Semantic Resolution And “Faith”

We all have intelligence. That does not mean we are all of the same intelligence. It does not mean there are only 2 categories; intelligent and unintelligent. Such a claim would remove the semantic resolution that reflects the reality of a smooth bell curve across various degrees intelligence.

We also all have beliefs. But warranted belief is commensurate to the degree of evidence available. Someone’s belief based on years of developing critical thinking skills and evaluating relevant evidence is not even remotely similar to a belief in merely what feels good. To claim we are similar in that we all have “faith” is to consciously remove semantic resolution to produce distortion.

The following are different types of belief.

1. Irrational belief
   (Maps to emotions, often runs contrary to evidence, and often tends to be absolute and dogmatic.)
2. Incommensurate belief
   (Does not map appropriately to the degree of evidence, and is influenced by the natural human tendency towards a bivalent commitment.)
3. Commensurate belief
   (Maps to the degree of evidence, and requires the discipline and rigor to disallow emotional factors. This is the only type of belief that is warranted.)

So those who want to say “we all have faith” are intentionally distorting reality by removing the semantic resolution that distinguishes between warranted and unwarranted belief.

An underlying false premise that contributes to this misunderstanding of warranted belief is that, if we do not ourselves have direct access to the evidence and must rely upon an authority, we are employing “faith”. In these cases our degree of belief is warranted if it maps to the degree of reliability of the authority. Simply assess the track record of the authority, whether the authority be our parents, our memory, a professor, a metal detector, Wikipedia, our eyesight, the scientific method, or a voice in our head. Where there is a track record of successful input and the subsequent predictive power, there is warrant for our confidence. This is nowhere close to “faith” as “faith” is conventionally defined.

---

While this essay primarily addresses the claims of theists that I also have “faith” as they do, it also holds true for non-theists who incoherently claim “you either you believe, or you don’t.”

---

Is Belief Binary?

THE CLAIM: BELIEF IS BINARY

A few days ago on The Atheist Experience, a host named Jen said “belief is binary.”

I opposed this absurd notion in a a blog post that Matt Dillahunty, another host of The Atheist Experience, responded to in the comments, and seemed to affirm that belief was indeed discrete and did not fall on a continuum. He made the following statements.

1. “My point is that if belief is the state of accepting something as true, one either believes something or one does not.”

2. “Tending to believe, kinda believing, almost believing, kinda-sort believing…it’s all sloppy thinking at a meta-level.”

3. “It is, therefore, possible to ‘barely believe’ something (to use the colloquial) but that still means you believe it.”

4. “Once you DO believe a claim, you can believe it to varying degrees of certainty (or even disbelieve it to varying degrees of certainty) but whether or not (look at that language…whether or not) you accept the position is, in fact, binary.”

I intend to clearly demonstrate this position to be nonsensical.

On Absolutes

Many have argued for the existence of moral absolutes by asserting that any claim that there are no absolutes is incoherent. I’d like to examine this claim.

Section One: Is it impossible to deny absolutes?

Here is one formulation of the denial of absolutes.

It is an absolute that there are no absolutes.

Now, here’s the claim by those who reject this as logical. No one can claim that there are no absolutes, for by doing so, one must invoke an absolute.

Here is the more rigorous form of this argument.

p1: Making an absolute claim requires at least one absolute.
p2: Claiming that there are no absolutes is an absolute claim.
p3: There cannot be both absolutes and no absolutes.

---

Therefore, the claim as an absolute that there are no absolutes cannot be true.

Because the assertion of absolutes is often made by theists in an attempt to validate their faith, let’s first look to the Bible to elucidate this issue.

Example 1: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9-14

If we are to belief the Biblical account of creation, the Earth had a beginning. It is obvious then that the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” must have been uttered a first time. Here is how an attack on this claim that there is nothing new under the sun looks when paralleled to the argument above.

p1: Making a claim for the first time means that at least one thing is new.
p2: The initial claim that there is nothing new under the sun is something new.
p3: There cannot be both something new and nothing new.

---

Therefore, the initial claim that nothing is new under the sun could not have been true.

If the one claiming that no one can say there are no absolutes is a Bible-believer, this passage from Ecclesiastes undermines their position.

But let’s examine other aspects.

Consider the following statement that is more approximate to the human experience.

Example 2: The only thing that has not changed is the fact that everything changes.

The following is an attempted dismissal of this statement syllogistic form.

p1: If a fact does not change, there is at least one thing that does not change.
p2: There exists the unchanging fact that everything changes.
p3: There cannot be both everything changed and one thing unchanged.

---

Therefore, claiming that, the only thing that has not changed is the fact that everything changes, cannot be true.

When examining the logic of the statement, it appears that it is logically incoherent. However, does the statement contain content, or is it nonsensical? Humans can grasp that, what seems to be an incoherency within the statement, does not necessarily change the truth value of the embedded statement “nothing fails to change”. The recognition of this embedding is a clue to why the full statement is merely an apparent contradiction. We will revisit this notion of linguistic embedding at a later point.

Putting Dictionaries In Their Place

Language is a product of convention.

You may be a “bad ass” at argumentation, but your assertion of the same may not get the reception you expect from an Ethiopian donkey breeder.

The community of minds that employs a given word has the final say on the definition of the word. You can invoke a dictionary all you want, but unless your audience understands the word you are using in the same way you understand it, communication will fail. Dictionary editors are not referencing some objective meaning of the word when they write definitions, but are rather attempting to list denotations of the word that are currently active in the population that speaks the language. For this reason, dictionaries must be regularly updated.