Beliefs same-belief position

Third, the obvious way of making the same-belief position palatable fails. Clearly, something important happened of an epistemic kind when Lavoisier carried out his famous experiments. Same-belief theorists might try and handle this point by saying that we believed all along that the sea contained H2O because we believed that the sea contained water, but after Lavoisier the belief that the sea contained H2O became one or more of explicit rather implicit, a belief we believed we had as well as having, a belief we were able to report in language, and so forth. But if they follow... 

I will frame my discussion in terms of water and H2O. A change might be nice, but familiarity has its expository advantages. And I will conduct the discussion in terms of the belief that the sea contains water and the belief that the sea contains H2O are they the same belief Here are some reasons why I think we should insist on the commonsense position that the answer is no. 

Second, the case is different from the planets one (or the Superman— Clark Kent case). Speaking for myself, 1 do not find the claim that, for example, the belief that Hesperus is over the horizon is the same belief as the belief that Phosphorus is over the horizon plausible. However, the idea that proper names are mere tags lacking descriptive content has an appeal that the corresponding position on terms for kinds kinds) does not. 

Finally, the one-belief position makes belief too easy. It is relatively easy to acquire the belief that the sea contains a natural kind that also is found in lakes, falls from the sky, is potable, and so on. It is relatively easy to tag this kind water. (In so tagging it we are not, of course, assuming that the kind always has the properties it has when we come across it in lakes etc.) But what we have just described is roughly how things were before Lavoisier, and on the one-belief position, we thereby believed that the sea contains H2O. It was that easy. What is more, this belief was a rationally supported one (because the belief that the sea contains water was and they are one and the same belief). All that can be said to be hard on the one-belief position was the discovery of what belief a certain sentence in our mouths, namely, The sea contains water, expresses. It took Lavoisier s experiments to tell us which belief we expressed in certain words. It is common to criticize Stalnaker s metalinguistic account of mathematical beliefs as underselling the manifest interest of mathematical discovery. This would seem a more extreme underplaying of Lavoisier s achievement. 

These are cases of openly calculated self-deception, but it is evident that the same strategy is often used in surreptitious cases. It is a strategy that filters input of evidence and that is much easier to do than to form beliefs that run counter to evidence already in the mind. That is why open self-deception uses this strategy so often. Incidentally, it is also a strategy that shows up a further difference between self-deception and the deception of others steering someone else away from evidence for not-p is not quite positive enough to count as deceiving him that p. 

Companies working on the same core molecule build patent franchises to protect their positions, often designing around the patent positions of competitors. One such situation arose when Beecham saw Bristol-Myers enter the Japanese Amoxicillin market. Beecham s belief was that Bristol-Myers was using its patented process for the manufacture of Amoxicillin (Scheme 5). 

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