I think there is another element to consider here, which is that most Atheists would consider their beliefs to be weakly held--if they witnessed Jesus descend from heaven they would change their minds. Their propositional attitude is malleable based on evidence, as opposed to a faith-based propositional attitude, which is resistant to evidence by definition.
To put it another way, some Atheists may bristle at having their views be called a “belief” simply because the word may carry a connotation of inflexibility in the context of religion.
Good point. But this is a quantitative point about the *intensity* of the belief (or lack thereof), whereas I was making a qualitative point about what kind of cognitive operation is involved in assenting to theism or atheism (both beliefs). Nicely put, though.
I think the framework for this discussion is a little misleading. If the question is raised in the context of the discipline of philosophy, then it's fine to frame an answer in terms of propositional attitudes. But that means that belief in God or in there being no God is in the same class as belief (or lack of belief) that there are aphids on my garden roses. Pragmatically, we ask whether someone "believes God exists in the universe" with a different type of import, connected to long term intellectual and social behavior, self-conception, and so forth. Simply analyzing that either position will conform to a propositional attitude tells us very little about what we want to know when we ask the question.
I like Mr. Rosenberg's comment about the "weak" nature of an atheist's commitment. I think it points to a fundamental distinction within "propositional attitudes." The religious person accepts the proposition of God's existence "on faith": it is not subject to discomfirmation. The atheist accepts the proposition of God's non-existence on the contingent basis of a lack of determinative evidence, which the occurence of determinative evidence will reverse. The "attitudes" behind the propositional attitudes are entirely different. (There could be a tl;dr riff here about people who have lost their faith but are not atheists, and also about agnostics, but there won't be.)
But there is also a different type of distinction. Because the term "atheism" takes the "-ism" form, it is cast in terms of an affirmative assertion, and for some atheists it can be (e.g., Madeleine Murray). But if we instead used the term "religionless" (or the phrase, "not religious") I think it would come closer to describing the experience of those who do not hold a belief in God.
Here's a thought experiment: An indigenous people is discovered that lacks any religion or belief in God. Have one member (somehow!) listen with understanding to a description of God and then ask the propositional question: Does God exist in the universe? When they answer, "No" concerning a concept that is entirely new to them, is that in any sense "atheism?" If it is, then it seems to me there is nothing actually interesting about the term or its use. But the term is, in fact, one filled with interest and controversy. That social context is lost in the philosophical frame of "propositional attitude," and I think that's why although the frame may produce an answer, it is one that does not satisfy the practical issue the question is driving at.
Since you're drawing on philosophy, sort of, it's fair to point out that one still (or again) influential school of philosophers, known as logical positivism or logical empiricism, didn't consider religious claims false, but rather considered them to be meaningless, in the sense that (a) they are not purely logical or mathematical claims; (b) no empirical or observational evidence can be adduced to support or refute such claims. This bypasses any need to worry about propositional attitudes, including belief, in this context.
I am a long-time atheist. IMHO, any ideas that can't be proven or disproven are beliefs. No one can prove that a God exists, just no one can prove that no God exists. Both are belief systems.
BTW, from a technical perspective, the earth is not round; it is an oblate spheroid. For most purposes, round works just fine - I am only being pedantic.
I found this part of the essay deeply flawed in an "alternative facts" era:
"For example, the near-canonical understanding of knowledge going all the way back to Plato is justified, true belief. One implication is that for you to be said to know something, you have to believe it. In other words, belief is a necessary condition of knowledge. Someone can’t know something without believing it. It’s incoherent to say, ‘He knew that 1 + 1 = 2, but he didn’t believe it’. It’s impossible to agree with ‘1 + 1 = 2’ without at the same time believing it.
This implies belief is a necessary ingredient of every single instance of anyone knowing anything."
Knowing and believing absolutely have to be separate and different functions in the critical thinking process. It is a fundamental error that our society is making to conflate the two... I believe, therefore I know. It is far too "easy" and many are too "susceptible" to believing without having a factual basis on which to know.
