Anna, this blog is too advanced for you and you should not be commenting on it. Go read The Simple Truth until you understand the relation between a map and the territory.
[EDIT: I deleted an additional comment from Anna in this thread.]
Oh great, now I'm going to think "There's no dragon in my garage" every time I open my garage door for the next week...
I enjoyed The Simple Truth, thanks for linking it.
[["If the pebbles didn't do anything," says Autrey, "our ISO 9000 process efficiency auditor would eliminate the procedure from our daily work."]]
This "ISO 9000" hypothesis has not been supported by direct observation, unfortunately...
From the post:
While I disagree with Dennett on some details and complications, I still think that Dennett's notion of belief in belief is the key insight necessary to understand the dragon-claimant. But we need a wider concept of belief, not limited to verbal sentences.
If you've read Dennett on beliefs, you'll appreciate that this "wider concept" based on behavior and predictability is really at the heart of things.
I think it is very difficult to attribute a belief in dragons to this "dragon-believer". Only a small subset of his acti...
How does this compare with Popper's theory? In the instance above, it's clear that belief in belief doesn't make sense. But things may not be as clear. Won't an event with low probability look like the invisible dragon before it happens?
Anna, If you're talking about real dragons, the theory that made the most intuitive sense to me (I think I read it in an E.O. Wilson writing?) is that dragons are an amalgamation of things we've been naturally selected to biologically fear: snakes and birds of prey (I think rats may have also been part of the list). Dragons don't incorporate an element of them that looks like a handgun or a piping hot electric stove, probably because they're too new as threats for us to be naturally selected to fear things with those properties.
Eliezer, Very interesting post. I'll try to respond when I've had time to read it more closely and to digest it.
This post helps me understand some of the most infuriating phrases I ever hear (which the title immediately reminded me of): "it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe something", "everyone has to believe in something", "faith is a virtue", &c. It makes sense that if a person's second-order belief is stronger than their first-order belief, they would say things like that.
I like Eliezer's essay on belief very much. I've been thinking about the role of belief in religion. (For the sake of full disclosure, my background is Calvinist.) I wonder why Christians say, "We believe in one God," as if that were a particularly strong assertion. Wouldn't it be stronger to say, "We know one God?" What is the difference between belief and knowledge? It seems to me that beliefs are usually based on no data. Most people who believe in a god do so in precisely the same way that they might believe in a dragon in the garag...
I've got a double garage... what if the dragon sneaks out one door while I'm coming in through the other door, then comes in behind me through the second door while I look for it outside the first door?? Dragons everywhere now!!
The parable was original with Antony Flew whose Theology and Falsification can be found here http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/flew_falsification.html
The parable your refer to by Sagan I think should be attributed to Antony Flew whose Theology and Falsification is available online. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/flew_falsification.html
Trying to work out the biases of the new antispam filter. Frequency of comments from same individual in same thread ?
Anna: Whether you call it science fiction, heuristics, overcoming bias, history, a belief is a belief. You can't prove belief as it's self-subjective. --That only makes for more of a reason it should only be self affecting, too many people try to influance the actions of others bases on their dragons
You can't tell someone what they feel is wrong. --Yes I can. "There's a dragon in my bathroom"... (careful examination of the bathroom)... "No, there isn't, you're wrong."
Each individual has there equation when it comes to understanding the...
If there exists a conventional syntax for quoting another comment, I think a commenter should use that convention rather than invent his own syntax, don't you?
There is a distinction between Belief and Knowledge. We can believe things that are untru and disbelieve things that are true.
At least in the case of religious people who are actually convinced God exists, I think the difference between belief and knowledge is thus: Belief is when you think something is true but it's controversial. Knowledge is when you think someting is true and think everyone would agree with you.
I knew as soon as I read the first paragraph that the comments would start discussing religion, haha...
