Curt Jaimungal: Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Gets "Belief" Wrong

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When Neil deGrasse Tyson says that I don't believe anything,

I know that you believe that there is fear mongering over it.

I don't believe anything.

It's not, don't say I believe anything.

Your wincing is indeed justified.

Now it's not just the scientist.

The insidious disdain for the usage of the word belief is echoed

even here in this infamous D-Pock Chopra exchange.

Now you stated before that all belief is a cover-up for insecurity, right?

Oh, do you believe that?

Yes.

Thank you.

The statement that I don't believe anything

is said so self-assuredly, so swiftly, so loudly,

and with a tinge of condescension that you know something else is going on.

It's a semaphore for, hey, look how enlightened I am.

Aren't I so rational, unlike those poor, unsound, religious folk?

So the phrase I don't have beliefs is either trivially true,

which you can read as empty, it's semantically confused,

which is equivocating between belief and faith,

or it's completely demonstrably false.

Now let's work through this rigorously.

In analytic epistemology, belief is a propositional attitude.

It's a mental state with a proposition as its content,

and then to believe X just means that you hold that proposition to be true.

Now it doesn't mean that I hold this proposition true to be true,

no matter what, it doesn't mean that you can't update your belief subject to new evidence.

In fact, there's an entire field called Bayesian epistemology about belief updating.

So when you say you have beliefs,

it doesn't mean that you're a member of the Westboro Baptist Church.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is unambiguous.

Contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a propositional attitude.

The key point is that belief doesn't have to imply faith nor certainty.

You can believe you have a head.

You can believe two plus two equals four.

You can believe that Neil is more logical than the person that he's speaking to.

I think he does.

So those who say when you ask them,

hey, well, what is it that you believe about so-and-so?

They say, oh, me, I don't hold beliefs.

Ask me a different question.

I'm a scientist.

They think that the word belief is some confession of irrationality.

No, it's just a basic piece of furniture in your mind.

If the scientist wants to say I don't have beliefs,

it would require a non-standard definition of belief,

and thus muddle the conversation with uncharitable and unstated redefinitions,

which is actually itself unscientific.

So one of the more charitable interpretations of the no belief claim

that this rational person is using is to say that belief means something like faith,

and faith to them means belief without adequate evidence,

or perhaps belief has some property of obstinate resistance to updating

when encountering new evidence.

But this is semantic equivocation.

Standardly, when people say and philosophers use belief at faith,

they distinguish belief that,

so that's a proposition I'm holding P to be true.

Or they can mean faith in,

like an attitude, a trust-based, a trust-relation

that could, although it doesn't have to involve resistance to change due to counter-evidence.

By the way, Kierkegaard is important here because Kierkegaard

has a similar sort of A rational or extra rational,

whatever we want to call it, type of faith.

There's a video here that I made about Kierkegaard

that went quite viral, I'll link it on screen,

and in the description.

Now, the no belief rationalist can look up these words in the dictionary,

and I want to just take it a tad further by going to the Stanford encyclopedia.

Richard Swinburne labels this the Thomas view of faith.

The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that there is a God.

However, even Aquinas distinguished faith from ordinary belief.

In theology, faith means one of these,

so belief in propositions that are not fully seen or demonstrable.

It could mean that, or it could also mean volition,

a type of trust beyond mere ascent.

And it could also mean that resilience to a certain kind of counter-evidence.

When a philosopher here is someone that says,

I don't believe I follow the evidence.

The immediate response is, okay,

following the evidence is just forming beliefs,

proportioned to that evidence.

That's precisely what belief is.

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To assert, scientists don't use the word belief,

and I'm a scientist is itself to express a belief.

The belief norm assertion,

which is the view that's widely held in philosophy of language,

says, one must assert P only if one believes P.

I spoke to a scientist on NPR,

where she said something like consciousness

is a universal principle,

and then my question was,

can you explain what you mean

when you said that you believe consciousness

is a universal principle?

That NASA scientist retorted to me.

So first, you have to stop saying belief.

