A distinction
Margaret Atwood won the Hitchens prize. The Atlantic shares her speech, in which she pointed out an important distinction:
I expect Hitch would join me in a distinction I have been making lately: that between belief and truth. It’s a comment on our special times that I’d even feel I have to make this distinction. A belief cannot be either proved or disproved. If you wish to believe that invisible flower spirits are causing your string beans to grow, there is no point in my trying to dissuade you, because these entities are invisible and immaterial. Something proposed as a truth can, however, be put to the test. In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic.
There’s also a distinction between feeling or “feeling like” and truth. Claims to “feel like” X also can’t be proved or disproved, and they also don’t mean very much.
I feel it to be true that I’m a transgiraffe, but only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
OK. OK. I can find my own way out. Mutter. Mutter.
I think it’s safe to say that Margaret Atwood does get it. That she’s been careful about a certain belief being questioned doesn’t mean that she doesn’t question it, and she’s putting her head above the parapet a bit here.
She confuses me. I wonder which sequencially hermaphroditic fish species she’ll tell us to go read about next.
Marinerachel? Are you saying she is ignoring her own wise word here by supporting a certain counterfactual belief system? Disappointing.
Back in my movement skeptic days the distinction being made was usually between belief and knowledge. Belief and knowledge (two epistemological categories) are both about the truth (an ontological category), but whereas beliefs can be wrong there is no such thing as wrong knowledge (if it turns out to be wrong, it was never actually knowledge in the first place, just a mistaken belief). Even back then I always thought the more important distinction was between justified and unjustified beliefs. As I understand the word, to “believe” a proposition X simply means considering X to be most likely true. There is nothing in the definition of “belief” that says a belief can’t be justified, or rational, or evidence-based (belief ≠ faith).
To be really nit-picky nothing outside pure mathematics or formal logic can be “proved or disproved” (proof ≠ evidence). A belief can, however, be unsupported by (or even contrary to) evidence and arguments, and although this far too rarely causes people to abandon their beliefs (at least when vested interests are involved), it’s not as if it never happens either. E.g. until very recently I used to believe that Voltaire said “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, but What a Maroon corrected me, and I have abandoned the belief.
It’s a big mistake to concede that all “beliefs” are equally faith-based, because then all the woo-peddlers have to do is point out that we can’t technically “know” anything** about external reality (since there is no way to disprove solipsism), and then all bets are off. Whatever the “truth” may be we only have access to our own beliefs, and if all beliefs are created equal, we’re lost.
* I was repeatedly told things like “I don’t believe in evolution, I accept the science of evolution” etc. So you don’t consider it most likely true then?
** And they often do in my experience. When they fail to make a convincing case that their beliefs are true, the next strategy is usually denying that there is such a thing as objective truth, or, if there is, that we can know anything about it, so at least they can tell themselves that “my woo beliefs are neither more nor less true/justified than anything else”.
I would have gone with the distinction between objective reality and delusion, rather than truth and belief, Truth is mostly about the expression or description of objective reality (but not objective reality itself), while delusion is when we get objective reality wrong, whether in thought or expression. Beliefs can work both ways, we can believe truths, falsehoods, all kinds of things. It’s a well written article though, and I generally agree with her.
Bjarte:
And to be extra ultra nitpicky, not even maths and formal logic. Both rest ultimately on axioms, which in turn rest on language and somewhat arbitrary word meanings.
I may be wrong, but Euclid I recall (long time since I studied it) rested his beautiful geometry on the unprovable proposition that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. (Notionally, two parallel straight lines meet at plus and minus infinity. Two non-parallel straight lines converge on one point only and meet to cross there.)
All number theory rests on the proposition that a = a, which can be true instantaneously, but not necessarily over time, as that inevitably involves changes to a. That proposition a = a in turn is a specific case of formal logic’s proposition that A = A.
Languages, one of which is mathematics, are prisons of the mind. The lives of animals are generally unencumbered by them; with both advantages and disadvantages.
When does the bar open?
Brian M:
Margaret Atwood claims there is no clear boundary between male and female/that they’re social constructions, then tells women to go read about barramundi on Twitter. She also got in trouble with TRAs for sharing an article that argued in favour of using the word woman instead of vague “trans-inclusive” terms. She plays both sides and I don’t get it. She’s clearly wise.
Bjarte @ 5
But colloquially, at least in the US (I don’t know if it’s the case in Canada too), “belief” is a synonym for faith.
It’s true though about Atwood’s mixing of categories, but, you know, novelists get to take liberties, etc.
Maybe it was one side then the other. Perhaps her chastisement at the hands of TRAs was her “peak trans” or it has caused her to move her closer to TERFdom if not jump to it completely? That’s assuming she took the hint and escaped the burning building that is trans “thought,” rather than settling in for the duration. Has she voiced any further gender-ideological advocacy since running afoul of the purity police? I haven’t been paying attention. We can hope that she has at least given up on barramundi, given that she’s probably been told by numerous women that humans aren’t fish.
Transactivists’ use of “fish” as a derogatory term for (actual) women notwithstanding.
If you’re an evolutionary biologist, “fish” is not a real category.
“Belief” is a funny word. If I think, or know, that something is untrue, I don’t know how I can “believe” it. I don’t know how anyone could force themselves to “believe” something without thinking or knowing that it is true. I can’t “believe” as an act of will. “Belief” is involuntary. “Choosing” to “believe” something is incoherent.
Maddog, for me “believe” means “to hold a proposition to be true” whereas “knowledge” is “justified true belief”.
So, I know the earth is round and not flat, because that’s both justified and true. I believe “there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe”, but even if it turns out to be true, until it’s actually demonstrated I can’t say I know it. I might believe “in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”, as the saying goes, but that’s faith, which I consider means “to believe something without evidence”.
I don’t think a person can choose to believe, either. You just do, or you don’t.
This I believe. [Not the Nicene Creed part, the other part.]
People do choose to believe things, though; at least, they choose to accept something as true and ignore any evidence to the contrary because it benefits them in some way. People compartmentalize all the time.
Peter N that’s interesting. Do you really believe “there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe”? As opposed to, say, believing it’s likely there is, or thinking there’s good reason to think there is?
That’s my epistemic take on it at least. More hedged than belief.
Mind you, “belief” is somewhat ambiguous. It can be impassioned and affirmative, or it can be tentative and limited.
I do believe there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, based on the Principle of Mediocrity. Yay! Mediocrity! That is: the assumption that it is much more likely that our sun, Earth, etc. are not unique or rare, but rather commonplace. If there are 70 billion trillion stars in the universe, and most of them have planets, then there must surely be millions of trillions of earth-ish planets. And when you consider that life on Earth seems to have emerged just about as early as it possibly could have done (when Earth’s environment was just starting to settle down into a potentially life-sustaining form), I have to think that the emergence of life here must have been just about inevitable, and that would also be the case on planets orbiting other stars.
Now intelligent life is another matter — on Earth it took billions of years of evolution to produce just one lineage that was capable of sophisticated language, tool use, and the all-important capacity to make shit up in our heads, and the survival of that lineage was by no means certain. So I would say that intelligent life must be quite rare — but if that rare thing gets 70 billion trillion potential rolls of the dice… Yeah, I believe it must be happening all the time.
Now, have we already encountered these beings? I highly doubt it. Will we ever? Again, I think that’s extremely unlikely — because of the stupendous distances involved. Will we be able to communicate or simply be able to detect them? Who knows?!
Omar:
“Notionally, two parallel straight lines meet at plus and minus infinity.”
Actually, that’s not quite right. In Euclidean geometry, two lines that are parallel to each other are considered to share one ideal point, not two, and all other lines parallel to those two lines pass through the same ideal point. I believe (there’s that word again) that this abstraction was not made by Euclid, but rather by much later mathematicians. In hyperbolic non-Euclidean geometry, a line passes through two distinct ideal points instead of one due to the different behavior of parallel lines in that geometry.
The use of the terms plus infinity and minus infinity are mathematically meaningful when you use the number line to visualize the real numbers, but that is a different abstraction following a different set of rules from ideal points in geometry.
Peter N., you’ve expressed my thoughts on the subject exactly. That is close to what I tell my students when they ask about the possibility of life on other planets. It seems difficult for them to understand the principle of mediocrity, though.