I think the point is technical, not practical, Mr. Williams, and the way the formula works may be the opposite of how you're reading it. It is not: "I believe, therefore I know." It is, "If you don't believe it you can't be said to know it." Belief is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for knowledge (which is, again, defined as *true* belief).
As for the separability of knowing and believing in critical thinking, it is asymmetric: you can believe without knowing (because you have not seen sufficient evidence to know, or because you believe falsely), but you can't know something without believing that what you know is true--it's a logical contradiction, just as the 1+1=2 example indicates. If someone were to say, "I know Biden won in 2020 but I don't believe it is true," we'd have to ask for an explanation, because the statement makes no sense logically--it would probably unpack as, "I know *all the evidence shows* Biden won in 2020, but I don't believe that the evidence is complete and feel sure other evidence will show it is untrue."
But you may be right that if some elements of society know how philosophy links knowledge and belief, they might conclude that philosophy has blessed their deep faith in their gut instincts. (I'm not sure how deeply that crowd's immersion in philosophy goes.)
Robert, belief is not the first condition nor is it necessary for knowing. You are just furthering the conflation and attempts to deceive the gullible. Facts don't need observers to be facts. Facts don't need "believers" to be facts. If humanity ceases, the universe will continue on in facts without the concept of our belief.
The way Bernie has configured his discussion, Michael, is around technical issues in philosophy, and you are challenging these ideas on non-technical grounds. The frameworks are different and not really mutually intelligible. "Facts don't need observers to be facts," makes good sense, but it is not true if "fact" is defined in terms of the correspondence between a proposition about the world and the world as it is. If humanity ceases, so do propositions and thus so do facts. I think you are using "fact" to refer to "the way the world is," not to true propositions about the world.
I think when you say that belief is not necessary for knowing you mean that the truth of propositions is independent of whether we believe them to be true. I agree with you in a general sense, and I'd imagine Bernie would too. But to challenge Bernie's point you need to show that the sentence "I know X to be true but I do not believe it to be true" makes sense. It doesn't (unless it is reinterpreted to express a difference sentence).
I wrote in an earlier comment that I felt Bernie had framed this discussion in a form that provides an answer to a question about atheism, but that it is an answer that doesn't address the actual intent of the question, which is freighted with social and cultural import. I think your comments reflect that problem--your point of view is socially engaged with these questions, and Bernie chose a point of view that is not. (For example, I think it would be valid, but irrelevant, to comment on Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" by noting that all facts are relative to human conceptual limitations . . . unless, I suppose, you meant by that to say something about Mr. Trump's unusual conceptual limitations.)
I think we can make a distinction between *facts* and *truth*, such that a fact is roughly what there is and a truth is a correspondence between a representation and reality.
On this reading, which I think is close enough to the standard philosophical view, a fact can exist independently of minds, but truth cannot. That's because, just for example, the fact of a tree's existence can be there whether or not a mind of any sort exists, whereas truth seems to require that a specific way of capturing the tree's existence (through an English-language sentence, say) accurately reflects the reality that the tree exists. But there are no representations apart from minds. So there is no truth without them, either.
That's just one account, though. Others take a different view.
Good point. I don't personally think we do. But society seems to think so, I guess, so we get a term like "truth." And when we analyze what people mean when they say things like "that's true," they tend to mean something like, "that sentence corresponds to reality." Fundamentally, truth and fact aren't so different. But if we wanted to be as precise as possible (which we often don't, and that's fine), I would say that a fact is just reality, and a truth is when a representation accurately captures reality.
So, it's a fact that the earth is round. And the sentence "the earth is round" is true.
But, you're right to point out that this is just the difference between a fact on its own and a fact when it is perceived.
I'd be fine with either formulation, Berny (sorry I somehow misspelled your name earlier!). I see both (facts/truth) as constructions from a human perspective (what is, is, but how it is seems to me instrinsically perspectival), but that's another argument (and one I'd lose because I'm not a pro).
