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On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, John Cowan wrote: > Invent Yourself scripsit: > > > I say it's a bogus contradiction, because under the scrutiny of > > precise language, any rational person would understand that the > > uncertainty of the truth of the set of their beliefs would have to be > > distributed among the individual beliefs, because the certainty of > > beliefs is a conserved quantity which isn't affected by the number of > > beliefs held. > > I never can understand you when you become metaphysical. Why on earth > would you think the certainty of beliefs is conserved? Do you suppose > that as I add additional tentative beliefs, the older firm ones that I > hold become more tentative? No, I meant rather that for a set of n beliefs, your total uncertainty U = 1/n Sum u(n). The "paradox" denotes the irrational mindset where U > 0, yet Sum u(n) = 0. U is not conserved as beliefs are added, and my use of the term might have been misleading. > > Furthermore, most people *suspect* there is a possibility that their > > beliefs *could be proven in the future* to be false, but at the > > current moment, the evidence has not yet been produced. > > No, I do more than suspect it, I firmly believe it: some of my beliefs > are wrong, though I don't know which ones. Therefore for each of your beliefs, it's impossible for you to claim that you have no uncertainty about it. Since you don't know which ones are wrong, you must be equally uncertain about each of them. -- // if (!terrorist) // ignore (); // else collect_data ();