Degrees of disbelief

As I wrote and revised my long post yesterday about definitions, I found myself struggling a bit with one aspect of it. I kept wanting to use phrases like 'strong disbelief' and 'weak disbelief'. But because a part of my argument was that disbelief is just absence of belief, how could I talk about levels of disbelief? Isn't that like talking about how much something wasn't a dog? Something can't be very not a dog or slightly not a dog, it's either a dog or it isn't!

I think it's clear that when we talk about varying strengths of disbelief, we're describing something real. Someone can be slightly skeptical about herbal remedies, and very skeptical about alien abductions, and in neither case do they have any amount of belief. Does this mean I have to concede that disbelief is in itself a belief, in order to talk about varying strengths of disbelief? Or is there another way to reconcile the issue?

After thinking about it, I think there is, and if we look back at the difference between an agnostic and an atheist/skeptic, it's a good way to illustrate it.

What I've called 'belief' is, I think, usually paired very tightly with something else, which is how much credibility, or acceptability, or persuasiveness, we see in an idea. Generally the more credibility we find in an idea, the more we believe it. (At least I hope so -- I don't think I can wrap my head around the thought that someone might think that an idea is unacceptable and nevertheless believe it's true.)

The range of belief terminates at zero -- i.e. no belief, disbelief. Negative belief really doesn't make any sense, if we bear in mind that it doesn't automatically become belief of the converse (that's a whole separate axis). Credibility, however, can go into the negative (because something can be judged as having either positive credibility or negative credibility -- an idea can be anywhere on the scale of acceptable to unacceptable). Credibility is subjective, so to put it in personal terms we'll talk about something having credence (since that implies that it's acceptable or unacceptable to somebody, and not just universally acceptable or unacceptable). Note that I'm using the word 'credence' in its plain English rather than its formal mathematical sense.

Now turn to the diagram on page 21 of your textbooks.

Page 21

I think this shows what I'm trying to say a bit better than words. The absence of belief isn't just a single position -- it's an infinite number of them. This is why different levels of disbelief can exist. Strong disbelief is when an individual considers an idea highly unlikely or unacceptable. Mild disbelief occurs when something is only somewhat unacceptable, perhaps when the evidence against it is not conclusive but still quite persuasive. In both cases the individual would have zero belief.

I think this provides a better distinction between the (weak) atheist and agnostic positions. Yesterday I struggled a bit to distinguish these two positions of zero belief, but now I can say that they're at different points on the axis -- it's just that a large section of the axis from its limit to some midpoint is made up of points of zero belief.

I'll finish with this observation: An idea of strong negative credence may be so unacceptable as to create in the individual a belief of the converse. If the idea of psychics is considered sufficiently unacceptable, a person with zero belief in psychics may develop a belief in the nonexistence of psychics. But this isn't a necessary outcome, merely a common one.