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When Neil deGrasse Tyson says that I don't believe anything,
0:33
I know that you believe that there is fear mongering over it.
0:36
I don't believe anything.
0:38
It's not, don't say I believe anything.
0:40
Your wincing is indeed justified.
0:43
Now it's not just the scientist.
0:44
The insidious disdain for the usage of the word belief is echoed
0:48
even here in this infamous D-Pock Chopra exchange.
0:51
Now you stated before that all belief is a cover-up for insecurity, right?
0:57
Oh, do you believe that?
1:03
The statement that I don't believe anything
1:05
is said so self-assuredly, so swiftly, so loudly,
1:09
and with a tinge of condescension that you know something else is going on.
1:15
It's a semaphore for, hey, look how enlightened I am.
1:18
Aren't I so rational, unlike those poor, unsound, religious folk?
1:23
So the phrase I don't have beliefs is either trivially true,
1:27
which you can read as empty, it's semantically confused,
1:31
which is equivocating between belief and faith,
1:34
or it's completely demonstrably false.
1:36
Now let's work through this rigorously.
1:41
In analytic epistemology, belief is a propositional attitude.
1:45
It's a mental state with a proposition as its content,
1:48
and then to believe X just means that you hold that proposition to be true.
1:52
Now it doesn't mean that I hold this proposition true to be true,
1:55
no matter what, it doesn't mean that you can't update your belief subject to new evidence.
2:00
In fact, there's an entire field called Bayesian epistemology about belief updating.
2:04
So when you say you have beliefs,
2:06
it doesn't mean that you're a member of the Westboro Baptist Church.
2:09
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is unambiguous.
2:12
Contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a propositional attitude.
2:16
The key point is that belief doesn't have to imply faith nor certainty.
2:21
You can believe you have a head.
2:22
You can believe two plus two equals four.
2:25
You can believe that Neil is more logical than the person that he's speaking to.
2:31
So those who say when you ask them,
2:33
hey, well, what is it that you believe about so-and-so?
2:35
They say, oh, me, I don't hold beliefs.
2:37
Ask me a different question.
2:39
They think that the word belief is some confession of irrationality.
2:44
No, it's just a basic piece of furniture in your mind.
2:49
If the scientist wants to say I don't have beliefs,
2:53
it would require a non-standard definition of belief,
2:56
and thus muddle the conversation with uncharitable and unstated redefinitions,
3:01
which is actually itself unscientific.
3:06
So one of the more charitable interpretations of the no belief claim
3:09
that this rational person is using is to say that belief means something like faith,
3:14
and faith to them means belief without adequate evidence,
3:18
or perhaps belief has some property of obstinate resistance to updating
3:21
when encountering new evidence.
3:22
But this is semantic equivocation.
3:25
Standardly, when people say and philosophers use belief at faith,
3:29
they distinguish belief that,
3:31
so that's a proposition I'm holding P to be true.
3:34
Or they can mean faith in,
3:36
like an attitude, a trust-based, a trust-relation
3:39
that could, although it doesn't have to involve resistance to change due to counter-evidence.
3:44
By the way, Kierkegaard is important here because Kierkegaard
3:47
has a similar sort of A rational or extra rational,
3:50
whatever we want to call it, type of faith.
3:52
There's a video here that I made about Kierkegaard
3:54
that went quite viral, I'll link it on screen,
3:57
and in the description.
3:58
Now, the no belief rationalist can look up these words in the dictionary,
4:02
and I want to just take it a tad further by going to the Stanford encyclopedia.
4:06
Richard Swinburne labels this the Thomas view of faith.
4:09
The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that there is a God.
4:15
However, even Aquinas distinguished faith from ordinary belief.
4:20
In theology, faith means one of these,
4:22
so belief in propositions that are not fully seen or demonstrable.
4:26
It could mean that, or it could also mean volition,
4:29
a type of trust beyond mere ascent.
4:31
And it could also mean that resilience to a certain kind of counter-evidence.
4:35
When a philosopher here is someone that says,
4:37
I don't believe I follow the evidence.
4:39
The immediate response is, okay,
4:42
following the evidence is just forming beliefs,
4:45
proportioned to that evidence.
4:47
That's precisely what belief is.
4:51
Most of my best ideas don't happen during interviews,
4:54
they come spontaneously,
4:56
most of the time in the shower, actually, or while I'm walking.
4:58
Until I had flawed, I would frequently lose them because,
5:02
by the time I write down half of it, it's gone.
5:05
I tried voice capture before, like Google Home,
5:07
and it just cuts me off in the middle.
5:09
It's so frustrating.
5:10
Most of my ideas aren't these 10-second sound bites,
5:12
they're ponderous, they're long-winded,
5:14
and I wind around, they're discursive,
5:17
they're five minutes long.
5:18
Apple notes, even Google keep,
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But plot, let's me talk for as long as I want,
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To assert, scientists don't use the word belief,
6:18
and I'm a scientist is itself to express a belief.
6:22
The belief norm assertion,
6:23
which is the view that's widely held in philosophy of language,
6:26
says, one must assert P only if one believes P.