You wrote: "But to challenge Bernie's point you need to show that the sentence "I know X to be true but I do not believe it to be true" makes sense." This happens all the time to people who place more value in the experience of believing than in the experience of knowing. It has become a choice, supported by a culture that affirms that believing something, despite the facts, is better.
I think we've reached the bottom of the rabbit hole, Michael, and are just circling the rabbit's den. I'd respond to your comment by saying that what happens all the time is not that people say, "I know X is true but I don't believe it is true," but that they say something that means, "I know the evidence indicates X is true but I don't believe it is true because I don't trust the evidence." But I've already said that so I won't say it again (despite having just done so!).
Instead, I'll switch sides. Berny was using philosophical tools, but considering instead the literature on brain, mind, and cognitive behavior, it is actually very common for people to maintain simultaneous contradictory commitments. For example, grief in mourning may combine parallel knowledge of death with denial, and we may say, with conviction, "I know X is dead but I just don't believe it!" which reports a complex cognitive state. We sometimes practice deep self-deception when encountering cognitive dissonance in many contexts, and committed political allegiance can lay that groundwork. It's not the job of the type of philosophy Berny was doing to attend to those sorts of psychological tensions, but I think that may be what you're appealing to.
I'm sorry, but your whole position is a straw man. Few would dispute that most humans have beliefs, so of course theists and atheists both do. The difference is what they believe in. Theists believe that gods actually exist, and atheists do not. As an atheist, I believe that 2 + 2 = 4, but that does not make me a theist.
I think this is a good analysis of how belief can be construed within atheism if we're considering it in the usual Protestant frame that everyone is familiar with. As you are aware, however, a few of my recent essays have critiqued our ideas about "belief" from a different angle. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about the following:
1. Propositions, being a particular kind of linguistic or language-adjacent representation, aren't necessary in a metaphysical sense. If it's raining out, I don't have to say "Hey -- it's raining!" If I do make such a statement, it can be evaluated against reality (according to the propositional logic you describe in your essay), but there's no supernatural requirement that any statement be made at all. And the rain will continue or stop in any case. We are told, culturally, that we have to take a position on the existence of God. Either God exists or God doesn't, and the whole matter is freighted with the heaviest metaphysical and existential obligations. The proposition of God's existence suddenly becomes very different than other propositions. But it doesn't have to be this way. One could contend that "God" is a word for a concept, and that concept may or may not be useful to what one person, a human at some point in history, needs to represent about the world for occasions practical or spiritual or anything in between. If a person decides that this concept is *not* useful or helpful or auspicious, he's not really an atheist, because he is not denying the existence of "God" or disbelieving in God, but is simply refusing the obligation to make specific representations founded on a historically contingent concept expressed by certain words. And this refusal can be well-founded because representational media necessarily include and exclude, and sometimes what matters is what is excluded from an inherited representational convention. I like to call this the "radical agnostic" position. I should note that scientists often make this same mistake about their work when gaps in their conceptual frameworks emerge.
2. I've made the point elsewhere that we might distinguish between "knowledge" and "belief" in terms of the motivations of the knower or believer. In this telling, "knowledge" is a neutral representation of reality as a general category (let's leave aside everything that's involved in the construction of knowledge as a cognitive process), while "belief" is a variety of knowledge that adds a set of values to a representation that is otherwise highly contingent. In this distinction, "belief" has a second order of contingency as a mode of knowledge because rather than observing facts, it expresses preferences, aspirations, personality in the face of uncertainty. In the theist/atheist context: often the interest in "the existence of God" as a religious matter has more to do with identity than a serious theological or metaphysical meditation, especially in a Christian context. A Christian "believes" in God because he identifies as a Christian and ostensibly values the things that Christians value. Atheists frequently reject a belief in God because they find the Christian culture that is presented to them to be alien, narrow-minded, hateful, and hypocritical; the implausibility of Christian myth becomes just a satisfying coda.
