Of course there is a good explanation for this. Self interest. I mean if you were to assert that there is a 70% (or 30%) chance in your mind that Jesus is the son of God it just gets you the worst of both worlds. So they lie, perhaps even to themselves.

My self interest hypothesizes that Jesus was a Space Alien, the Son of God thing was just a good cover. So was Zoroaster. So also, Siddharta Gautama. And Lao Tzu.

Joseph Smith however was not a space alien, he was just a redneck whack job with a comic-book brain and poor writing skills that made it big as a charlatan. Mohammed fits somewhat into the Joseph smith motif but a bit wiser, as he was first a successful trader that married well, and, although illiterate, then turned to "visions' and "fits" (later in life) that morphed into a violent power grab and into a large religious movement that proved successful and enduring.

It's not just God or gods that come into question but all those that purport to have some special communication with them or it or X. In that sense I'm quite the atheist. I prefer however the moniker: rationalist.

To "not believe" means to be delusional. Looks contradictory but it isn't.

I hear people describe their position (in terms of more / less likely) under non-denominational theism (and deism) quite frequently, esp from self-described agnostics. Perhaps the important difference is that in order to consider oneself a denominational theist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Mormon etc, then one has already reached the high level of certainty required, whereas the belief in a generic god of theism (and deism) can be expressed in the more / less likely manner.


Aaron, do you think only a high degree of certainty can be considered 'belief'? Is this another semantic issue, that the "slightly more likely than not" position is better labelled something different to 'belief' (perhaps it still falls under agnosticism), even though it might be 'technically correct' to consider it belief?

Belief is an attitude towards a proposition. If I say "I believe X" then I'm saying that I consider X to be true. The question of measuring certainty is at some level irrelevant. At that point, you're not quite talking about "belief" as much as you are "degree/level of belief." That is, you've changed the conversation from "Do you believe X is true" to "How confident are you that X is true?"

The gambling example highlights the distinction. I can be confident enough to make wagers without believing anything about the outcome. The outcome doesn't even need to be a mathematical favorite for this to happen. For example, I'd be willing to wager $1 on drawing the 7 of diamonds at random from the deck if someone is paying me $100 if I do it. That doesn't mean that I would assent to "I believe the card I will draw is the 7 of diamonds."

On the other hand, someone can pull a card and (before seeing it) believe that it is the 7 of diamonds. That is, they can have a propositional attitude where they would affirm the claim "This is the 7 of diamonds." That belief may or may not be justified and it may or may not be true. But the person *believes* it's true.

So it's semantics in the sense that you really need to think about what's being said when someone says "I believe X." But I don't think that this is the same as trying to find some "level of belief" based on wagering propositions.

I'm unpacking this in real time, forgive the rambling. I've realised that while I often see discussion around how high or low someone's confidence is that X is true, I'm struggling to find how this applies in real life, say to my own beliefs. What I believe to be true, I have a high degree of certainty. In fact the reason I believe X was because I obtained a high degree of certainty, however that might have happened. I can't think of something I'd say I believed, that I had a low degree of certainty.

That would lead to the idea, belief in X is when you have a high degree of certainty that X is true (some nebulous certainty threshold). I'm not sure if you are saying different when you say "The question of measuring certainty is at some level irrelevant".

Take a bag of balls example. With 99 red balls and 1 blue ball, and one ball is selected, it's rational to believe "the selected ball is probably red". If someone says "I believe the selected ball is red", I don't expect them to literally hold that belief, but that "is red" is a shorthand for "is probably red".

If the single blue ball was removed, I could still not believe the next selected ball was red. I'd say something like "if there really are only red balls in the bag then the selected ball should indeed be red". That's NOT the same as believing the selected ball is red, agreed? Until I'd seen the selected ball, I could not hold the belief in what the ball was, just what it is expected to be.


I'm not sure where I'm going with this, just pondering the different degrees of skepticism people hold, such that there are those who would believe the selected ball is red before having seen it, in the 99:1 example.