When you're talking to scientists,

the only belief we put is in the hypothesis,

we're formulating hypotheses.

The problem is, just because you don't use the word belief,

it doesn't mean you don't have one.

Consider this.

You're speaking to your friend.

You tell your friend, look, friend,

you have some idea of what truth is.

They say, look, I don't even need to use the word truth.

It is raining outside.

I didn't use the word truth.

You'd be absolutely correct to say to your friend,

okay, but the fact that you've managed to say a sentence

without some particular word doesn't mean

that concept isn't implicitly embedded in it.

It is raining outside is shorthand

for it is true that it is raining outside.

In the same manner, when Natalie Cabral said,

I hypothesize that consciousness may be a universal principle.

That's shorthand for, I believe,

there's a non-zero chance that consciousness

may be a universal principle.

Of course, this avoids the question of what it even means

to be a universal principle, but that's besides the point.

When the scientist says something like,

they think this is true or they think so and so is possible,

they're committing to the truth

or at least to the possibility of truth of a proposition.

That's what assertion is.

Assertion presupposes belief or at minimum

something functionally equivalent.

And then there's Thomas Campbell

who goes further and pathologizes belief.

Belief is a problem.

Belief gets in the way.

Beliefs are always a problem.

He then spends three hours defending to me

that consciousness is fundamental,

that fear produces ego, et cetera.

Those are beliefs, dozens of them.

My ears tend to go back when the scientist

shares something in common with the guru.

If you're sensing something contradictory here,

I think you're right.

To say, I don't have beliefs is itself an assertion.

Therefore asserting I don't have beliefs

presupposes a belief.

The belief that one doesn't have beliefs,

it's like an undermining act.

Now, and also note, there is an alternate view of truth,

which is deflationary by saying truth is nothing more than

some utterance of a statement.

Crispin Wright, for instance, noticed you could flip this, though,

since the equivalence doesn't privilege a direction.

But this is something for a future video,

so subscribe if you like.

Now, a counter may be to reach for boss von Frost's distinction

between belief and acceptance.

In the early 1980s, von Frost and argued that science

aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate,

and acceptance of a theory involves as belief

only that it is empirically adequate.

The constructive empiricists accept theories.

They commit to using them.

They base further research on them and so on,

but they may be agnostic as to what the theory is true

about unobservables.

But even von Frost and doesn't eliminate belief,

acceptance of a theory involves belief

that is empirically adequate.

The scientist still has beliefs.

In fact, I spoke directly to boss von Frost

and about this.

It's a fantastic podcast.

You should check it out.

He's one of the most cited philosophers of science.

He says, I believe many things.

I believe that I had a father.

I believe I wrote a book.

Could I be wrong?

Certainly.

My beliefs could be false.

Boss's point is more about the scope

of rational belief in science.

And it's not decidedly not about the elimination of belief

from a scientist.

Scientists can be epistemologically modest.

Maybe they should be, but they're not actually belief-free.

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Of course, you can use a vernacular synonym for belief,

like I'm going to call it credence.

And I should be careful here because belief and credence

are only semantic synonyms, but they do remain

distinct concepts in philosophy, particularly in basingism.

Credence is a probability valued attitude,

so a measure of confidence in some proposition ranging

from zero, I fully disbelieve this to number 100% say,

or number one, which is complete certainty.

So the difference here is that you could say that I'm only going to say

that I believe in X once my credence has passed some threshold.

A scientist who says something like, let's say,

I have extremely high confidence based on evidence

in the theory of evolution.

But I don't believe the theory of evolution.

They're speaking incoherently.

If we take belief in the standard sense,

high credence is just belief.

And by the way, you may have noticed, of course,

the scientific methodology itself reflects beliefs.

Belief that the scientific method is reliable,

belief that evidence constrains a theory,

belief in modus pollinants, et cetera.

Quine actually had a concept of holism

in his two dog muzzle empiricism,

where he places beliefs at the center of the quote,

web of belief.

