Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn’t Understand What “Belief” Means | Curt Jaimungal

Starting point is 00:00:00 When Neil deGrasse Tyson says that I don't believe anything, I know that you believe that there is fear-mongering over AI. I don't believe anything. It's not, don't say I believe anything. Your wincing is indeed justified. Now, it's not just the scientist. The insidious disdain for the usage of the word belief is echoed, even here in this infamous Deepak Chopra exchange.

Starting point is 00:00:21 Now, you stated before that, all belief is a cover up for insecurity, right? Who? Do you believe that? Yes. Thank you. Nice. The statement that I don't believe anything is said so self-assuredly, so swiftly, so loudly,

Starting point is 00:00:39 and with a tinge of condescension that you know something else is going on. It's a semaphore for, hey, look how enlightened I am. Aren't I so rational, unlike those poor, unsound religious folk? So the phrase, I don't have beliefs, is either trivially true, which you can read as empty. it's semantically confused, which is equivocating between belief and faith, or it's completely demonstrably false.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Now let's work through this rigorously. In analytic epistemology, belief is a propositional attitude. It's a mental state with a proposition as its content, and then to believe X just means that you hold that proposition to be true. Now, it doesn't mean that I hold this proposition true to be true no matter what. it doesn't mean that you can't update your beliefs subject to new evidence. In fact, there's an entire field called Bayesian Epistemology about belief updating. So when you say you have beliefs, it doesn't mean that you're a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. The Stanford Encyclopedia

Starting point is 00:01:40 of philosophy is unambiguous. Contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a propositional attitude. The key point is that belief doesn't have to imply faith nor certainty. You can believe you have a head. You can believe two plus two equals four. You can believe that Neil is more logical than the person that he's speaking to. I think he does. So those who say when you ask them, hey, well, what is it that you believe about so-and-so? They say, oh, me, I don't hold beliefs. Ask me a different question.

Starting point is 00:02:08 I'm a scientist. They think that the word belief is some confession of irrationality. No. It's just a basic piece of furniture in your mind. If the scientist wants to say, I don't have beliefs, it would require a non-standard definition of belief and thus muddle the conversation with uncharitable and unstated redefinitions, which is actually itself unscientific. So one of the more charitable interpretations of the no-belief claim that this rational person

Starting point is 00:02:40 is using is to say that belief means something like faith, and faith to them means belief without adequate evidence, or perhaps belief has some property of obstinate resistance to updating when encountering new evidence, but this is semantic equivocation. standardly when people say and philosophers use belief at faith, they distinguish belief that, so that's a proposition I'm holding P to be true. Or they can mean faith in, like an attitude, a trust-based, a trust relation, that could, although it doesn't have to involve resistance to change due to counter-evidence. By the way, Kierkegaard is important here because Kierkegaard has a similar sort of a rational

Starting point is 00:03:19 or extra-rational, whatever we want to call it, type of faith. There's a video here that I made about Kierkegaard. that went quite viral, I'll link it on screen, and in the description. Now, the no-belief rationalist can look up these words in the dictionary, and I want to just take it a tad further by going to the Stanford Encyclopedia. Richard Swinburne labels this the Thomist view of faith. The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that there is a god. However, even Aquinas distinguished faith from ordinary belief. In theology, faith means one of these. So belief in propositions that are not fully seen or demonstrable. It could mean that, or it could also mean

Starting point is 00:03:58 volition, a type of trust beyond mere assent. And it could also mean that resilience to a certain kind of counter evidence. When a philosopher here is someone that says, I don't believe, I follow the evidence. The immediate response is, okay, following the evidence is just forming beliefs proportioned to that evidence. That's precisely what belief is. When I'm wrestling with a guest's argument about, say, the hard problem of consciousness or quantum foundations, I refuse to let even a scintilla of confusion remain unexamined. Claude is my thinking partner here. Actually, they just released something major, which is Claude Opus 4.6, a state-of-the-art model.

