None of the words you've said in response to my question makes any sense to me. "Dispositional mental state". "Representational". These mean nothing to me.
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Hm, what makes you confident that those people do not really “understand” what they claim to believe?
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Because often it's just nonsense. "God is omnipotent". What the hell does that mean? Can God create a rock He can't lift? It's an incoherent word and concept.
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Sure, that’s kind of an extreme example though. What about something like “No human being is illegal”? Do you see that as also nonsensical? I feel like it is a real attempt to express an important idea?
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I mean, does that mean that we shouldn't use the word "illegal" to describe people colloquially? Or that laws don't proscribe the existence of individual humans? Or something else? Do they even know which it means, or think about it?
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Good question! My guess would be that different people who say that slogan probably all have somewhat different meanings in mind?
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Yeah, this is an interesting question. There's a huge literature on it in philosophy, but I only know a little of it. Does belief require understanding? It seems like the answer is no. I can believe that E=mc^2 even if I know nothing of physics.
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But we can make a strong argument for "yes" as well. The physicist who understands E=mc^2 believes something different than I do if I only know to recite the slogan. They believe something about the relationship between mass and energy.
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Maybe all I believe is that "The equation E=mc^2 expresses a truth." But I don't really believe that E=mc^2 because I don't understand it. Maybe we should say the same thing about "God is omnipotent." If that's an incoherent claim, I could still (falsely) believe it expresses...
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