Now, counter example to the last few minutes

is that you could take the fourth option.

I gave a few in the beginning, but let's say option one

is I believe in X.

Okay, well, that's not a counter example,

because I believe X is the case is exactly what we're discussing.

How about option two, where you say I don't believe in X?

Now, this one's a bit tricky,

because some people would say that this is a stand-in

for I believe that X isn't the case,

at least that's how we use the word.

In this option, then, isn't actually a counter example.

Another option is you can be agnostic.

You could say I don't know.

My mind isn't made up,

whether that's because I don't think there's enough evidence

to reach such a conclusion in either direction or what have you.

But that still remains an attitude of belief.

Now, the last option here is the most interesting to me

option four.

You could say that the matter at hand is independent of belief,

that belief has nothing to do with this.

But then you could ask, well, what do you mean

that belief has nothing to do with this?

It seems like the first three options exhaust possibilities.

However, consider a cup of water.

You could ask, what's the electric charge of the cup of water?

That's a sensible question.

You could also ask, what's the total electric charge of the universe?

Or you could ask, what's the electric charge of $55?

Now, in that case, that latter case,

it would be wrong to say that the electric charge of $55 is zero

or that it's 10 EV or 250 TEV or something like that.

As dollars have nothing to do with electric charge,

assigning them an arbitrary number would just be a category error.

My present deliberation is that the only way someone could say

that they hold no beliefs and be accurate

is in this option four sense.

Now, some more objections that naturally come to mind

is perhaps one could remain radically uncertain about everything,

treating all propositions as guesses.

But even this doesn't eliminate belief.

It's just describing fallabalism, so fallabalist belief.

And even if you say something like 99.9% credence is required in order for me to say

I believe in this, well, then to act in the world,

such as crossing the streets, eating food,

does require something like 99.9% credence

that you're not going to get hit by a car or poisoned.

So I think that the charitable reading is that the scientist is saying,

look, I'm not dogmatic.

I update.

That's why I don't hold beliefs.

But the best way to communicate that isn't to deny beliefs.

It's instead to model epistemic virtues explicitly.

Saying, I have no beliefs doesn't signal rationality.

To me, it signals confusion about one's own cognition.

Worse, it gives ammunition to those who claim scientists

are in denial about their own presuppositions.

Now, one could counter, hey, Kurt,

historically speaking, faith meant trust or fidelity.

It's not exactly a propositional ascent.

Now, this is true.

However, it does commit this etymological fallacy,

confusing a word's current meaning with its origin.

To me, what matters is how belief functions

in contemporary discourse.

How do we use it?

And also, if we want to be a bit more technical,

what does it mean in philosophy?

No one thinks Neil deGrasse Tyson is channeling a quietness.

So what do I think is going on?

Why do so many scientists almost bolstfully state

I don't use the word belief.

I don't like beliefs.

I don't hold beliefs.

Beliefs are no part of me as a scientist.

I think it's because there's an impulse

to communicate, I'm not dogmatic.

I update.

I could be wrong.

To me, the way to communicate that again

is not by denying to have beliefs.

You just state fallibleism.

That's fine.

You're open to counter evidence.

You're willing to update.

And you have precision about your confidence levels, perhaps.

You do this with belief.

I think it's like a demonstration of beacon

of how rational they are by ostentatiously rejecting this term

that they think has something to do with irrationality.

When actually it's the opposite,

it's more irrational to claim you have no beliefs

by any standard definition.

In fact, by most accounts,

you can't even use the word no like knowledge

without believing in whatever you're knowing.

It's necessary for you to believe you have a mother

in order for you to say you know you have a mother.

So my concise verdict is that scientists have beliefs.

Everyone does.

It's not innately irrational to have them.

Pretending otherwise is linguistic posturing.

It's entirely fine to say I believe electrons exist.

And I'm willing to change my belief

if the evidence shows me that I'm wrong.

That's entirely honorable.

That statement itself is not creatinous.

The scientist who says I hold no beliefs

is confused about their own mind, I believe.

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