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Starting point is 00:05:44 To assert scientists don't use the word belief, and I am a scientist, is itself to express a belief. The belief norm assertion, which is the view that's widely held in philosophy of language, says one must assert P only if one believes P. I spoke to a scientist on NPR

Starting point is 00:06:00 where she said something like consciousness is a universal principle and then my question was, can you explain what you mean when you said that you believe consciousness is a universal principle? That NASA scientist retorted to me. So first you have to stop saying belief

Starting point is 00:06:13 when you are talking to scientists. The only belief we put is the hypotheses. We're formulating hypotheses. The problem is, just because you don't use the word belief, it doesn't mean you don't have one. Consider this. You're speaking to your friend. You tell your friend, look, friend, you have some idea of what truth is. They say, look, I don't even need to use the word truth. It is raining outside. I didn't use the word truth. You'd be absolutely correct to say to your friend, okay, but the fact that you've managed to say a sentence without some particular word doesn't mean that concept isn't implicitly embedded in it. It is raining outside is shorthand for

Starting point is 00:06:52 it is true that it is raining outside. In the same manner, when Natalie Cabral said, I hypothesized that consciousness may be a universal principle, that's shorthand for, I believe there's a non-zero chance that consciousness may be a universal principle. Of course, this avoids the question of what it even means to be a universal principle, but that's besides the point. When the scientist says something like, they think this is true or they think so-and-so is possible, they're committing to the truth, or at least to the possibility of truth, of a proposition. That's what assertion is. Assertion presupposes belief, or at minimum, something functionally equivalent. And then there's Thomas Campbell who goes further and pathologizes belief.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Belief is a problem. Belief gets in the way. Belief are always a problem. He then spends three hours defending to me that consciousness is fundamental, that fear produces ego, etc. Those are beliefs, dozens of them. My ears tend to go back when the scientist shares something in common with the guru. If you're sensing something contradictory here, I think you're right. To say, I don't have beliefs. Is itself an assertion? Therefore asserting, I don't have beliefs presupposes a belief, the belief that one doesn't have beliefs. It's like an undermining act. Now, and also note, there is an alternate view of truth, which is deflationary, by saying truth is nothing more than some utterance of a statement.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Crispin Wright, for instance, noticed you could flip this, though, since the equivalence doesn't privilege a direction. But this is something for a future video, so subscribe if you like. Now, a counter may be to reach for Boss Von Frazen's distinction between belief and acceptance. In the early 1980s, Von Frazen argued that science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate, and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate. The constructive empiricist accepts theories. They commit to using them. They base further research on them and so on, but they may be agnostic as to what the theory is true about unobservables.

Starting point is 00:08:51 But even von Frazen doesn't eliminate belief. Acceptance of a theory involves belief that is empirically adequate. The scientist still has beliefs. In fact, I spoke directly to Boss Van Frazen about this. It's a fantastic podcast. You should check it out. He's one of the most cited philosophers of science. He says, I believe many things. I believe that I had a father. I believe I wrote a book. Could I be wrong? Certainly. My beliefs could be false. Boss's point is more about the scope of rational belief in science. And it's not, decidedly not, about the elimination of belief from a scientist. Scientists can be epistemologically modest. Maybe they should be. But they're not actually belief-free. Of course, you can use a vernacular synonym for belief. Like, I'm going to call it credence. And I should

Starting point is 00:09:38 be careful here because belief and credence are only semantic synonyms, but they do remain distinct concepts in philosophy, particularly in Bayesianism. Credence is a probability valued attitude, so a measure of confidence in some proposition ranging from zero. I fully disbelieve this to number 100% say, or number one, which is complete certainty. So the difference here is that you could say that I'm only going to say that I believe in X once my credence has passed some threshold. A scientist who says something like, let's say, I have extremely high confidence based on evidence in the theory of evolution, but I don't believe the theory of evolution. They're speaking incoherently. If we take belief in the standard sense, high credence is just belief. And by the way,

