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On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, John Cowan wrote: > Invent Yourself scripsit: > > > 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. > > I fail to see what certainty has to do with it, and that on two counts: > > 1) It is simply false that I am equally uncertain about each belief. The > belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is very strong, much more so than > the belief that I will make it to my 1 PM meeting on time. You're changing the situation as you go along. If you have a set of beliefs and you believe all of them (completely and equally), and then decide to include some uncertainty about them, then that uncertainty gets distributed to all the beliefs equally. But it cannot vanish and fail to distribute across your actual beliefs. It's ridiculous to detach the uncertainty about beliefs from the uncertainty about beliefs, and give them different values. > 2) Certainty has nothing to do with truth. I may be extremely certain, > and often have been, about some beliefs that are completely false. Yes, but since we both understand the terms, there's no need to analyze them any further. -- // if (!terrorist) // ignore (); // else collect_data ();