I think there is another element to consider here, which is that most Atheists would consider their beliefs to be weakly held--if they witnessed Jesus descend from heaven they would change their minds. Their propositional attitude is malleable based on evidence, as opposed to a faith-based propositional attitude, which is resistant to evidence by definition.
To put it another way, some Atheists may bristle at having their views be called a “belief” simply because the word may carry a connotation of inflexibility in the context of religion.
Good point. But this is a quantitative point about the *intensity* of the belief (or lack thereof), whereas I was making a qualitative point about what kind of cognitive operation is involved in assenting to theism or atheism (both beliefs). Nicely put, though.
I think the framework for this discussion is a little misleading. If the question is raised in the context of the discipline of philosophy, then it's fine to frame an answer in terms of propositional attitudes. But that means that belief in God or in there being no God is in the same class as belief (or lack of belief) that there are aphids on my garden roses. Pragmatically, we ask whether someone "believes God exists in the universe" with a different type of import, connected to long term intellectual and social behavior, self-conception, and so forth. Simply analyzing that either position will conform to a propositional attitude tells us very little about what we want to know when we ask the question.
I like Mr. Rosenberg's comment about the "weak" nature of an atheist's commitment. I think it points to a fundamental distinction within "propositional attitudes." The religious person accepts the proposition of God's existence "on faith": it is not subject to discomfirmation. The atheist accepts the proposition of God's non-existence on the contingent basis of a lack of determinative evidence, which the occurence of determinative evidence will reverse. The "attitudes" behind the propositional attitudes are entirely different. (There could be a tl;dr riff here about people who have lost their faith but are not atheists, and also about agnostics, but there won't be.)
But there is also a different type of distinction. Because the term "atheism" takes the "-ism" form, it is cast in terms of an affirmative assertion, and for some atheists it can be (e.g., Madeleine Murray). But if we instead used the term "religionless" (or the phrase, "not religious") I think it would come closer to describing the experience of those who do not hold a belief in God.
Here's a thought experiment: An indigenous people is discovered that lacks any religion or belief in God. Have one member (somehow!) listen with understanding to a description of God and then ask the propositional question: Does God exist in the universe? When they answer, "No" concerning a concept that is entirely new to them, is that in any sense "atheism?" If it is, then it seems to me there is nothing actually interesting about the term or its use. But the term is, in fact, one filled with interest and controversy. That social context is lost in the philosophical frame of "propositional attitude," and I think that's why although the frame may produce an answer, it is one that does not satisfy the practical issue the question is driving at.
Since you're drawing on philosophy, sort of, it's fair to point out that one still (or again) influential school of philosophers, known as logical positivism or logical empiricism, didn't consider religious claims false, but rather considered them to be meaningless, in the sense that (a) they are not purely logical or mathematical claims; (b) no empirical or observational evidence can be adduced to support or refute such claims. This bypasses any need to worry about propositional attitudes, including belief, in this context.
I am a long-time atheist. IMHO, any ideas that can't be proven or disproven are beliefs. No one can prove that a God exists, just no one can prove that no God exists. Both are belief systems.
BTW, from a technical perspective, the earth is not round; it is an oblate spheroid. For most purposes, round works just fine - I am only being pedantic.
An atheist isn't for want of evidence, there's no void awaiting proof of the non existence or existence of any brand of deity.
I found this part of the essay deeply flawed in an "alternative facts" era:
"For example, the near-canonical understanding of knowledge going all the way back to Plato is justified, true belief. One implication is that for you to be said to know something, you have to believe it. In other words, belief is a necessary condition of knowledge. Someone can’t know something without believing it. It’s incoherent to say, ‘He knew that 1 + 1 = 2, but he didn’t believe it’. It’s impossible to agree with ‘1 + 1 = 2’ without at the same time believing it.
This implies belief is a necessary ingredient of every single instance of anyone knowing anything."
Knowing and believing absolutely have to be separate and different functions in the critical thinking process. It is a fundamental error that our society is making to conflate the two... I believe, therefore I know. It is far too "easy" and many are too "susceptible" to believing without having a factual basis on which to know.