Starting point is 00:10:23 you may have noticed, of course, the scientific methodology itself reflects beliefs. Belief that the scientific method is reliable, belief that evidence constrains a theory, belief in modus. poinins, et cetera. Quine actually had a concept of holism in his two dogmas of empiricism, where he places beliefs at the center of the, quote, web of belief. Now, a counter example to the last few minutes is that you could take the fourth option. I gave a few in the beginning, but let's say option one is I believe in X. Okay, well, that's not a counter example, because I believe X is the case is exactly what we're discussing. How about option two, where you say, I don't believe an X. Now, this one's a bit tricky because some people would say that this is a stand-in for I believe

Starting point is 00:11:11 the X isn't the case. At least that's how we use the word. In this option, then, isn't actually a counter-example. Another option is you can be agnostic. You could say, I don't know. My mind isn't made up, whether that's because I don't think there's enough evidence to reach such a conclusion in either direction or what have you. But that still remains an attitude of belief. Now, the last option here is the most interesting to me, option four. You could say that the matter at hand is independent of belief. That belief has nothing to do with this. But then you could ask, well, what do you mean that belief has nothing to do with this? It seems like the first three options exhaust possibilities. However, consider a cup of water. You could ask, what's the electric

Starting point is 00:11:48 charge of the cup of water? That's a sensible question. You could also ask, what's the total electric charge of the universe? Or you could ask, what's the electric charge of $55? Now, in that case, that latter case, it would be wrong to say that the electric charge of $55 is zero, or that it's 10 E.V, or 250 T.E.V or something like that, as dollars have nothing to do with electric charge, assigning them an arbitrary number would just be a category error. My present deliberation is that the only way someone could say that they hold no beliefs and be accurate is in this option four sense. Now, some more objections that naturally come to mind is perhaps one could remain radically uncertain about

Starting point is 00:12:29 everything, treating all propositions as guesses. But even this doesn't eliminate belief. It's just describing fallibilism, so fallibilist belief. And even if you say something like 99.9% credence is required in order for me to say, I believe in this, well, then to act in the world, such as crossing the street, eating food, does require something like 99.9% credence that you're not going to get hit by a car or poisoned. So I think that the charitable reading is that the scientist is saying, look, I'm not dogmatic. I update. That's why I don't hold beliefs. But the best way to communicate that isn't to deny beliefs. It's instead to model epistemic virtues explicitly.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Saying I have no beliefs doesn't signal rationality. To me, it signals confusion about one's own cognition. Worse, it gives ammunition to those who claim scientists are in denial about their own presuppositions. Now, one could counter, hey, Kurt, historically speaking, faith meant trust or fidelity. It's not exactly a propositional assent. Now this is true. However, it does commit this etymological fallacy, confusing a word's current meaning with its origin. To me, what matters is how belief functions in contemporary discourse. How do we use it?

Starting point is 00:13:42 And also if we want to be a bit more technical, what does it mean in philosophy? No one thinks Neil deGrasse Tyson is channeling Aquinas. So what do I think is going on? Why do so many scientists almost boastfully state, I don't use the word belief, I don't like beliefs, I don't hold beliefs, beliefs are no part of me as a scientist. I think it's because there's an impulse to communicate, I'm not dogmatic, I update, I could be wrong. To me, the way to communicate that again is not by denying to have beliefs. You just state fallibilism. That's fine. You're open to counter-evidence. You're willing to update, and you have precision about your confidence levels, perhaps. You do this with belief. I think it's like a demonstration, a beacon of how rational they are by Austin.

Starting point is 00:14:27 presentatiously rejecting this term that they think has something to do with irrationality, when actually it's the opposite, it's more irrational to claim you have no beliefs by any standard definition. In fact, by most accounts, you can't even use the word no, like knowledge, without believing in whatever you're knowing. It's necessary for you to believe you have a mother in order for you to say you know you have a mother. So my concise verdict is that scientists have beliefs. Everyone does. It's not innately irrational to have them, pretending otherwise is linguistic posturing. It's entirely fine to say, I believe electrons exist, and I'm willing to change my belief if the evidence shows me that I'm wrong. That's entirely

Starting point is 00:15:08 honorable. That statement itself is not cretiness. The scientist who says, I hold no beliefs, is confused about their own mind. I believe.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn’t Understand What “Belief” Means | Curt Jaimungal

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