John Rozendaal, I never really thought about the "We know"/"We believe" distinction before. Seems to me like the church conditions people to think of their ideals as a belief, so that the thought of 'knowledge' wont creep into their minds and make them think. Thinking is the church's worst enemy.
I believe the difference between belief and knowledge stems from experience. Knowledge is accepted as proven data, whether from the experience of others or through your own direct experience. Beliefs are accepted as something proven to varying levels of personal satisfaction inferred directly from experience, dependent upon the person and the belief.
This makes the two rather interdependent in my view, for how can one know without believing that his knowledge is truth and how can one believe without knowing something to believe in?
In the case of modern religion, people take the belief others express as knowledge and use it as a basis for their own beliefs.
X: There's something that makes beliving and knowledge quite different, and that’s truth which isn’t inside one person head but out there, in reality. I’m sure that if we ask this man if he knows there is a dragon in the garage he will reply affirmatively, no doubt about it, but the truth is that there is no dragon and he just think he knows is in there. But the man doesn’t know anything, he believe a lie and he is making excuses to protect the lie, and one of those excuses is that he knows is in there, is not a belief.
I think this is one of humanity great...
"There's something that makes beliving and knowledge quite different, and that’s truth which isn’t inside one person head but out there, in reality."
Ehm, let me ask you this: Are you 100% sure that the sun will come up tomorrow?
All evidence points that way, yes. We have a fair idea of what is going on yes. But that's where the ball stops - we will never know with 100% certainity.
When we stop acknowledging that the science of tomorrow may produce evidence that will turn our whole world-view upside down, is when Science becomes Religion.
I'm not say...
Does the idea that it is a good thing to subject our beliefs (and even our belief in belief) to logical and analytical scrutiny count as belief in itself or is it so justifiable as to count as knowledge? If so, what is the justification?
I've always thought that the idea of "believing in" things was very curious. This is a very thought-provoking article. Every time I engage a debate about this subject (the relevance or usefulness of beliefs) someone is sure to say something about beliefs existing for the benefit of the believer. My feeling is that with most beliefs and with most believers, there is an internal acknowledgement of the falsifiablity of their belief which is outweighed by the perception that some benefit is derived from the belief. What I interpret from this is that ...
The real question is not "is there a dragon?", but "why is it having sex with my car?"
Chelo: "I don't think we ever posess true knowledge."
I KNOW I went to Tesco's this morning. Am I wrong? Discuss!
Main post "The claimant must have an accurate model of the situation somewhere in his mind, because he can anticipate, in advance, exactly which experimental results he'll need to excuse."
I know this is a bit of a side issue, but how do you justify this claim from the example given? You don't need such a model to give the answers he gives. Surely you once engaged in late-night undergraduate pseudo-intellectual discussions...
"Those who find this confusing may find it helpful to study mathematical logic, which trains one to make very sharp distinctions between the proposition P, a proof of P, and a proof that P is provable"
This is a bit of a side question, but wouldn't a proof that P is provable be a proof of P? In fact, it sounds like a particularly elegant form of proof.
Blarg... okay this one is tripping me up. There are two parts to this comment. The first part is quasi-math; the other is not. It is very much a brain dump and I have not edited it thoroughly.
EDIT: I think I managed to get it cleared up and responded with a second comment. FYI.
Let B(X) mean belief in X where belief is defined as a predictor of reality so that reality contains event X. Using "There is a dragon in my garage" as X we get:
I think ...
I think I found an example of Belief in Belief that makes sense to me. The other day I met someone and they talked about how World War 3 would take place by next October. They didn't really go into details, and I didn't press for details, but the basic source of reasoning was the Book of Revelations.
If I had pressed for information I am sure all sorts of soft reasons would be produced about the current state of international affairs and blah, blah, blah. If I asked if America would be invaded and if there would be terrible destruction the answer would probably be, "Yes." Yet I am positive that they are doing nothing to prepare for invasion and won't be surprised in the slightest when October rolls around with no World War. World War 3 will still be happening "soon" and "soon" is still 18 months out. There won't be any change in behavior, no worries about the botched prediction, no wondering if perhaps the Book of Revelations isn't the best source material.
