Does evidence care about belief?
Daniel Dennet says humans will change the way how we believe.
Is evidence caring about belief? If so, can evidence exist without belief?
Daniel Dennet says humans will change the way how we believe.
Is evidence caring about belief? If so, can evidence exist without belief?
Comments (19)
Brushing Dennett's pretzel philosophy aside.
We all have beliefs, some we care about more than othekrs, and we look forward recurring patterns of these beliefs (possibly shared with others) that we might call evidence or some confirmation. But beliefs change as does evidence as we evolve.
I know evidence changes.
But does evidence need beliefs?
I don't doubt that patterns can form beliefs, but does evidence actually require belief?
I can think up some scenarios where evidence doesn't require belief.
There are observations. They don't become evidence until they are used to establish the truth or falsehood of a fact or proposition.
The status of evidence as such must be concluded, otherwise it is not evidence, and if conclusions are required then knowledge is required and if knowledge is required then belief is required.
The first sentence is both ungrammatical and a misquote.
Sentence two is either incoherent or intentionally backwards. And so no. 3 cannot follow.
I think he says it in a book called "Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind".
As in, can evidence exist without belief?
I don't think so, because I know many Christians who believe world was made in 6 days, and those beliefs disagree with science evidence. We can maybe then say scientific evidence doesn't care about beliefs?
Yes people can believe what ever they want to believe, but that does not make those beliefs knowledge. Knowledge as true belief implies the ability to demonstrate with evidence that a belief is rationally coherent, even if it can't be proven absolutely true.
Exactly. This makes me think beliefs are not necessary, because we can ignore beliefs that don't deal with evidence, and also, we can ignore beliefs that deal with evidence.
We could ignore evidenced based beliefs, because those are redundant, as the evidence doesn't care whether or not people believe in it.
I think we can ignore beliefs that don't have evidence, any such beliefs are about faith and not about knowledge. Beliefs that are evidenced by facts or our abstraction of the facts, are essential to our survival and progress.
You speak of evidence as if it were a simple thing, yet I think that evidence is the result of beliefs, and that beliefs acts as differentia or values separating the notion of a simple thing or state of affairs from their entailing something else beyond their simple existence as such.
I don't think he would say this.
Science is something that enables us to progress, by mostly looking on evidence, with out the need to look on all possible evidence.
I would say based on data, belief mostly encourages people to ignore evidence. Could science really thrive based on something that enables people to mostly ignore evidence?
I don't think so. I can't get over the fact that evidence can be valid, without being dependent on whether or not people chose to believe in that evidence.
a=b is meaningless if no one believes a=b.
For one thing, equations don't work because somebody choses to believe in them; so whether or not a scientist may chose to believe in some equations, does not impact whether or not those equations are valid.
If equations cared about scientists believing in them, then many scientists would be able to believe in their equations (no matter how wrong those equations were in reality), and equations would then work after sufficient belief was placed upon them. But we know life doesn't work that way; instead we simply follow the evidence until some workable thing gets implemented eventually. This is what has enabled us to make progress, and no matter how much belief or passion we may want to put in our work, it fails unless evidence is followed.