Out of interest, would you believe differently re: the two bag o'balls examples above?
Aren't theists declaring their belief about the selected ball (without having seen it)? If so, how many red and blue balls are in the bag that they are declaring a belief, and is it reasonable to hold that belief?

Perhaps you can think of better examples...

I suppose there's something to explore a bit on the reasons that you've come to believe. I think we often like to view ourselves as rational beings and that there really is some sort of "belief-o-meter" in our heads that calculates the probability of X being true for whatever statement X we happen to come across.

I think it's a better picture to think that we have about a thousand little belief-o-meters to choose from (each one might be "rational" in its own right, but just taking into consideration different sets of observations). And the choice of which meter to listen to is more like an emotional decision. This is how you can have someone completely believe that the next roulette spin will be black even if they know that there's only an 18/38 chance of it happening.

If it's true that you think you hold no beliefs without also having a high degree of certainty, I would suggest it's probable that your justifications for your beliefs are not as strong as you think they are. The reason for this is that the human brain is full of all sorts of random beliefs, many of which aren't true but we're completely confident right up to the point where we have to face some aspect of reality that shows us we're wrong with no way of getting out of it. Here's a bit of listening that will perhaps give you some insight into this.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/rad...t-of-knowledge

Again, I disconnect the two things as being different. I can believe something even though I'm not confident in it. I can also be very confident in something but not believe. I think the example you give is a good one.

I agree that it's rational to assent to belief (because it's very probable to be red). But it's also rational to not assent to belief (because it could logically be blue). In both cases, however, I can be confident that the ball is probably red.

This is the classic magician's trick. You "force" the observer's mind to hold something to be the case, and then reveal something different. Maybe you should watch some sleight of hand and enjoy the process of being led around by your beliefs to get a better understanding of this.

I think it's really about parsing between "belief" and "degree of belief." I'm not claiming it's completely clean or easy. If you want to read deeply in it, SEP has an entire article that you can work through:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/

See above. I'm in between two types of ways of interpreting the statement of belief. I suspect that if I were not in the middle of a conversation about belief, I would probably believe in the sense of taking the disposition that it's actually red.

I don't think this is the appropriate model for belief in most situations. For most things in life, we don't have a clear model for the sample space of possibilities. That is, with a deck of cards, we know exactly how many cards are supposed to be in the deck and what all the 52 possibilities are. I think it's a flawed model to take that and say "Now let's take all the different gods that have been hypothesized throughout history and put them in a bag..." It's just not an accurate reflection of anything, much like how DS likes to force everything into a binary gambling proposition. Sometimes (often) it doesn't work out meaningfully.

Mine too, but I'm working on it.

My hypothesis wasn't that I think I hold a typical number of beliefs, all of which I am very confident in, but that I think I hold fewer of these beliefs, the consequence being fewer beliefs held with higher confidence.

Without knowing how others think, I don't know whether that position is basically the norm, or whether it is greatly more skeptical than the norm.

Given this, I can't think of a good example for which I could say "I believe X" and "I am not confident X is true".

Anyway, thx for the links! I've tried to get through the SEP one before, it's a bit hard going.

Have you ever found yourself in a decision-making context, like poker, where you had a really tough decision and didn't like any of your options? There are probably situations in which you can say "I believe 'Y is the best play'" while simultaneously saying "I am not confident that 'Y is the best play' is true."

I've always considered myself to be an atheist. I don't believe god exists. I also believe that god does not exist. I don't know if these are the same thing, but I'll leave it to you philosophers to decide that. I just know that the idea of a supernatural being responsible for everything we see, do and think seems like something only a child could subscribe to. There is neither evidence nor proof of such a being. Believers make me chuckle.

Do you believe this universe was not created by any being? Like say a really really smart one form another universe.

That may be because instead of saying "I believe X" you use other language to avoid ambivalence, you may say "I think X" or "I suspect X" to indicate that while you hold some view on X you are not confident in it. And this is fine but for me thoughts and suspicions are beliefs.