This is certainly a Belief in Belief. They really do think they believe it. If I asked them if they believed in an October '11 WW3, they would say, "Yes." But there is no conviction and no action as a result of this belief. So... do they really believe?
I think now I understand.
Would there be any experimental results that he wouldn't need to excuse?
The idea here is that if you really believed you had an invisible dragon in your garage, if somebody proposes a new test (like measuring CO2), your reaction should be "Oh, hey! There's a chance my dragon breathes air, and if so, this would actually show it's there! Of course, if not, I'll need to see it as less likely there's an invisible dragon."
If instead, your instant reaction is always to expect that the CO2 test returns nothing, and to spend your first thoughts (even before the test!) coming up with an excuse why this doesn't disconfirm the dragon... then the part of you that's actually predicting experiences knows there isn't actually a dragon, since it instantly knows that any new test for it will come up null.
I am in occasional contact with religious people, and they don't behave as the "separate magisteria" hypothesis would predict.
For instance, I have heard things along the following lines: "I hope my son gets better." "Well, that's not in your hands, that's in God's hands." All this said quite matter-of-factly.
There is active denial here of something that belongs in the magisterium of physical cause and effect, and active presumption of interference from the supposedly separate magisterium of faith.
Of course most of those people back down from the most radical consequences of these beliefs, they still go see a doctor when the situation warrants - although I understand a significant number do see conflict (or at least interaction) between their faith and medical interventions such as organ transplants or blood transfusions.
This isn't just an epiphenomenal dragon, it's a dragon whose proscriptions and prescriptions impinge on people's material lives.
Think of the relation between the magisteria as a one-way relationship. The supernatural can affect the natural but there is no way to move backwards into the supernatural.
Then the natural can perceive the supernatural but not vice versa. To perceive something is to be affected by it.
The real problem with those who go on about separate magisteria is that they are emitting words that sound impressive to them and that associate vaguely to some sort of even vaguer intuition, but they are not doing anything that would translate into thinking, let alone coherent thinking.
I'm sorry to be brutal about this, but nothing I have ever heard anyone say about "separate magisteria" has ever been conceptually coherent let alone consistent.
There's just one magisterium, it's called reality; and whatever is, is real. It's a silly concept. It cannot be salvaged. Kill it with fire.
It's Gould's separate magisteria. Physical materialism rejects the separate magisteria, and I'm convinced that it is self-consistent in doing so. However, dualists do believe in the separate magisteria and you cannot try to interpret their beliefs in the context of monism -- it just comes out ridiculous.
It is not possible to interpret "separate magisteria" as different kinds of stuff, one "empirical" and one "non-empirical". What they are, rather, is different rules of thinking. For example, prayer can often help and never hurt in individual cases, but have no effect in the aggregate (e.g. when surveys are performed). There's no consistent model that has this attribute, but you can have a rule for thinking about this "separate magisterium" which says, "I'll say that it works and doesn't hurt in individual cases, but when someone tries to survey the aggregate, I won't expect positive experimental results, because it's not in the magisterium of things that get positive experimental results".
Mostly, "separate magisterium" is the classical Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. It can't be defined consistently. Mostly it means "Stop asking me those annoying questions!"
This division, needless to say, exists in the map, not in the territory.
99% of the people I know are religious. This isn't an exaggeration. I can think of 2 or 3 that aren't. (This doesn't count online interactions.)
So... I guess I will just repeat what I said earlier. I've never met anyone who acted like this and wasn't blatantly lying.
You have to realize that "evidence or tests" does not mean the same thing to them as it does to you. They have been conditioned against these words. If the belief is something as vague as, "God will show up during worship." you cannot ask the phrase, "What evidence do you have for this?" This puts them on an immediate defensive because they are used to jerks asking the questions.
