tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post2383536128831594695..comments2024-03-27T08:33:11.834-07:00Comments on There is some truth in that: Imagination and Belief in a "Single Code"?Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05260245860017778409noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5673382.post-79733292448851865642010-10-10T17:32:30.000-07:002010-10-10T17:32:30.000-07:00I have a potentially off-topic observation to make...I have a potentially off-topic observation to make. David Hume's theory of belief provides an elegant solution to the problem you present.<br>For Hume (in the Treatise, at any rate), belief is a lively species of imagination. In other words, according to his analysis, imagination and belief are mental states of the same kind, which operate on the same range of contents, and differ only in their degree of 'vivacity'. Since the core of the theory is that beliefs themselves are acts of imagining, the real question is whether Hume can account for the differences between them. This is where the difference in vivacity comes in. The degree of vivacity determines things like the amount of influence the act of imagining exhibits on behavior, and the ease or difficulty of exhibiting willful control over the act, etc.<br>To translate this into the 'belief-box' mode of discourse, Hume's view is one on which your belief box is nested within your imagination box (or, alternately, on which there is no belief box, just an interesting subset of elements within the imagination box). One nice result of this is that you get identity of content associations for free (and through a roughly similar approach to the one that you've attributed to Nichols; the associations are between the contents themselves, and they don't depend on the box the content is in).Lewis Powellhttp://horselesstelegraph.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.com