Right, I've wondered if this might be the case, that I might be using belief differently to the 'accepted' philosophical definition. Similar to how some ppl think belief means to have a low confidence in a proposition, and when they are certain of something they will say "I don't believe X, I know it" - they might struggle to accept the broader philosophical definition of belief, at least initially.

But if belief can be a proposition for which you hold low confidence (without outright rejecting it) then "I believe X" and "I doubt X" would be interchangeable. It makes belief so broad that any proposition you think might be the case, would be considered a belief. This doesn't seem useful, and worse, it means believing contradictory propositions would be commonplace. With Aaron's 'best play' example, you could believe both 'X is the best play' and 'Y is the best play'.

If you consider some proposition P that you have not outright rejected, and have little confidence in, but not zero - would you really declare "I believe P"?

No, because "believe" and "doubt" are two different propositional attitudes. One is a positive attitude towards the truth of a statement and the other is a negative propositional attitude. Again, this is a matter of distinguishing belief and degree of belief.

If I were *forced* to make a probabilistic statement, I might say that I'm 20% confident that X is true. I might also believe that X is true because the other possibilities only seem to give me 1% confidence.

But there could be another case that I'm 20% confident that X is true, but I doubt its truth because some other possibility gives me 70% confidence.

So you cannot do a one-for-one exchange with the words simply based on level of confidence by itself. That is, if you're 20% confident in X, that's not sufficient information on its own to try to declare belief or doubt regarding the statement.

No. But this requires you to make the distinction that I've suggested in order for you to understand it. Do not conflate "belief" with "degree of certainty." They're just not the same thing. If you insist that they're the same thing, then it's more of a problem with your language usage than a conceptual problem. It's easy enough to distinguish between them if you allow for the distinction to exist.

You might. It depends on the context. It also requires you to understand that belief is a propositional attitude, which isn't the same as a degree of certainty.

Aaron's pretty much answered that better than I was about to so I'm just going to make one point that a belief can be expressed in terms of a degree of certainty "I think P is true 20%" of the time is a propositional attitude.

What I think is important as someone who is sympathetic to contextualist epistemology is that "I believe P" may reflect a different degree of confidence specific to the context in which it is made.

This is true. I should probably say something like "degree of certainty" is just one way to hold a propositional attitude towards a particular claim, so that a propositional attitude is not necessarily a "degree of certainty" type of statement.

In particular, it is meaningful to assert "I believe X" without needing to assert a degree of certainty regarding the belief in X. It is also possible to assert a degree of certainty regarding the belief in X without asserting "I believe X." So the two statements contain different content about one's propositional attitude towards X.

I'm struggling a bit to get my language clear, and I think my original reason for questioning this is getting lost in the weeds, I'm also wondering whether this is just a pretty meaningless difference in semantics. Allow me to take a few steps back. My hypothesis is that meaningful belief requires holding some threshold of confidence that the proposition is the case. The competing position would be that belief requires any non-zero degree of confidence (and perhaps not even that?).

I think it would help enormously if I had a real world example of something, a proposition someone would declare they believed, but they held a low degree of confidence. I just can't think of something that I would apply to myself.

Back again to the bag of 99 red balls / 1 blue ball, I'm fine with declaring "I believe the ball is 99% likely to be red", but that's not the same as declaring "I believe the ball is red". To clarify that I see the difference between belief and degree of confidence, I would have a high degree of confidence in the proposition "the ball is 99% likely to be red" (in fact this is why I would believe it). I would not have that high degree of confidence in the proposition "the ball is red", and so I would not beleive it. Is anyone saying "I believe the ball is 99% likely to be red" to be equivalent to "I believe the ball is red" that was held with 99% degree of confidence? If so, that would explain where the disagreement is coming from.


I believe with a high degree of confidence that this topic is not really getting anywhere

I think I contributed to the confusion, but remember that a belief is a noun that refers to a propositional attitude and believing is a verb hence is something you do. If I have a belief regarding P that belief can represent any degree of confidence in P, including doubting, thinking, suspecting, believing etc.