This has little to do with quests for belief. It has more to do with the arguments as armies concept. This is an important point. Please don't dismiss it without thinking about it.
The appropriate way to ask the question is to ask for details about how God is showing up and act enthusiastic. "Every time? Wow! How do you know? Does this happen at other worship services? Has it always happened here? Does he show up stronger at some than others? Which ones are the best? Does he say anything to you?"
If this sou...
Prayer is the best example were I have seen Christians start getting frustrated. Not because they are coming up with excuses, but because they don't understand why it isn't working.
I have close friends who are religious, and something that always struck me as both odd and tragic is how they treat their prayers vs. the prayers of others.
When someone else laments that their prayers have not been answered, they reassure them and encourage them to continue praying.
When their own prayers are not answered, they get frustrated and worry that somehow they're failing God and that they don't deserve to have their prayers answered.
For others, they act like no excuse is necessary ("God has a plan"), but for themselves they look for one ("I've been lax in my faith").
This is good evidence for the "belief in belief" theory, but is kind of a bummer to think about (How would you feel if you knew the person reassuring you about your prayers actually had the same frustration as you?).
What's even more of a bummer is how often priests/pastors/etc. get asked "Why does God talk to everyone but me?"
Late to the game, but I'm precisely in this boat.
I don't have faith -- if I did, I'd have no qualms whatsoever about facts and arguments presented by atheists. I wouldn't be nervously claiming that the dragon is invisible. (Some people who think the apocalypse is nigh actually do stockpile canned food. That's faith; they believe in Revelations the same way I believe in physics.) I don't have faith, because I'm actually frightened that some archaeologist will find evidence that there wasn't any Exodus, for instance. And the fear is really that changing my religious beliefs will make me a worse person. Less grateful? Less reverent? Less respectful? That's the basic idea but I'm not sure if those words convey it.
To give a non-religious analogy, take the question of whether men have evolved to be irresponsible fathers. That's an empirical question. But a man can be afraid of believing that he is, indeed, biologically designed to be an irresponsible father, because he fears that such a belief will make him actually treat his children poorly. A rational man, we'd hope, would decide "I'll be a good father, whatever the evolutionary biologists say." But he can only...
If I may extend your hypothetical frightened father metaphor: the man is worried that he is biologically designed to be an irresponsible father, but he is mistaken to worry that he will find out that he is biologically designed to be irresponsible. What he wants is to be responsible, not to think that he is responsible, so the mere fact of whether or not he knows some specific fact is not going to affect that.
Whatever the truth is, the hypothetical frightened father - and the very real frightened theists, such as yourself - already are living under whatever conditions actually hold. If the father is a responsible one, he already wins, whatever his biological predisposition was. If a theist is a good person, that theist already is a good person, whether God is real or not.
That is the first of two essential points. The second is this: if you would rather be good than not, then you are already on the right path, even if you can't see where you are going. Others have walked this way before, and escaped into clear air.
Well, I'm kind of ... done.
It occurred to me that nothing I actually revere could object to me responding to the evidence of my eyes and mind. I can't help doing that. It can't possibly be blameworthy.
I don't feel that I'm losing anything right now. What I always took seriously was a sense of justice or truth. Not just mine, you understand, and maybe not a bunch of platonic forms out in the Eagle Nebula either, but something worth taking seriously. A little white light. That's what I was afraid would go away. But I don't think it will, now, and all the rest is just window dressing. Maybe I can even pay better attention to it without the window dressing.
I couldn't believe I'd ever be happy like this, and maybe I'll see my error soon enough... for so long this was something I promised myself I'd never do, a failure of will. But right now this seems ... better. Actually better. Less phony. Truer to what I actually did revere all along.
Yes! It's that. It's also that I'm starting to think it's not so terrible; that I'm not a traitor to anything worth my loyalty.
