Sunday, August 30, 2009

Fourth propositional attitude: WTF?

I've been thinking about a fourth propositional attitude "nonplused" which is not anything like a judgment that the evidence is counterbalanced as far as you can tell: the "WTF" attitude.

Keynes made clear in his Treatise that his probability function was only a *partial* function not a *total* function. So it does not map every ordered pair of propositions onto a value. He thought that some propositions just bore no probabilistic relation to others (this is not possible in Komolgorov's axiomatization, but that was decades later).

This is very plausible, for consider the question What's the probability that it'll be sunny tomorrow given that I'm currently holding a brick? Now some friends of the Principle of Indifference will still say it's 50/50 (I'm sometimes one of those guys), but it's quite plausible that there's just *no* probabilistic relation between them whatsoever.

So suppose this very plausible idea is true. There's something it's like to get this. When you host that WTF-quale the attitude you are having or that fits the experience is that of suspension of judgement in the WTF sense. By *definition* you are not judging the probabilities to be balanced, because on this view--the Keynesian view--*what* you are getting is that there *is no* probabalistic relation between them.