I think the point is technical, not practical, Mr. Williams, and the way the formula works may be the opposite of how you're reading it. It is not: "I believe, therefore I know." It is, "If you don't believe it you can't be said to know it." Belief is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for knowledge (which is, again, defined as *true* belief).
As for the separability of knowing and believing in critical thinking, it is asymmetric: you can believe without knowing (because you have not seen sufficient evidence to know, or because you believe falsely), but you can't know something without believing that what you know is true--it's a logical contradiction, just as the 1+1=2 example indicates. If someone were to say, "I know Biden won in 2020 but I don't believe it is true," we'd have to ask for an explanation, because the statement makes no sense logically--it would probably unpack as, "I know *all the evidence shows* Biden won in 2020, but I don't believe that the evidence is complete and feel sure other evidence will show it is untrue."
But you may be right that if some elements of society know how philosophy links knowledge and belief, they might conclude that philosophy has blessed their deep faith in their gut instincts. (I'm not sure how deeply that crowd's immersion in philosophy goes.)
Robert, belief is not the first condition nor is it necessary for knowing. You are just furthering the conflation and attempts to deceive the gullible. Facts don't need observers to be facts. Facts don't need "believers" to be facts. If humanity ceases, the universe will continue on in facts without the concept of our belief.
The way Bernie has configured his discussion, Michael, is around technical issues in philosophy, and you are challenging these ideas on non-technical grounds. The frameworks are different and not really mutually intelligible. "Facts don't need observers to be facts," makes good sense, but it is not true if "fact" is defined in terms of the correspondence between a proposition about the world and the world as it is. If humanity ceases, so do propositions and thus so do facts. I think you are using "fact" to refer to "the way the world is," not to true propositions about the world.
I think when you say that belief is not necessary for knowing you mean that the truth of propositions is independent of whether we believe them to be true. I agree with you in a general sense, and I'd imagine Bernie would too. But to challenge Bernie's point you need to show that the sentence "I know X to be true but I do not believe it to be true" makes sense. It doesn't (unless it is reinterpreted to express a difference sentence).
I wrote in an earlier comment that I felt Bernie had framed this discussion in a form that provides an answer to a question about atheism, but that it is an answer that doesn't address the actual intent of the question, which is freighted with social and cultural import. I think your comments reflect that problem--your point of view is socially engaged with these questions, and Bernie chose a point of view that is not. (For example, I think it would be valid, but irrelevant, to comment on Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" by noting that all facts are relative to human conceptual limitations . . . unless, I suppose, you meant by that to say something about Mr. Trump's unusual conceptual limitations.)
I think we can make a distinction between *facts* and *truth*, such that a fact is roughly what there is and a truth is a correspondence between a representation and reality.
On this reading, which I think is close enough to the standard philosophical view, a fact can exist independently of minds, but truth cannot. That's because, just for example, the fact of a tree's existence can be there whether or not a mind of any sort exists, whereas truth seems to require that a specific way of capturing the tree's existence (through an English-language sentence, say) accurately reflects the reality that the tree exists. But there are no representations apart from minds. So there is no truth without them, either.
That's just one account, though. Others take a different view.
Why do we need a different word for a fact that is observed, versus a fact that is not observed?
Good point. I don't personally think we do. But society seems to think so, I guess, so we get a term like "truth." And when we analyze what people mean when they say things like "that's true," they tend to mean something like, "that sentence corresponds to reality." Fundamentally, truth and fact aren't so different. But if we wanted to be as precise as possible (which we often don't, and that's fine), I would say that a fact is just reality, and a truth is when a representation accurately captures reality.
So, it's a fact that the earth is round. And the sentence "the earth is round" is true.
But, you're right to point out that this is just the difference between a fact on its own and a fact when it is perceived.
I'd be fine with either formulation, Berny (sorry I somehow misspelled your name earlier!). I see both (facts/truth) as constructions from a human perspective (what is, is, but how it is seems to me instrinsically perspectival), but that's another argument (and one I'd lose because I'm not a pro).
