If we take the above definition of belief as an axiom, I find it hard to reconcile the idea that somebody could in fact be happy but not believe himself to be happy (or vice versa: be sad but believe to be happy). This is because with this definition of belief implies a state of being!

I assume you are of sound reasoning, however. Perhaps I misunderstood what you had said earlier about belief, or perhaps you are merely using the term differently in this case (e.g. perhaps you mean by believe: “would profess belief that ‘I am happy’”). In either event, I would very much like to get to the bottom of this.

I should like to say that I do not think that believing you are happy is all there is to being happy. I do not know what conditions it would take for a person to be happy (i.e. believe he is happy), and the conditions seem to vary from person to person. Thus for one person, happiness is not the same as happiness for another person.

If the point you are making is worth making, then it needs to be expressed in simple, accessible language.

There is no excuse for using terms like “inviduate” and “functionalist”, or for cramming loads of abstract terms into a single sentence.

Where is the sense in writing in this needlessly impenetrable style? We are not code breakers. We are flesh and blood human beings.

With a bit of care and thought you could express the same ideas using short accessible sentences and everyday words.

I assume you are trying to communicate rather than to impress. In that case please rewrite this article in a form that makes sense to ordinary human beings. Use simpler language and give concrete examples of what you mean.

There are a lot of people out there I am sure who would be interested in the point you are making.

Unfortunately, the language you use and your over reliance on abstractions are placing your message out of their reach.

Best wishes

Rhodes

I bring this up because this was pointed out to me once by a well-appointed professor of psychology. I was discussing with him how I found it frustrating that, on some earlier occasion, I was unable adequately to explain to some cantankerous person with whom I’d been arguing, why it’s not the case that, given accumulated advances in modern science, only the ignorant and/or stupid can be religious (in this case, those who adhere to orthodox Catholocism). In days prior to that dust-up, I’d been reading a lot about modern natural science and the possibility of the existence of a personal/creator God, etc., yet I couldn’t for the life of me cull the proper arguments in refutation of my interlocutor. And yet I *knew* — or, let’s say, I knew I had strong “justified belief” that — this person’s arguments were erroneous. Does it therefore follow that I wasn’t justified in my knowledge that this person’s arguments were a bunch of bullshit? (I.e., does it follow that my belief that science can’t disprove the case for belief in a creator/personal god was mistaken?) Not to take anything on authority, but given his use of the X-Ray and word-definition analogy, I was satisfied with my psychologist friend’s answer: “No.”

—-

[*from a particularly brilliant Thomist-acquaintance of mine, who, I'll wager, presides over a theoretical grasp of modern natural science as forbidding, impressive and acute as any hard-nosed scientist-for-the-sake-of-atheism today:]

Intuitions

It is common to hear people claim that knowledge is based on intuitions. If these intuitions are taken to mean an essential grasp of a thing, then I agree, but I don’t see how one can get the word intuition to mean an essential grasp of a thing. The essence of a thing is revealed in words, in its name. This essence imples that certain things are per se, others per accidens, and certain things are virtually contained in the very idea of the term. To say these things of the term makes for what is called “a self evident proposition”- a primarily known truth. Intuitions seem to be wordless things, you just “get it” apart from words, apart from the act of naming. Naming, in this sense, is seen as incidental to the act of knowledge, and it is unclear how the self evident comes to be, since essence is not acknowledged as known.

I think the physicist that I imagined below** in my dialogue two posts back had an “intuition” of time and distance and mass in the true sense, but I would call his grasp “a working postulate” or something of the kind.

In a word, intuitions lack a relation to the essential. It is inevitable that an intuition based science will be unable to handle accusations of being arbitrary.

[His blog:]

http://www.liverevolt.com/assimilatiodei/

** http://www.liverevolt.com/assimilatiodei/assimilatio.php?title=a_discussion_with_an_all_physics&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

I think that a profitable viewpoint on this is to regard a self-report of happiness to be a (noisy) sample at time t.

In this manner you could be “wrong” about your happiness if that sample was not strongly correlated with your self-reports at nearby points in time (i.e. if that report was an outlier).

If however you performed repeated measurements and kept seeing the same self-reported happiness numbers cropping up, the only way there could be an error is if there was a disconnect between your reported happiness and your biochemical happiness.

As an experimentalist, to control for this what you might do is measure a huge number of people and build up a regression function relating underlying biochemical happiness to reported happiness. Then take biochemical measurements on people, which are much harder to fake/misreport than self-reports, and use the vector of biochemical measurements to predict true happiness in the event that self-report is discordant with biochemistry.

One thing that strikes me as problematic with self-reporting is that ‘happiness’ is ambiguous, and, as someone interested in Aristotle (like some of the commenters above), I think an important ambiguity is between descriptive and evaluative senses of the term. If someone asks me if I’m happy, I don’t really know what’s being asked of me. Do I feel happy (right now, most of the time, etc.)? Am I happy with my life? Would I be happy with my life if I took the standpoint of an “ideal observer”?

I think your disanalogy with pain is good, especially if the relevant sense of ‘happiness’ has any significant evaluative (moral) weight. A villain might be happy with his life, but viewed from the outside, we might look at such a person (living within tightly secured walls, with bodyguards and food-tasters, no friends – think “the perfectly unjust man” from Plato’s Republic) and claim, “What an unhappy (sad) life!”

Interesting point. Numerous psychological studies suggest that people are very bad at identifying why they do things so it seems plausible that a lot of our mental functions are compartmentalized in such a way as to block our own conscious access of them.

I wonder, though, whether this line of thought brings us back to a “revealed preference” formulation of happiness, where we infer mental states from dispositions to act. I think this is why the whole happiness survey idea was generated.

Interested to hear your thoughts on whether there is a middle ground…

DED

And I think you’re right to be skeptical that we can just tell introspectively how happy we are, in the same easy way that we can just tell introspectively whether or not we’re in pain. There’s much to say here; one thing is that it seems like our sense of how happy we are is influenced and often corrupted by things such as expectation effects and shifting standards and that these don’t apply to the pain case. But this too is disputable. Take the prank torture case. A guy believes that he’s going to be stuck in the back with a red hot poker; his anticipation is intense. Instead, they stick an ice cube on his back. And he yelps in pain, mistakenly thinking that he’s being burned.

Do self-reports of happiness measure something? Probably. But I’m not sure we know what they measure.