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la djan cusku di'e
The basic trouble is that you cannot substitute equals for equals in belief-expressions reliably. If John believes that the president of Russia is bald, and John also believes (falsely) that the president of Russia is Yeltsin, do we conclude that John believes that Yeltsin is bald, or that John believes that Putin is bald?
Neither. We can't apply logical transformations to John's beliefs to generate further putative beliefs. (We can in fact conclude both, but not as a logical entailment.)
Similar stories can be told of Hesperus-Phosphorus, or about Ortcutt the spy. Let us take up the last. George believes that the man in the brown hat isa spy, and George believes that Ortcutt is not a spy. (Changing from de dictoto de re will not help; then it becomes "George believes '\x.x is a spy' ofthe man in the brown hat" and "George believes '\x.~x is a spy' of Ortcutt".But Ortcutt is the man in the brown hat. George's beliefs are flatly contradictory, yet both are reasonable.
Yes, it is not unreasonable to hold contradictory beliefs when one does not realize that they are contradictory. As long as you don't try to move the quantifier in or out of the belief there isn't a problem with that. For some x, (George believes that x is a spy) and (George believes that x is not a spy). That's fine. We know that he has false beliefs, so there is nothing strange about one of his beliefs contradicting another one. If you then conclude that: For some x, George believes that (x is a spy and x is not a spy) then there's a problem, as George has no such belief about any x. But that move is not allowed, so there is no problem. mu'o mi'e xorxes _________________________________________________________________MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus