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Moore's Paradox Analysis

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Jordi Fernandez, Transparent Minds, Chapter 4: Moore’s Paradox

Moore’s paradox is a puzzle that concerns the following sentences:

(1): NB — It is raining and I do not believe it is raining (omissive)
(2): BN — It is raining and I believe it is not raining (commissive)

To have the intuition that either is true is irrational. But, neither of these sentences are logical contradictions. The beliefs could be correct, even though they seem to us as being irrational.

— Deflationism

One strategy for solving Moore’s paradox is deflationism, which is to raise the truth-conditions of NB and BN to the same level. This is surprising because the truth-condition of NB concerns the world, while the truth-condition of BN concerns the mind. There are two main methods for doing so: i) bottom-up, or raising the level of the first conjunct to that of the second, or ii) top-down, bringing the second conjunct down to the level of the first.

— A Top-Down Strategy

The broad deflationist view suggests that when “I believe that P” is asserting, one asserts “that P”. There may be two versions of this: i) weak deflationism — by uttering “I believe that P”, one asserts both “I believe that P” and “P”, and …show more content…

And the same can be said of desires. Our grounds for having beliefs and desires are the same states as our bases for self-attributing those beliefs and desires. Fernandez suggests merely that we should not believe a proposition if we have no grounds for believing it. Furthermore, we should not believe a proposition is we have grounds for believing the proposition is not the case. A subject’s grounds for believing a particular belief is her total, weighted set of grounds for that belief. And so, for any proposition, S should not believe P if, all things considered, S has grounds for not believing that P. Moore’s paradox violates these restrictions on what we may

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