Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Differentiating Probability Claims with Labels, Not.

Are you saying you recommend “agnostic atheist” for someone who thinks God’s existence is likely but does not believe that God exists? How would you differentiate that person from someone like Hermes, who believes no gods exist but does not claim knowledge?
I personally wouldn’t distinguish the difference with labels. You would need to ask them personally about what they believe. We could make a distinction between people who claim “I believe the existence of X is less than 1%,” “I believe the existence of X is between 1 and 5%,” and “I believe the existence of X is between 5 and 10%,” and so on until we cover every probability. But alas, we can make more distinctions between someone that states “I believe the existence of X is between 5% and 7%” and the person who states “I believe the existence of X is between 8% and 10%.” We could assign a separate label to each position, but the effort would be fruitless. I’ll leave it to the individual to state whether they believe X exists is likely or unlikely.

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