How small must the chance of error be before we accept something as true and certain?
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From: MarkA on 3 Aug 2010 13:39 On Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:15:56 -0700, Immortalist wrote: > Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a belief could be completely > justified without all chance of error being excluded. How great a chance > of error is to be allowed? One chance in ten? One chance in a million? It depends entirely on how severe are the consequences of being wrong. If you are trying to remember what time a movie starts that you really want to see, you may just show up at the theater when you think the movie starts, and just hope you are correct. If, however, you are an airline pilot, ready to take off with a plane full of people, and a gauge on the panel indicates a problem, you will abort takeoff until the problem is solved. > Now, suppose we set up a fair lottery with a million tickets numbered > consecutively from 1, and that a ticket has been drawn but not > inspected. Of course, there is only one chance in a million that the > number 1 ticket has been drawn. So by the current proposal, we would be > completely justified in believing that the number 1 ticket was not > picked. There is only one chance in a million of error. Hence we would > be completely justified in claiming to know that the number 1 ticket was > not picked. Even better: the odds of the cards in a deck of 52 cards being in one particular sequence is roughly 10^70. However, the odds that they are in one of those available sequences is 100%. That is why Creationists are wrong when they say that the odds of some particular thing turning out the way that it did are so small that Divine Intervention is necessary to explain it. It's the difference between prediction and rationalization after the fact. -- MarkA Keeper of Things Put There Only Just The Night Before About eight o'clock |