The issue for discourse is that beliefs do come in degrees, but when expressing them they lose this feature. Declarative statements are mostly discrete. (Saying “It’s raining outside” doesn’t communicate how strongly you believe it, except to more than 50% -- but again, the fan of championing will deny even that in certain discourse contexts.)
Talking explicitly about probabilities is a workaround, a hack where we still make binary statements, just about probabilities. But talking about probabilities is kind of unnatural, and people (even rationalists) rarely do it. Notice how both of us made a lot of declarative statements without indicating our degrees of belief in them. The best we can do, without using explicit probabilities, is using qualifiers like “I believe that”, “It might be that”, “It seems that”, “Probably”, “Possibly”, “Definitely”, “I’m pretty sure that” etc.
See
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zonination/perceptions/master/joy1.png
The issue for discourse is that beliefs do come in degrees, but when expressing them they lose this feature. Declarative statements are mostly discrete. (Saying “It’s raining outside” doesn’t communicate how strongly you believe it, except to more than 50% -- but again, the fan of championing will deny even that in certain discourse contexts.)
Talking explicitly about probabilities is a workaround, a hack where we still make binary statements, just about probabilities. But talking about probabilities is kind of unnatural, and people (even rationalists) rarely do it. Notice how both of us made a lot of declarative statements without indicating our degrees of belief in them. The best we can do, without using explicit probabilities, is using qualifiers like “I believe that”, “It might be that”, “It seems that”, “Probably”, “Possibly”, “Definitely”, “I’m pretty sure that” etc. See https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zonination/perceptions/master/joy1.png