Consider that we have beliefs that are not true, the degree of certainty we hold with regard to P influences how much new information we need to alter our belief.

In the morning I generally have the belief that my keys are on top of the bookcase, I don't hold this belief with a high degree of confidence as any number of facts can alter that belief, I can go to the bookcase and find they aren't there, my wife asks me where they are and follows up with "are you sure?". As soon as she asks whether I am sure my belief changes from one with a high degree of certainty to one much lower. In this case I don't need any new facts I just need my wife to question whether I am sure the keys are on the bookcase for my confidence they are there to alter. But I still believed they were and have changed my confidence level only on the context of the question rather than needing new facts to disprove my belief.

Have you heard of Street Epistemology? It's a socratic technique from Peter Boghossian's A Manual for Creating Atheists. A good example of it in practice is by Anthony Magnabosco who has a YouTube channel with his interviews (https://www.youtube.com/user/magnabosco210/videos).

Sometimes the interlocuter is asked how confident they are in their belief at the start and again at the end, and often there is a reduction in reported confidence. While it may be that their confidence has been reduced, there's a good argument to say that they over-represented their confidence at the start.

This crossed my mind when you described your confidence dropping after you had to evaluate it. I think we would all agree that you can think you believe something without having a degree of confidence in mind, as Aaron has stated earlier. Could it just be that "I believe my keys are on the bookcase" is merely an automatic response, and that you might not hold it as an actual belief? So when you really consider the proposition and find a low confidence, perhaps it wasn't an active belief at all? I'm not trying to tell you your own thoughts! But it would fit with how I have been thinking about it.

I'll have to think about the noun vs verb comment, it's a good point.

This is the first I've heard of it and after a quick google looks interesting, I'll take a closer look later and get back to you.

Returning to the keys on the bookcase, I act on the belief as if I hold it to be true when I go to the bookcase to retrieve my keys, regardless of my confidence level the belief directs my actions when I'm leaving the house. So while I am less than certain my keys are there my actions are directed that that is the most likely place I will find them and I am not surprised to find them there.

I would not use "actual belief" because it's too True Scotsman-like. I think "actionable belief" might be a more apt phrasing. It's not an "actionable belief" unless the belief can influence some sort of decision-making process.

This is a line of reasoning that people take as a way to attack religious people. For example, "You have your crazy religious beliefs, but when you go to the doctor you trust SCIENCE!" It's not a good line of attack for various reasons, but that's not the point. The underlying assertion is that these religious beliefs are non-actionable and so in some sense aren't "real."

I think the keys on the dresser example is good. The belief is actionable in that it informs behaviors.

I think that this ends up being problematic in a few ways, mostly in the world of human psychology. I can believe that eating vegetables and getting exercise is good for my health, but I may still act contrary to those beliefs, even if those beliefs are well-informed, true, and all sorts of other things.

SEP directly addresses "active" beliefs, I believe. You don't need to be actively thinking about something for it to be a belief. I don't often stop and think about the fact that the sun is pulling on me, but I believe it.

Thanks for the responses, I can't think of anything else to add for the moment.

I think we've clearly established what it means to 'believe' something, but I asked what it means not to believe, and by that I'm asking that if by not believing something we are necessarily rejecting it, i.e. we are saying that it's not true, we are taking the opposite position. Or, is it simply withholding assent to the proposition and having no view unless otherwise stated?

The context is one of whether or not Atheists are necessarily taking the position that they believe that there is no god by rejecting a belief in god.

Have you come to an understanding? There've been some good earlier replies that highlight the difference between "not believing" and "believing not", and also that "believing X is true" and "believing X is false" can be considered separately (as long as it is not the response that automatically precludes the other).

I'd put aside the 'atheist' label, because it can mean something different to whoever uses it, clouding your question. Philosophically 'atheism' is not merely not believing, but believing not, but in common usage 'atheism' has come to mean just the broader not believing. Hence the likelihood of confusion.