6:30
I spoke to a scientist on NPR,
6:32
where she said something like consciousness
6:34
is a universal principle,
6:35
and then my question was,
6:36
can you explain what you mean
6:38
when you said that you believe consciousness
6:40
is a universal principle?
6:41
That NASA scientist retorted to me.
6:43
So first, you have to stop saying belief.
6:45
When you're talking to scientists,
6:48
the only belief we put is in the hypothesis,
6:50
we're formulating hypotheses.
6:52
The problem is, just because you don't use the word belief,
6:55
it doesn't mean you don't have one.
6:58
You're speaking to your friend.
6:59
You tell your friend, look, friend,
7:01
you have some idea of what truth is.
7:03
They say, look, I don't even need to use the word truth.
7:05
It is raining outside.
7:07
I didn't use the word truth.
7:09
You'd be absolutely correct to say to your friend,
7:12
okay, but the fact that you've managed to say a sentence
7:16
without some particular word doesn't mean
7:18
that concept isn't implicitly embedded in it.
7:21
It is raining outside is shorthand
7:23
for it is true that it is raining outside.
7:26
In the same manner, when Natalie Cabral said,
7:29
I hypothesize that consciousness may be a universal principle.
7:32
That's shorthand for, I believe,
7:34
there's a non-zero chance that consciousness
7:36
may be a universal principle.
7:37
Of course, this avoids the question of what it even means
7:40
to be a universal principle, but that's besides the point.
7:43
When the scientist says something like,
7:44
they think this is true or they think so and so is possible,
7:47
they're committing to the truth
7:49
or at least to the possibility of truth of a proposition.
7:52
That's what assertion is.
7:54
Assertion presupposes belief or at minimum
7:57
something functionally equivalent.
7:59
And then there's Thomas Campbell
8:00
who goes further and pathologizes belief.
8:03
Belief is a problem.
8:06
Belief gets in the way.
8:07
Beliefs are always a problem.
8:09
He then spends three hours defending to me
8:11
that consciousness is fundamental,
8:12
that fear produces ego, et cetera.
8:14
Those are beliefs, dozens of them.
8:18
My ears tend to go back when the scientist
8:20
shares something in common with the guru.
8:22
If you're sensing something contradictory here,
8:24
I think you're right.
8:26
To say, I don't have beliefs is itself an assertion.
8:29
Therefore asserting I don't have beliefs
8:31
presupposes a belief.
8:33
The belief that one doesn't have beliefs,
8:35
it's like an undermining act.
8:37
Now, and also note, there is an alternate view of truth,
8:40
which is deflationary by saying truth is nothing more than
8:43
some utterance of a statement.
8:45
Crispin Wright, for instance, noticed you could flip this, though,
8:48
since the equivalence doesn't privilege a direction.
8:51
But this is something for a future video,
8:52
so subscribe if you like.
8:54
Now, a counter may be to reach for boss von Frost's distinction
8:57
between belief and acceptance.
9:00
In the early 1980s, von Frost and argued that science
9:02
aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate,
9:06
and acceptance of a theory involves as belief
9:09
only that it is empirically adequate.
9:11
The constructive empiricists accept theories.
9:14
They commit to using them.
9:15
They base further research on them and so on,
9:17
but they may be agnostic as to what the theory is true
9:21
about unobservables.
9:23
But even von Frost and doesn't eliminate belief,
9:25
acceptance of a theory involves belief
9:28
that is empirically adequate.
9:29
The scientist still has beliefs.
9:31
In fact, I spoke directly to boss von Frost
9:34
It's a fantastic podcast.
9:36
You should check it out.
9:36
He's one of the most cited philosophers of science.
9:39
He says, I believe many things.
9:41
I believe that I had a father.
9:42
I believe I wrote a book.
9:46
My beliefs could be false.
9:47
Boss's point is more about the scope
9:49
of rational belief in science.
9:51
And it's not decidedly not about the elimination of belief
9:56
Scientists can be epistemologically modest.
9:59
Maybe they should be, but they're not actually belief-free.
10:04
When I'm deep in research, reading papers on, say,
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11:20
Of course, you can use a vernacular synonym for belief,
11:23
like I'm going to call it credence.
11:25
And I should be careful here because belief and credence
11:28
are only semantic synonyms, but they do remain
11:30
distinct concepts in philosophy, particularly in basingism.
11:34
Credence is a probability valued attitude,
11:36
so a measure of confidence in some proposition ranging
11:40
from zero, I fully disbelieve this to number 100% say,
11:43
or number one, which is complete certainty.
11:46
So the difference here is that you could say that I'm only going to say
11:49
that I believe in X once my credence has passed some threshold.
11:54
A scientist who says something like, let's say,
11:56
I have extremely high confidence based on evidence
11:59
in the theory of evolution.
12:01
But I don't believe the theory of evolution.
12:03
They're speaking incoherently.
12:05
If we take belief in the standard sense,
12:08
high credence is just belief.
12:10
And by the way, you may have noticed, of course,
12:12
the scientific methodology itself reflects beliefs.