Also. For a long, long time I felt that God had given up on me... that any deity would have long ago decided I was no good and put me in the reject file. God's love was an unknown, but it seemed very, very unlikely. A more cheerful thought -- but not, I think, a false one -- is that there is no distance between Justice and the Judge. If I do right, there's no additional question, "But is it good enough for God?" I've done right. If I learn from my mistakes and make restitution, there's no additional "But will God forgive me?" If I've paid my debts, then I've paid my debts.
All I have to do is do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with reality. Suddenly this seems feasible as it never did before.
Just curious, based on your phrasing I would guess that you're Jewish, and possibly orthodox (there is some precedent for that here). I pushed the big unsubscribe button in the sky two month ago myself and have gone through some of the same emotions.
Jewish, yes, orthodox, no (and always wondered about the consistency of that; if you're already choosing not to be strictly observant, what can you then conclude?)
yeah...I should know well enough by now that there are lots of atheists floating around, but it's nice to have extra data points, especially if they're friendly!
I know this is an old comment, but... Having gone through a similar process, I just want to give you a big warm hug.
I also liked this essay very much. Many times it has occurred to me that "There are people who may claim to believe in Y, but deep down they know just as well as everyone else that Y is not true."
I would add that our conversation with the hypothetical dragon claimant is not likely to get to the point where you are discussing bags of flour. Because by that point he will probably be extremely angry with you and one way or another the conversation will be concluded.
As the old joke goes, "Shut up, she explained."
Actually I think it was St...
I also liked this essay very much. Many times it has occurred to me that "There are people who may claim to believe in Y, but deep down they know just as well as everyone else that Y is not true."
I would add that our conversation with the hypothetical dragon claimant is not likely to get to the point where you are discussing bags of flour. Because by that point he will probably be extremely angry with you and one way or another the conversation will be concluded.
As the old joke goes, "Shut up, she explained."
Actually I think it was St...
Hi, I'm new to this blog. I haven't read all the essays and whatnot, so if you read something I say that you think is bull, I'd like it if you linked me to the essay.
Anyway... Regarding the dragon and the garage scenario: what would the dude say if I were to ask "how do you know the Dragon is there if it's impossible to know if he's there?"
Might belief in belief occasionally be valuable when overcoming bias? It would be better to correct my beliefs, but sometimes those beliefs come from bias. I might be convinced in my head that standing on the glass floor of an airplane and looking down is totally safe - this specially-modified-for-cool-views airplane has flown hundreds of flights - yet in my heart deeply believe that if I step onto it I will fall through. I might then choose to "believe in the belief that it is safe to take a step", while all my instinctual reactions are based on a false model. The cognitive dissonance is due to my inability to integrate something so foreign to the evolutionary environment into my belief structure.
Belief in disbelief:
One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a horseshoe over the door to his house. When a mutual acquaintance asked him, 'But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?' he replied, 'Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don't believe it.'
— Niels Bohr
(Note: This is often retold with Bohr himself as the one with the horseshoe, but this quote appears to be the authentic one.)
I wonder how common that is, believing that you don't believe something but acting in a way that implies more belief in it than you acknowledge. One other example I experienced recently: For whatever reason, my mom had a homeopathic cold remedy lying around. (I think a friend gave it to her.) She and I both had colds recently, so she suggested I try some of it. The thing is, she gives full assent to my explanations of why homeopathy is both experimentally falsified and physical nonsense; she even appeared to believe me when I looked at the ingredients and dilution factors and determined that the bottle essentially contained water, sugar, and purple food colouring. But even after that, she still said we may as well try it becau...
Wow. So, I'm basically brand new to this site. I've never taken a logic class and I've never read extensively on the subjects discussed here. So if I say something unbearably unsophisticated or naive, please direct me somewhere useful. But I do have a couple comments/questions about this post and some of the replies.
I don't think it's fair to completely discount prayer. When I was a young child, I asked my grandmother why I should bother praying, when God supposedly loved everyone the same and people praying for much more important things didn't get what they wanted all the time.
