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misterpessimistic: Yes, but we can visit Bangladesh and get a better understanding of it from that direct contact. There is not really any way to form a 'cognitive model' of anything other than the physical world in which we exist and interact with.

I'm not sure where you're going with this. My point was that there's a correlation between a person's conduct and their belief, but that moral belief is based on a cognitive model that may or may not accurately represent the world. What's the point of connection between that and what you're arguing?

At any rate, it patently is possible to form a cognitive model of a non-physical world. You can find really obvious examples in the science fiction section of a book store. Tolkein's cognitive model of Middle Earth is precise enough to involve maps and languages.

A less obvious, and more pertinent, example would be just about any social institution, all of which are understood in terms of cognitive maps, and all of which embody non-physical concepts. The justice system is the embodiment of a particular social conception of justice, and our current freethought reading demonstrates how possible it is to provide a cognitive map of such a system.

The few who percieve things differently, due to mainly psychological or phisical malfuntions, should not call into doubt that jumping off a 20 story building will most likely kill us.

I'm really starting to hate that example. It gets dredged up every time we have a discussion about perceptions of reality, and really only bears the most tangental relationship to what we're talking about. All but the smallest percent of the population wuold agree that a drop from a 20 story building is likely to kill you, but on just about any other question you won't find anywhere near as much agreement. Ask the population whether or not a person's genetic background determines their competency to serve as president, for example, and you'll get a mixed bag of answers. But isn't the genetic question as scientific and physical a question as that of whether or not the sidewalk is healthier from 20 centimeters rather than 20 stories? And what does any of this have to do with the question of why people's fidelity to their beliefs varies according to their present situation?

me (talking about science): I think it's probably correct in essentials, but my confidence in it is based, in part, on my acceptence of a lot of second-hand information.
Mr. P: Second hand info? But there are tons of primary sources and interpreters of those sources to choose from. And relatively RECENT sources at that!

Primary sources are still second hand info. I can read primary sources on the destruction of Carthage, but in order to have first hand info I'd have actually had to have been there.

And I could certainly get first hand information about most scientific theories. All I'd have to do is conduct an experiment. There are certain social factors that bar me from conducting, first hand, certain experiments -- for example, access to an electron microscope or atom smasher. But for the vast majority of people, even the most basic of scientific information is gained second hand.

...but seriously, you seem to have strong convictions in certain of your position by use of the interpretive abilities of Trevor-Roper, Veyne and other authors you respect, do you not find such sources in support of Evolutionary theory?

I have the same reservations with Trevor-Roper that I have about just about any reputable book on evolution. I recognize that my acceptance of the word of either author is based on a certain amount of trust, and for that reason (among others) any conclusions that I draw therefrom are less substantiated than I'd like for them to be.

As for Veyne, he's a different sort of author. He draws on a lot of historical data, but he's a theorist on a different order, and my acceptance of anything he says is based less on trust than it would be with Trevor-Roper or, say, Gould. I bring Veyne up mostly because he's interesting, and because I think some of his ideas may be applicable in some ways. But I certainly wouldn't consider him the sort of authority you'd trust based on his credentials alone.

me: 1) that it is objectively wrong to kill another person, and 2) that some crimes merit the death penalty. One is a belief that is operative in personal conduct; the other is operative in judicial conduct.
Mr. P: But is it correct to boil the statements above down to the reduced form you are using? I think #1 needs to be expanded to include some qualifiers. To make such a basic statement is just inviting confusion into the system, no?

I'm not talking about an ideal morality here. What I'm talking about are the ways in which people actually formulate their beliefs and the problems that arise when those beliefs are translated into conduct. If it was an isolated correlation -- that is, if conduct arose from belief with no intermediary -- then we probably wouldn't see the problem that Rose raised earlier in this thread. Part of what I'm suggesting is that context is a third factor, ie. that conduct arises from belief, but is modified by context. Moreover, different beliefs may be operative in different contexts, beliefs that would be, if held in the same context, contradictory.

Would it be more logically consistent to formulate belief some other way? Yeah, of course it would. But that's just the point. Most people have beliefs that they can't reconcile to one another through logic, but which rarely come into conflict because they're rarely operative at the same time.

Beliefs, as I think you understand my meaning of the term, are just rationalizations in disguise.

