Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
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...