She told me that the idea is not to pray for things to happen or not happen. If I pray for my basketball team to win our game (or for my son to get well, or to win the lottery, or whatever) then based on how I interpret the results of my prayer I would be holding God accountable for me getting or not getting what I wanted. The point of praying, as she explained it, was to develop a relationship with God so I would be able to handle whatever situation I found myself in with grace. Even though we often structure our prayers as requests for things to happen, the important thing to keep in mind was how Jesus ...
Surprised not to find Pascal's wager linked to this discussion since he faced the same crisis of belief. It's well known he chose to believe because of the enormous (inf?) rewards if that turned out to be right, so he was arguably hedging his bets.
It's less well known that he understood it (coerced belief for expediency's sake) to be something that would be obvious to omniscient God, so it wasn't enough to choose to believe, but rather he actually Had To. To this end he hoped that practice would make perfect and I think died worrying about it. this is d...
Very interesting. I have transhumanist beliefs that I claim to hold. My actions imply that I believe that I believe, if I understand this properly.
A prime example would be how I tend to my health. There are simple rational steps I can take to increase my odds of living long enough to hit pay dirt. I take okay care of myself, but could do better. Much better.
Cryonics may be another example. More research is required on my part, but a non-zero last stab is arguably better than nothing. I am not enrolled. It feels a bit like Pascal’s Wager to me. Perhaps it...
This is fascinating. When I look back at the thought patterns of my younger self, I can see so much of this belief-in-belief. Despite being raised religious, I came to an agnostic conclusion at around age ten, and it terrified me, because I very much wanted to believe. To my mind, people with faith had a far greater sense of morality than those without, and I didn't want to fall into that latter category.
So I proceeded as if I believed, and eventually came to make justifications along the lines of 'ritual X accomplishes outcome Y' where Y was something ps...
It doesn't seem to me that this post actually makes any coherent argument. It spends a fair amount of words using seemingly metaphysical terms without actually saying anything. But that's not even the important thing.
Is this post supposed to increase my happiness or lifespan, or even that of someone else?
As if the human brain only had enough disk space to represent one belief at a time!
If you think of belief as something like "representing the world as being a certain way", then a belief in Real Beliefs might have followed from profound ignorance of neursicence. But there are plenty of other ways of getting there. For instance, if one thinks of belief as expalaning actions, then the Real Belief is the one attested by action. Someone who does not giove to charity does ot Really Believe in chaity even if they say they do. Actions either occur o...
This post taught me a lot, but now "There is no invisible dragon in my garage" will be popping into my head whenever I see a garage.
I noticed that I was confused by your dragon analogy. 1) Why did this guy believe in this dragon when there was absolutely no evidence that it exists? 2) Why do I find the analogy so satisfying, when its premise is so absurd.
Observation 1) Religious people have evidence:
The thing about religion is that a given religion's effects on people tend to be predictable. When Christians tell you to accept Jesus into your heart, some of the less effective missionaries talk about heaven, but the better ones talk about positive changes to their emotional states. O...
"Belief in belief" exists as a phenomenon but is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the claims of the Dragonist (if I may name his espoused metaphysics thus) in Sagan's parable.
My most recent encounter with someone who believed in belief was someone who did not in addition believe. He had believed once, but he lost his faith (in this case, in God, not dragons) and he wished he could have it back. He believed in belief--that it was a good thing--but alas, he did not believe.
In the above article, Eliezer (if I may so call him) was invoki...
My main take-away: There is a difference between conscious and subconscious. If you accuse sb with "You do not believe X" then you will get denial because he consciously believes it. The problem is that he subconsicously does not believe it and thus comes up with excuses in advance.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism...