I think that presupposes a lot more that you recognize. Our conscious perception of reality is rarely ever, if at all, direct. We believe in a particular kind of reality, and that's what we respond to.

misterpessimistic: What does a physical place and experience of that place have to do with a scientific theory that we both agree is still being grown with research? What does your experience of your room have to do with your beliefs and your conduct?

Part of the point I was trying to make is that a direct experience of an object (or, at least, as direct as we, as finite beings, can get -- it may be better to use the term "immediate" so as not to cause confusion) is more reliable than a report of an object. Thus, I have more confidence in my experience of my bedroom than I do in someone else's report of Bangladesh. You can extend that by analogy to a historical process like evolution. I have a fair deal of confidence in my memory of the historical process that was my going to work this morning, but my knowledge of evolution is nowhere near as immediate as that. So while I have some confidence in evolution, I try to bear in mind that it's an idea I received second hand, and that even the people who gave me that idea confirmed it mostly be indirect, unimmediate means. (I say "most" because some scientists apparantly have recorded actually instances of adaptive triats developing in short-lived species -- certain breeds of finches, for example.)

What this means is that, in essentials (I hope), I share a cognitive model of evolution with those scientists. That's part of what I mean when I say that science is an institution geared towards building a cognitive map of the natural world as it may be. But because my knowledge of evolution is gleaned at second hand, there's a good chance that my cognitive map differs in a number of ways from the cognitive map of the scientists in question. And those differences may not be merely a matter of degree (ie. the scientist's map has more detail, or covers more ground) but a matter of differences subtle enough that neither I nor the people with whom I engage on a casual basis can tell that there is a difference. (For that matter, there's a good chance that the cognitive maps of two scientists will vary from one another to some degree -- and you see this once you start comparing the way scientists write about, say, evolutionary morality).

So in answer to your second question, if we take it for granted that belief influences conduct, differences in our cognitive maps about any given topic -- moral, scientific, even geographical, to make the metaphor literal -- will result in different behaviors. If you and I agree to meet in Bangladesh, but our cognitive maps of the area differ from one another, there's a good chance that we'll end up at different destinations. The same goes for, say, science; if you and I are trying to decide what Dawkins' selfish gene theory implies for human morality, differences in our cognitive maps will lead us to different conclusions. If we're drafting governmental policy, that will lead to differences of policy, which means different forms of conduct on a very large scale. And so on.

All of which I brought up to lead to the point that we ought to act more confidently when our action arises from belief that is grounded in more immediate experience. My knowledge of evolutionary theory is pretty distant when compared to my knowledge of, say, my cat's moods. Where the two coincide -- the direct theory and the abstract knowledge -- so much the better. That isn't necessarily ironclad confirmation of the abstract theory, but it's nice when our cognitive models match up.

me: You can find really obvious examples in the science fiction section of a book store. Tolkein's cognitive model of Middle Earth is precise enough to involve maps and languages.
Mr.P : This is FICTION Mad. This is NOT a cognitive model in any helpful way.

I thought that's what you were getting at. You said, "There is not really any way to form a 'cognitive model' of anything other than the physical world in which we exist and interact with." What I thought you were getting at -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- was that religious conceptions are obviously false because they don't provide a cognitive map of a world we can verify by physical means.

And I'd say that fiction provides cognitive maps that incredibly helpful, in their own way. But that's a different argument.

At least with our senses and experiments, we can nail down a good idea of objective reality...the object of our sense and experiments.

I think we're using "objective" in different ways. You seem to mean it here as a synonym for physical; thus "objective reality" would be reality as we sense it through physical objects. I'm talking about objective in epistemological terms: objective as opposed to subjective. That is, knowing the object apart from a subjective point of view, or knowing it in some way that in some way simulated the loss of subjectivity. And I don't think that kind of knowledge is possible.

Maybe I also put a too narrow definition on cognitive, my bad.

We're getting into some fairly heady stuff, so maybe we should be more explicit about our terms. I've already tried to nail down what I mean by objective. By cognitive, I mean, essentially, produced or sustained by thought. That is, of course, related to neurological activity -- ie. the processes of the brain as a biological organ -- but neurological activity is not limited to cognitive activity.

To take it a step further, what I mean by the term "cognitive model" is any conception sustained in thought of how a thing works or how it is arranged. And just to be precise, I'd say that cognitive models are a function of imagination, which for the sake of clarity, I'll say is the ability to present in thought the idea of a thing in terms that are roughly analogous to the senses.

I hope that helps.