Even after we set aside moral and ethical beliefs, and personal preferences, the remaining category -- Habermas's "First World," the realm of intersubjective reality, what is "out there" -- contains several different kinds of belief. People still make category errors when arguing about matters even within the First World. Plato and Socrates didn't recognize these distinctions and in fact, it wasn't until Fermat and Pascal came along in the 17th Century that we began to develop the epistemological tools even to think about them.
One way we get into trouble is by failing to recognize that the word "opinion" has multiple meanings. It includes Second and Third World beliefs -- moral and esthetic preferences. Again, we're putting those aside for now, but it can also include people's expectations about First World questions that are in dispute. For example, one physicist may have the opinion that the mysterious dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, whereas another may have the opinion that Einstein's theory of gravity is incomplete in some way. Most physicists may favor the first alternative, some may favor yet others. But there isn't any way to put a number on the likelihood of who is right. We're just groping with the unknown.
Alternatively, there are questions about which physicists are overwhelmingly in agreement. These include, for example, the properties of the electromagnetic field and it's instantiation in radiation and charged particles. These are firmly held beliefs which physicists will tell you are almost certainly true and justified. This is the category where the formulation dating back to Socrates works. On the other hand, physicists have discovered that the way the world works at very small scales is not like that, and for many purposes it isn't like that at large scales. That is where we encounter Fermat, Pascal, and their successors including Gauss and Bayes, the realm of probability.
The theory of probability quantifies what we don't know. It allows us to hold very definite beliefs about what is likely to be true, or to happen, but these are beliefs that include a substantial component of not knowing. And here the concepts of truth and justification get murky indeed. That's where we'll go next time.
1 comment:
But the probability that some facts in the First World are true is > 99%.
There ought to be a simple way to claim their truthfulness when there is only the faintest hint of a shadow of doubt that they aren't. Otherwise we'll get bogged down in arguments that prevent us from discussing the actual and important issues facing us.
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