I'm not disagreeing with any of the content above, but a note about terminology--
LessWrong keeps using the word "rationalism" to mean something like "reason" or possibly even "scientific methodology". In philosophy, however, "rationalism" is not allied to "empiricism", but diametrically opposed to it. What we call science was a gradual development, over a few centuries, of methodologies that harnessed the powers both of rationalism and empiricism, which had previo...
Went back to re-read some Lacan and Zizek after this, with regards to Dennett's 'belief in belief.' Very similar to the 'displaced belief' they talk about. The common example they give is Santa Claus: children probably don't believe it but they say they do for the presents, because they understand that the adults expect them to believe, etc. The parents don't believe it but they continue the ruse for the benefit of the children, other people's children, or whatever they tell themselves. Thus people often *do* admit t...
I agree with gfarb that the claimant does not necessarily believe in a belief; taking the parable literally, it is far more likely that the claimant suffers from a delusional disorder and actually genuinely believes that there is a dragon in his garage. As to why he anticipates that no one else will be able to detect the dragon, that would most likely be explained by his past experiences, where other people denied his experiences and failed to find evidence for them.
The recent conception of the hostile telepaths problem goes a long way towards explaining why people believe in belief in the first place.
Great article. It unpacks some of the denser aspects of beliefs and our alignment with them.
However, I couldn't help but notice that the essay also unapologetically brushes off the utilitarian alue of such a position. It doesn’t go further enough to ask - Why might someone claim or decide to believe in X, despite knowing it can’t be proven logically?
In other words - Is there any utilitarian value in claiming to believe something, despite knowing all the logical pitfalls and unanswered questions about the belief itself?
In a public debate between Jorda...
Carl Sagan once told a parable of someone who comes to us and claims: “There is a dragon in my garage.” Fascinating! We reply that we wish to see this dragon—let us set out at once for the garage! “But wait,” the claimant says to us, “it is an invisible dragon.”
Now as Sagan points out, this doesn’t make the hypothesis unfalsifiable. Perhaps we go to the claimant’s garage, and although we see no dragon, we hear heavy breathing from no visible source; footprints mysteriously appear on the ground; and instruments show that something in the garage is consuming oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.
But now suppose that we say to the claimant, “Okay, we’ll visit the garage and see if we can hear heavy breathing,” and the claimant quickly says no, it’s an inaudible dragon. We propose to measure carbon dioxide in the air, and the claimant says the dragon does not breathe. We propose to toss a bag of flour into the air to see if it outlines an invisible dragon, and the claimant immediately says, “The dragon is permeable to flour.”
Carl Sagan used this parable to illustrate the classic moral that poor hypotheses need to do fast footwork to avoid falsification. But I tell this parable to make a different point: The claimant must have an accurate model of the situation somewhere in their mind, because they can anticipate, in advance, exactly which experimental results they’ll need to excuse.
Some philosophers have been much confused by such scenarios, asking, “Does the claimant really believe there’s a dragon present, or not?” As if the human brain only had enough disk space to represent one belief at a time! Real minds are more tangled than that. There are different types of belief; not all beliefs are direct anticipations. The claimant clearly does not anticipate seeing anything unusual upon opening the garage door. Otherwise they wouldn’t make advance excuses. It may also be that the claimant’s pool of propositional beliefs contains the free-floating statement There is a dragon in my garage. It may seem, to a rationalist, that these two beliefs should collide and conflict even though they are of different types. Yet it is a physical fact that you can write “The sky is green!” next to a picture of a blue sky without the paper bursting into flames.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism is supposed to prevent us from making this class of mistake. We’re supposed to constantly ask our beliefs which experiences they predict, make them pay rent in anticipation. But the dragon-claimant’s problem runs deeper, and cannot be cured with such simple advice. It’s not exactly difficult to connect belief in a dragon to anticipated experience of the garage. If you believe there’s a dragon in your garage, then you can expect to open up the door and see a dragon. If you don’t see a dragon, then that means there’s no dragon in your garage. This is pretty straightforward. You can even try it with your own garage.
