Find Your Way
  • Home
  • Find Your Way
  • The Hidden Kabalah
  • Lovecraft's Dream Cycle of Stories
  • Musing on Lovecraft's Dreamlands
  • Through the Gate of Dreams links
  • Through the Gate of Dreams: Excerpts
  • Lucid Dreaming
  • Mutterings & Musings
  • Check these Links out
  • Cool images
  • Gary Jaron: Doc. Fixer
  • Seymour Jaron
  • Contact & book links
  • Carol Jaron's web site

Mutterings & musings

Do animals have 'beliefs'?

4/8/2021

0 Comments

 
It is with this end of unifying the sciences of the mind with social life that the pragmatists began their attempts to define ‘belief’.  Adopting a developmental perspective, Bain observed that mammals are born in action: sucking, swallowing, rooting, and so on.  But belief does not guide these initial actions until some interruption or obstacle prevents instinctive behavior from serving an animal’s need for nourishment, security, and affection.  Because of inevitable environmental irregularities, an animal must draw on sensorimotor memories and expectations to gain control over its initial attempts to move and feed.  As these memories and expectations are representations of its past and future actions and observations, they do ‘reference’ a time beyond that at which they occur.  Memories and expectations are therefore an animal’s most basic beliefs.  Human minds are indeed variations on this theme.
 
[Referencing Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Science, Part 1: Psychology and History of Philosophy.  Longmans & Green, 1872 and his Mind and Body, 2nd ed. Henry S. King and Co., 1872.]
From : Belief: A Pragmatic Picture: A Precis by Aaron Zimmerman,  William James Studies, v. 16, no. 1, Fall 2020, pg.  37

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Gary Jaron's musings.

    In my High School Art Department someone had made an ornate sign on hung it on the wall that read: 'Ignore this sign completely.'  A paradox couched in sarcasm and irony.  This blog is for random musings on anything and everything that comes into my head.
    Hope it strikes your fancy.

    Archives

    September 2022
    August 2022
    June 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    October 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Find Your Way
  • The Hidden Kabalah
  • Lovecraft's Dream Cycle of Stories
  • Musing on Lovecraft's Dreamlands
  • Through the Gate of Dreams links
  • Through the Gate of Dreams: Excerpts
  • Lucid Dreaming
  • Mutterings & Musings
  • Check these Links out
  • Cool images
  • Gary Jaron: Doc. Fixer
  • Seymour Jaron
  • Contact & book links
  • Carol Jaron's web site