You wrote: "But to challenge Bernie's point you need to show that the sentence "I know X to be true but I do not believe it to be true" makes sense." This happens all the time to people who place more value in the experience of believing than in the experience of knowing. It has become a choice, supported by a culture that affirms that believing something, despite the facts, is better.
I think we've reached the bottom of the rabbit hole, Michael, and are just circling the rabbit's den. I'd respond to your comment by saying that what happens all the time is not that people say, "I know X is true but I don't believe it is true," but that they say something that means, "I know the evidence indicates X is true but I don't believe it is true because I don't trust the evidence." But I've already said that so I won't say it again (despite having just done so!).
Instead, I'll switch sides. Berny was using philosophical tools, but considering instead the literature on brain, mind, and cognitive behavior, it is actually very common for people to maintain simultaneous contradictory commitments. For example, grief in mourning may combine parallel knowledge of death with denial, and we may say, with conviction, "I know X is dead but I just don't believe it!" which reports a complex cognitive state. We sometimes practice deep self-deception when encountering cognitive dissonance in many contexts, and committed political allegiance can lay that groundwork. It's not the job of the type of philosophy Berny was doing to attend to those sorts of psychological tensions, but I think that may be what you're appealing to.
I'm sorry, but your whole position is a straw man. Few would dispute that most humans have beliefs, so of course theists and atheists both do. The difference is what they believe in. Theists believe that gods actually exist, and atheists do not. As an atheist, I believe that 2 + 2 = 4, but that does not make me a theist.
I think this is a good analysis of how belief can be construed within atheism if we're considering it in the usual Protestant frame that everyone is familiar with. As you are aware, however, a few of my recent essays have critiqued our ideas about "belief" from a different angle. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about the following:
1. Propositions, being a particular kind of linguistic or language-adjacent representation, aren't necessary in a metaphysical sense. If it's raining out, I don't have to say "Hey -- it's raining!" If I do make such a statement, it can be evaluated against reality (according to the propositional logic you describe in your essay), but there's no supernatural requirement that any statement be made at all. And the rain will continue or stop in any case. We are told, culturally, that we have to take a position on the existence of God. Either God exists or God doesn't, and the whole matter is freighted with the heaviest metaphysical and existential obligations. The proposition of God's existence suddenly becomes very different than other propositions. But it doesn't have to be this way. One could contend that "God" is a word for a concept, and that concept may or may not be useful to what one person, a human at some point in history, needs to represent about the world for occasions practical or spiritual or anything in between. If a person decides that this concept is *not* useful or helpful or auspicious, he's not really an atheist, because he is not denying the existence of "God" or disbelieving in God, but is simply refusing the obligation to make specific representations founded on a historically contingent concept expressed by certain words. And this refusal can be well-founded because representational media necessarily include and exclude, and sometimes what matters is what is excluded from an inherited representational convention. I like to call this the "radical agnostic" position. I should note that scientists often make this same mistake about their work when gaps in their conceptual frameworks emerge.
2. I've made the point elsewhere that we might distinguish between "knowledge" and "belief" in terms of the motivations of the knower or believer. In this telling, "knowledge" is a neutral representation of reality as a general category (let's leave aside everything that's involved in the construction of knowledge as a cognitive process), while "belief" is a variety of knowledge that adds a set of values to a representation that is otherwise highly contingent. In this distinction, "belief" has a second order of contingency as a mode of knowledge because rather than observing facts, it expresses preferences, aspirations, personality in the face of uncertainty. In the theist/atheist context: often the interest in "the existence of God" as a religious matter has more to do with identity than a serious theological or metaphysical meditation, especially in a Christian context. A Christian "believes" in God because he identifies as a Christian and ostensibly values the things that Christians value. Atheists frequently reject a belief in God because they find the Christian culture that is presented to them to be alien, narrow-minded, hateful, and hypocritical; the implausibility of Christian myth becomes just a satisfying coda.