I agree with your points here: believing is not binary, we don’t have perfect access to our beliefs, we can believe contradictory things and act on contradictory beliefs in different contexts.
But… how does that distinguish it from ‘thinking’? Isn’t ‘thinking that X’ just as non-binary, imperfectly accessible, potentially contradictory, and contextual as ‘believing that X’?
And if that’s so, then given that you ‘think’ that X is the case, and (in at least some context) act as though X is the case because you ‘think’ that X is the case, how do those break the link between thought and belief?
Fussiness accepted. I also don’t think the original formulation was explicitly about acting-as-though, and instead was trying to argue that because of the expected payoff of believing in God, you should believe in God. But that doesn’t follow and doesn’t seem to be how belief works (but that’s begging the question for my favored definition).
Well, that one doesn’t stand alone, it’s part of a conjunction:
If
- You think that X is the case, and
- You act as though X is the case because you think that X is the case,
Then
→ you believe that X is the case
Just to be clear, assuming those are true, they aren’t claims about this external world, but about any external world.
I mean, if we can reason to knowledge from empirical evidence, then we can in principle reason to knowledge from empirical evidence on claims like “there are no ghosts”.
Does that apply equally to claims like “dogs exist”? Do I need to say “I trust dogs exist”?
We can easily distinguish between claims about the existence of ghosts and claims about the nature of squares. What I’m trying to understand is whether your position is that we can also distinguish between claims about ghosts and claims about dogs, or between claims about existing and claims about not existing.
I mean in principle. In principle, we can have as strong evidence that there are no ghosts as we can have, in principle, that dogs exist or that there is no visible T-rex roaming Manhattan.
All to say that “There are no ghosts” is a regular kind of empirical claim that empirical evidence can, in principle, support.
I still think you overstate the degree to which scientists and scientific journals are unwilling to endorse universal negatives. Again, a few minutes of searching Google Scholar for strings like “cannot exist”, “ruled out”, “no connnection” finds lots of examples that looks like scientists publishing papers making (or discussing) categorical negative claims.
- Can sterile neutrinos be ruled out as warm dark matter candidates?
- A critique of some modern applications of the Carnot heat engine concept: the dissipative heat engine cannot exist
- No connection between alcohol use and unsafe sex among gay and bisexual men
All of those hypotheses could be massaged to save the thing being ruled out, but they aren’t in these articles, and the authors seem comfortable saying no, the rejected hypotheses don’t explain/don’t exist/can’t exist. Maybe these are particularly low-quality publications, but they seem legit from a cursory review.
But I’m also not saying that “There are no ghosts” should be the thesis of a published research paper. Scientific language is necessarily precise, so that other scientists in the field can have their own work informed by the work of others – notice how much of this nearly 600 post thread has been dedicated to defining words. That doesn’t mean the claim is scientifically illegitimate or unjustified.