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felipec  unbelief  2yr ago (felipec.substack.com)   3600 thread views

2+2 = not what you think

felipec.substack.com

Changing someone's mind is very difficult, that's why I like puzzles most people get wrong: to try to open their mind. Challenging the claim that 2+2 is unequivocally 4 is one of my favorites to get people to reconsider what they think is true with 100% certainty.

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By checking whether or not the person considers the possibility of the claim being not necessarily true. And if not, whether or not the claim is substantiated by evidence or reason.

By "the claim being not necessarily true", are you referring to the possibility that the claim's originator is expressing a belief contrary to truth, or the possibility that the claim's recipient is interpreting the claim differently in such a way as to make it the received belief incorrect? The examples in your original post are of the latter, but I'd usually understand substantiation as a property of a belief having already been shared and correctly interpreted.

It would also seem that the former is far easier than the latter. If you know that you're correctly understanding the belief being expressed by a claim, then you can simply compare the belief to your own worldview, and doubt it according to how likely the alternatives appear to be true. But evaluating how much you may be misinterpreting a claim is a far different challenge: you have to map out the space of possible beliefs in the originator's mind that could have plausibly led to that particular claim, accounting for how the originator's thoughts might look far different from your own.

By "the claim being not necessarily true", are you referring to the possibility that the claim's originator is expressing a belief contrary to truth, or the possibility that the claim's recipient is interpreting the claim differently in such a way as to make it the received belief incorrect?

Neither. I said the claim's originator considers the possibility that the claim might not be necessarily true. This is expressed in modal logic as ◇⊥ (possibly false), or ¬□⊤ (not necessarily true).

It's not about whether or not the claim is really true or not, or if it has been substantiated... It's about you believing it might be false.

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