I’d argue that’s the same thing, in the sense that if you are a radical skeptic and scrupulously literal in all your statements you can’t say a damn thing without layering on endless caveats and likelihoods and assuming ceteris paribus etc.
Ghosts do not exist, in the sense that Russel’s Teapot doesn’t exist. I am open to additional evidence, I acknowledge that I am but a small part of a vast universe of which I am unaware, but the non-existence of ghosts is fairly well-established relative to other beliefs. So for practical purposes, “ghosts don’t exist” is roughly accurate.
For communicative purposes, it is probably more effective than it would be to lay out the layers of uncertainty that surround that believe, because the long version would make it seem as though my beliefs about ghosts are in some way unique in the degree of uncertainty I have about them. In fact, there are many other controversial beliefs that I reject but about which I am more uncertain than that ghosts do not exist in anything like their traditional description.
I’m not discounting them, those testimonies demand explanation. But ‘ghosts exist’ is a bad explanation for all the people claiming to see ghosts, given all the evidence that people just get confused a lot.
I can see how that comes off as arrogant, but I’d argue it comes from a place of humility: I’ve observed myself getting confused in the same way that I suspect people who claim to have seen ghosts are confused. I’ve seen things that weren’t there, and lept to explanations that weren’t well supported and turned out to be wrong. Because I’m an unreliable witness, it’s easy to believe that other people are also not reliable.
And that’s particularly true when we consider that:
- observations of ghosts aren’t identical, they tend to look like the myths of the culture from which the witness comes (c.f. @BeingMuslim’s claims above); and
- my explanation for these observations appeals to patterns in the failures of human perception, e.g. pareidolia, spurious causality, over-attribution of agency, better-to-be-wrong-than-dead, etc. These patterns are widely attested, I can verify them in myself and in those around me in non-ghost contexts, and they fit a more general theory of where we come from and why our minds work the way they work (which, yes, is secular).
I’m not sure what to make of this. Is that to say that they aren’t objective?
I am aware that people claim to see all sorts of things, but those observations are better explained by things like pareidolia. People observe things with great conviction that just don’t exist. Consider table-turning or N-ray, for which people had loads of subjective evidence and which were conclusively disproved by further investigation.
When you say “ghosts are subjective”, that sounds to me like you’re making your hypothesis that ghosts exist untestable. And untestable hypotheses verge on meaningless: if the world with ghosts and the world without ghosts aren’t distinguishable through rigorous investigation, what can it mean that they exist?