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Originally Posted by Mightyboosh
If it doesn't lead to the god of the bible, why do you believe Genesis?
My beliefs are not built off a singular collection of observations.
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You haven't dealt with my criticism that adding 'plausibility' to the requirement for 'rational belief' creates the problem of beliefs about beliefs having to be examined for plausibility in a never ending chain. It makes defining a rational belief impossible. And it transfers 'rational' from being a property of the thinking leading to a belief (and leaving a void for what we now call that and how we judge the quality of it), and makes 'justified' redundant as a property of the belief itself.
No, it doesn't. It does, however, end up with a definition of rationality that requires interpretation and understanding. If you're looking for black-and-white definitions, you're going to find yourself in a weird and useless train of thought.
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It's not going beyond the evidence though. We know the probability of the coin being heads or tails and no one would be coming to this situation from a void, they will bring with them prior knowledge about coin tossing. However... whatever you can reasonably predict, you can't know anything until the million tosses have been completed, and it could come up tails a million times thereby providing evidence that doesn't just weaken your inductive conclusion that there will be at least one head, but shows it to be wrong.
Yes, it does go beyond. Without even running the experiment, I'm saying that there *WILL BE* at least one head *IF* someone ran this experiment. According to your definition, this thought is irrational. I'm saying that it's a perfectly rational conclusion.
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It's actually a good example of one of the problems with Inductive reasoning (specifically Hume's problem) but I'm not ready to have that conversation yet.
No, this really isn't about induction. It's about probability.
And it's not really a problem in the sense of rationality. Rational conclusions can be wrong. That's a perfectly acceptable condition. (There are "problems" with inductive reasoning, but they're not problems of the type you think they are. Inductive reasoning is perfectly rational.)