Possibility for miracles

Although Hume leaves open the possibility for miracles to occur and be reported, he offers various arguments against this ever having happened in history:

People often lie, and they have good reasons to lie about miracles occurring either because they believe they are doing so for the benefit of their religion or because of the fame that results.
People by nature enjoy relating miracles they have heard without caring for their veracity and thus miracles are easily transmitted even where false.

Hume notes that miracles seem to occur mostly in "ignorant" and "barbarous" nations and times, and the reason they don't occur in the "civilized" societies is such societies aren't awed by what they know to be natural events.

The miracles of each religion argue against all other religions and their miracles, and so even if a proportion of all reported miracles across the world fit Hume's requirement for belief, the miracles of each religion make the other less likely.

Despite all this Hume observes that belief in miracles is popular, and that "The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder."
Critics have argued that Hume's position assumes the character of miracles and natural laws prior to any specific examination of miracle claims, and thus it amounts to a subtle form of begging the question. They have also noted that it requires an appeal to inductive inference, as none have observed every part of nature or examined every possible miracle claim (e.g., those yet future to the observer), which in Hume's philosophy was especially problematic.

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Marvellous event

In his discussion of miracles in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Section 10) Hume defines a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent".

Given that Hume argues that it is impossible to deduce the existence of a Deity from the existence of the world (for he says that causes cannot be determined from effects), miracles (including prophesy) are the only possible support he would conceivably allow for theistic religions.

Hume discusses everyday belief as often resulted from probability, where we believe an event that has occurred most often as being most likely, but that we also subtract the weighting of the less common event from that of the more common event. In the context of miracles, this means that a miraculous event should be labeled a miracle only where it would be even more unbelievable (by principles of probability) for it not to be. Hume mostly discusses miracles as testimony, in context of which he writes that when a person reports a marvellous event we (need to) balance our belief in their veracity against our belief that such events do not occur. Following this rule, only where it is considered, as a result of experience, less likely that the testimony is false than that a miracle occur should be believe in miracles.


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Metaphor is rooted in the beliefs

Where is metaphor actually grounded?

Not in logic, nor literary theory. There is no purely literal language in terms of which metaphor may be evaluated and objectively assessed. Along a broad front in cognitive psychology and social anthropology, metaphor is currently subject to extensive analysis, but the findings can only be partial, and relative to the discipline involved. What is becoming clearer is that metaphor — like linguistic theory and theories of speech acts — is rooted in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.

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Belief and meaning

Davidson points out that beliefs and meanings are inseparable.

A person holds a sentence true based on what he believes and what he takes the sentence to mean. If the interpreter knew what a person believed when that person held a sentence to be true, the meaning of the sentence could then be inferred. Vice versa, if the interpreter knew what a person took a sentence to mean when that person held it to be true, the belief of the speaker could be inferred.
So Davidson doesn't allow the interpreter to have access to beliefs as evidence, since the interpreter would then be begging the question. Instead, Davidson allows that the interpreter can reasonably ascertain when a speaker holds a sentence true, without knowing anything about a particular belief or meaning.

This will then allow the interpreter to construct hypotheses relating a speaker and an utterance to a particular state of affairs at a particular time.

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Neopragmatism

Putnam, in Words and Life (1994), enumerates the ideas in the Classical Pragmatist tradition, which newer pragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam:

1. antiscepticism (the notion that doubt requires justification just as much as belief);
   


2. fallibilism (the view that there are no metaphysical guarantees against the need to revise a belief);
   


3. antidualism about "facts" and "values";
   that practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy.

Three Basic Moves. Linguistic pragmatism revises pragmatism in three basic moves.

First, one applauds pragmatists such as James and Dewey for repudiating a variety of methods and goals in traditional philosophy.

Second, one renounces their attempts to reconstruct what should not be reconstructed.

Finally, once one accepts the idea that only language is available to furnish philosophy's materiel. This step complete, one can create freely, even poetically, to serve whatever ends seem best.

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• See that post with different algorithms in metabole
• See the journal French Metablog with today different posts