Part of the process of coming to believe a verbal statement often includes a social requirement to claim to believe that statement. I call these “credal beliefs” because the profession of belief is often phrased as a creed.
For example, a well known creed is the US Pledge of Allegiance, which includes the words “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America”. It is obviously meaningless to pledge allegiance to a flag, since allies are entities one expects to cooperate with and flags are inanimate objects that don’t take action and therefore cannot be cooperated with. But clearly the intent was to get the people saying the creed to believe it in some sense.
This highlights another trait of a credal belief: the belief can exist only as a verbal statement and there is no requirement for the verbal statement to have any meaning beyond the social consequences of making the verbal statement. The words don’t have to have a meaning in the sense of having a definition or being part of a statement that predicts observations.
So it is possible for people who believe in consciousness or free will to be holding that belief credally. Credal beliefs have psychological consequences that I don’t understand well, but it is clear that the possibly hopeless search for a definition for the words in a credal belief isn’t part of the project of understanding the psychological consequences of holding it.
The opposite of this is to come across a word and presuppose that it must have a non-credal meaning and then start guessing what that meaning might be. Gemini tells me that this is called the Reification Fallacy. The mere existence of a word does not imply it refers to a thing that exists.
Part of the process of coming to believe a verbal statement often includes a social requirement to claim to believe that statement. I call these “credal beliefs” because the profession of belief is often phrased as a creed.
For example, a well known creed is the US Pledge of Allegiance, which includes the words “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America”. It is obviously meaningless to pledge allegiance to a flag, since allies are entities one expects to cooperate with and flags are inanimate objects that don’t take action and therefore cannot be cooperated with. But clearly the intent was to get the people saying the creed to believe it in some sense.
This highlights another trait of a credal belief: the belief can exist only as a verbal statement and there is no requirement for the verbal statement to have any meaning beyond the social consequences of making the verbal statement. The words don’t have to have a meaning in the sense of having a definition or being part of a statement that predicts observations.
So it is possible for people who believe in consciousness or free will to be holding that belief credally. Credal beliefs have psychological consequences that I don’t understand well, but it is clear that the possibly hopeless search for a definition for the words in a credal belief isn’t part of the project of understanding the psychological consequences of holding it.
The opposite of this is to come across a word and presuppose that it must have a non-credal meaning and then start guessing what that meaning might be. Gemini tells me that this is called the Reification Fallacy. The mere existence of a word does not imply it refers to a thing that exists.