12:16
Belief that the scientific method is reliable,
12:19
belief that evidence constrains a theory,
12:22
belief in modus pollinants, et cetera.
12:25
Quine actually had a concept of holism
12:27
in his two dog muzzle empiricism,
12:29
where he places beliefs at the center of the quote,
12:36
Now, counter example to the last few minutes
12:38
is that you could take the fourth option.
12:40
I gave a few in the beginning, but let's say option one
12:45
Okay, well, that's not a counter example,
12:46
because I believe X is the case is exactly what we're discussing.
12:50
How about option two, where you say I don't believe in X?
12:53
Now, this one's a bit tricky,
12:55
because some people would say that this is a stand-in
12:57
for I believe that X isn't the case,
12:59
at least that's how we use the word.
13:01
In this option, then, isn't actually a counter example.
13:03
Another option is you can be agnostic.
13:06
You could say I don't know.
13:07
My mind isn't made up,
13:09
whether that's because I don't think there's enough evidence
13:11
to reach such a conclusion in either direction or what have you.
13:14
But that still remains an attitude of belief.
13:17
Now, the last option here is the most interesting to me
13:20
You could say that the matter at hand is independent of belief,
13:23
that belief has nothing to do with this.
13:25
But then you could ask, well, what do you mean
13:27
that belief has nothing to do with this?
13:29
It seems like the first three options exhaust possibilities.
13:32
However, consider a cup of water.
13:34
You could ask, what's the electric charge of the cup of water?
13:37
That's a sensible question.
13:39
You could also ask, what's the total electric charge of the universe?
13:42
Or you could ask, what's the electric charge of $55?
13:47
Now, in that case, that latter case,
13:49
it would be wrong to say that the electric charge of $55 is zero
13:53
or that it's 10 EV or 250 TEV or something like that.
13:58
As dollars have nothing to do with electric charge,
14:01
assigning them an arbitrary number would just be a category error.
14:04
My present deliberation is that the only way someone could say
14:07
that they hold no beliefs and be accurate
14:10
is in this option four sense.
14:11
Now, some more objections that naturally come to mind
14:13
is perhaps one could remain radically uncertain about everything,
14:18
treating all propositions as guesses.
14:20
But even this doesn't eliminate belief.
14:21
It's just describing fallabalism, so fallabalist belief.
14:24
And even if you say something like 99.9% credence is required in order for me to say
14:28
I believe in this, well, then to act in the world,
14:32
such as crossing the streets, eating food,
14:34
does require something like 99.9% credence
14:37
that you're not going to get hit by a car or poisoned.
14:39
So I think that the charitable reading is that the scientist is saying,
14:42
look, I'm not dogmatic.
14:45
That's why I don't hold beliefs.
14:47
But the best way to communicate that isn't to deny beliefs.
14:51
It's instead to model epistemic virtues explicitly.
14:55
Saying, I have no beliefs doesn't signal rationality.
14:57
To me, it signals confusion about one's own cognition.
15:01
Worse, it gives ammunition to those who claim scientists
15:04
are in denial about their own presuppositions.
15:07
Now, one could counter, hey, Kurt,
15:09
historically speaking, faith meant trust or fidelity.
15:13
It's not exactly a propositional ascent.
15:17
However, it does commit this etymological fallacy,
15:20
confusing a word's current meaning with its origin.
15:24
To me, what matters is how belief functions
15:27
in contemporary discourse.
15:29
And also, if we want to be a bit more technical,
15:31
what does it mean in philosophy?
15:33
No one thinks Neil deGrasse Tyson is channeling a quietness.
15:37
So what do I think is going on?
15:39
Why do so many scientists almost bolstfully state
15:42
I don't use the word belief.
15:43
I don't like beliefs.
15:44
I don't hold beliefs.
15:45
Beliefs are no part of me as a scientist.
15:47
I think it's because there's an impulse
15:50
to communicate, I'm not dogmatic.
15:56
To me, the way to communicate that again
15:58
is not by denying to have beliefs.
16:01
You just state fallibleism.
16:03
You're open to counter evidence.
16:05
You're willing to update.
16:06
And you have precision about your confidence levels, perhaps.
16:09
You do this with belief.
16:11
I think it's like a demonstration of beacon
16:13
of how rational they are by ostentatiously rejecting this term
16:17
that they think has something to do with irrationality.
16:19
When actually it's the opposite,
16:21
it's more irrational to claim you have no beliefs
16:24
by any standard definition.
16:26
In fact, by most accounts,
16:27
you can't even use the word no like knowledge
16:30
without believing in whatever you're knowing.
16:32
It's necessary for you to believe you have a mother
16:34
in order for you to say you know you have a mother.
16:37
So my concise verdict is that scientists have beliefs.
16:41
It's not innately irrational to have them.
16:44
Pretending otherwise is linguistic posturing.
16:48
It's entirely fine to say I believe electrons exist.
16:51
And I'm willing to change my belief
16:53
if the evidence shows me that I'm wrong.
16:55
That's entirely honorable.
16:57
That statement itself is not creatinous.
16:59
The scientist who says I hold no beliefs
17:03
is confused about their own mind, I believe.
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