Quick: is there an 85 year old former plumber by the name of Saul Morgan eating a breakfast of steak and eggs in a diner in North Side of Chicago right now? Who knows, right? You certainly don’t have an affirmative belief that there is, but it’s also true that, perhaps up until this moment, you didn’t affirmatively believe that there wasn’t such a man either. Lacking a belief in something is not the same as believing in its converse. To affirmatively believe in the non-existence of every conceivable entity or the falsity of ever proposition would require an infinite number of beliefs.
Beliefs are procedural, you don’t need them all written out explicitly. This allows to hold infinite number of beliefs, each of them equipped with a specific level of certainty. I never before thought about the question of what the value of 385+23 is, but I still have a belief that 385+23=408 and also that 385+23 is not 409.
I reservedly agree. Taken to extremes your position implies logical omniscience—that I already have a belief one way or the other about the truth of the Riemann hypothesis because I know the basic axioms of complex mathematics, for example.
On the other hand, if I have a random number generator about to spit out a number between 1 and 10^12 I do assign an implicit probability 10^-12 to each number in that range, even though I (couldn’t possibly) explicitly list them out.
The way beliefs are “procedural” includes the requirement that you must be able to instantiate them, but permitting this bounded step vastly increases the number of possible beliefs. Beliefs are answers to questions, and epistemic mind is a question-answering engine. Without logical omniscience, the process of computation increases information about statements over time (even without learning new facts from environment). When first confronted with a question of what 385+23 is, the one-second reply is “about 400″, and only then “408”.
As V. Nesov said, not having thought about it isn’t important. I have no evidence about plumbers in Chicago, but if I am presented with the question, I can think for a while and assign some probability to the proposition. I assume population of cca. 1 million, out of which former or present plumbers are, say, 1%, from what the age group select another 1%, the name and surname make another factor… so I am almost sure that there isn’t such a man. Affirmatively, if you want.
Another point is that even if I accept that I hadn’t had an affirmative belief about Saul Morgan before you have presented the question, I find the analogy misleading, because practically all atheists have heard about the hypothesis of God.
Of course you can meet a claim and decide to not care about it. But it seems to me that it’s almost always case of very unimportant questions. I can’t imagine a person who wilfully suspends judgement about eternal damnation and torture in hell, meaning of life, basis for morality and all other important subjects traditionally associated with religion. You can quickly conclude that religion is bogus and then go thinking about something else. But to leave the question genuinely open?
Quick: is there an 85 year old former plumber by the name of Saul Morgan eating a breakfast of steak and eggs in a diner in North Side of Chicago right now? Who knows, right? You certainly don’t have an affirmative belief that there is, but it’s also true that, perhaps up until this moment, you didn’t affirmatively believe that there wasn’t such a man either. Lacking a belief in something is not the same as believing in its converse. To affirmatively believe in the non-existence of every conceivable entity or the falsity of ever proposition would require an infinite number of beliefs.
Beliefs are procedural, you don’t need them all written out explicitly. This allows to hold infinite number of beliefs, each of them equipped with a specific level of certainty. I never before thought about the question of what the value of 385+23 is, but I still have a belief that 385+23=408 and also that 385+23 is not 409.
I reservedly agree. Taken to extremes your position implies logical omniscience—that I already have a belief one way or the other about the truth of the Riemann hypothesis because I know the basic axioms of complex mathematics, for example.
On the other hand, if I have a random number generator about to spit out a number between 1 and 10^12 I do assign an implicit probability 10^-12 to each number in that range, even though I (couldn’t possibly) explicitly list them out.
The way beliefs are “procedural” includes the requirement that you must be able to instantiate them, but permitting this bounded step vastly increases the number of possible beliefs. Beliefs are answers to questions, and epistemic mind is a question-answering engine. Without logical omniscience, the process of computation increases information about statements over time (even without learning new facts from environment). When first confronted with a question of what 385+23 is, the one-second reply is “about 400″, and only then “408”.
I believe that would still be a contentious position in epistemology, but I agree.
As V. Nesov said, not having thought about it isn’t important. I have no evidence about plumbers in Chicago, but if I am presented with the question, I can think for a while and assign some probability to the proposition. I assume population of cca. 1 million, out of which former or present plumbers are, say, 1%, from what the age group select another 1%, the name and surname make another factor… so I am almost sure that there isn’t such a man. Affirmatively, if you want.
Another point is that even if I accept that I hadn’t had an affirmative belief about Saul Morgan before you have presented the question, I find the analogy misleading, because practically all atheists have heard about the hypothesis of God.
Of course you can meet a claim and decide to not care about it. But it seems to me that it’s almost always case of very unimportant questions. I can’t imagine a person who wilfully suspends judgement about eternal damnation and torture in hell, meaning of life, basis for morality and all other important subjects traditionally associated with religion. You can quickly conclude that religion is bogus and then go thinking about something else. But to leave the question genuinely open?