No, this invisibility business is a symptom of something much worse.
Depending on how your childhood went, you may remember a time period when you first began to doubt Santa Claus’s existence, but you still believed that you were supposed to believe in Santa Claus, so you tried to deny the doubts. As Daniel Dennett observes, where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it. What does it mean to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green? The statement is confusing; it’s not even clear what it would mean to believe it—what exactly would be believed, if you believed. You can much more easily believe that it is proper, that it is good and virtuous and beneficial, to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green. Dennett calls this “belief in belief.”1
And here things become complicated, as human minds are wont to do—I think even Dennett oversimplifies how this psychology works in practice. For one thing, if you believe in belief, you cannot admit to yourself that you merely believe in belief. What’s virtuous is to believe, not to believe in believing; and so if you only believe in belief, instead of believing, you are not virtuous. Nobody will admit to themselves, “I don’t believe the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is blue and green, but I believe I ought to believe it”—not unless they are unusually capable of acknowledging their own lack of virtue. People don’t believe in belief in belief, they just believe in belief.
(Those who find this confusing may find it helpful to study mathematical logic, which trains one to make very sharp distinctions between the proposition P, a proof of P, and a proof that P is provable. There are similarly sharp distinctions between P, wanting P, believing P, wanting to believe P, and believing that you believe P.)
There are different kinds of belief in belief. You may believe in belief explicitly; you may recite in your deliberate stream of consciousness the verbal sentence “It is virtuous to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is perfectly blue and perfectly green.” (While also believing that you believe this, unless you are unusually capable of acknowledging your own lack of virtue.) But there are also less explicit forms of belief in belief. Maybe the dragon-claimant fears the public ridicule that they imagine will result if they publicly confess they were wrong.2 Maybe the dragon-claimant flinches away from the prospect of admitting to themselves that there is no dragon, because it conflicts with their self-image as the glorious discoverer of the dragon, who saw in their garage what all others had failed to see.
If all our thoughts were deliberate verbal sentences like philosophers manipulate, the human mind would be a great deal easier for humans to understand. Fleeting mental images, unspoken flinches, desires acted upon without acknowledgement—these account for as much of ourselves as words.
While I disagree with Dennett on some details and complications, I still think that Dennett’s notion of belief in belief is the key insight necessary to understand the dragon-claimant. But we need a wider concept of belief, not limited to verbal sentences. “Belief” should include unspoken anticipation-controllers. “Belief in belief” should include unspoken cognitive-behavior-guiders. It is not psychologically realistic to say, “The dragon-claimant does not believe there is a dragon in their garage; they believe it is beneficial to believe there is a dragon in their garage.” But it is realistic to say the dragon-claimant anticipates as if there is no dragon in their garage, and makes excuses as if they believed in the belief.
You can possess an ordinary mental picture of your garage, with no dragons in it, which correctly predicts your experiences on opening the door, and never once think the verbal phrase There is no dragon in my garage. I even bet it’s happened to you—that when you open your garage door or bedroom door or whatever, and expect to see no dragons, no such verbal phrase runs through your mind.
And to flinch away from giving up your belief in the dragon—or flinch away from giving up your self-image as a person who believes in the dragon—it is not necessary to explicitly think I want to believe there’s a dragon in my garage. It is only necessary to flinch away from the prospect of admitting you don’t believe.
If someone believes in their belief in the dragon, and also believes in the dragon, the problem is much less severe. They will be willing to stick their neck out on experimental predictions, and perhaps even agree to give up the belief if the experimental prediction is wrong.3 But when someone makes up excuses in advance, it would seem to require that belief and belief in belief have become unsynchronized.
1 Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin, 2006).
2 Although, in fact, a rationalist would congratulate them, and others are more likely to ridicule the claimant if they go on claiming theres a dragon in their garage.
3 Although belief in belief can still interfere with this, if the belief itself is not absolutely confident.