Posted by smokeymadison on January 17, 2005, at 20:53:25
In reply to Re: Folk Psychology and the Nature of Belief. » smokeymadison, posted by alexandra_k on January 17, 2005, at 19:57:15
> >But i think that they mean what they say. i don't think that the meanings of the words have changed. instead, they are speaking about what they are experiencing in thier own minds, not what is happening in the world outside of them.
>
> Yeah, thats what I think too.
> But that might be hard in the case where the guy decapitated his stepfather to look for batteries. He wasn't just 'expressing' himself. He really seemed to believe that.I don't see the difference between just expressing oneself through words and acting out a belief. what behind the expression and the action is the same thing. my roommate, when she said that she was dead, was expressing a belief. but in this case the belief didn't require any action. had the belief required an action, she may or may not have done the action. the guy who cut off his stepdad's head really isn't that different from my roommate. they both were enmaeshed within their own worlds. they got stuck in the fantasy step of creating an accurate belief, if that makes any sense. "Enmeshed w/in their own world" may mean that the subjects form beliefs based on their inner experience. Perhaps the guy who cut off his stepdad's head to look for batteries was experiencing detachment from the world, a certain sort of numbness, of not being able to feel, and he projected that onto his stepfather, therefore creating a stepfather who wasn't "real"
i am speaking from past experience. there have been times when people seem to be "automated" and "unreal" when i have been very numb from depression or when i have been having a panic attack. if i had been enmeshed w/in my own world at the time, i might have formed the belief that the people were not real, were run by batteries. fortunately, i was not. :)
SM
poster:smokeymadison
thread:443284
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20041210/msgs/443458.html