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Question If you don't have any reasons whatsoever to believe that a certain thing exists, should you deny that it exists, or simply withhold judgment on the question?

Accepted:
October 18, 2005

Comments

It's hard to generalise about this. For example, is the certain thing a new kind of thing or not.? If not, withholding judgment may be the right answer. For example, I have no reason whatsoever to believe that the house next to mine has a red ball in it, so I probably should simply withold judgment: maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. On the other hand, if I have no reason whatsoever to believe that in the house next to mine there is a kind of animal quite different from any known animal, I probably should deny that it exists.

Why should we deny the existence of radically new kinds of things when we have no evidence for their existence? Part of the answer may be that our principles of reasoning incorporate various kinds of preferences for simplicity. In the case of things, this is known as Occam's razor: don't multiply entities beyond necessity. It is not obvious why, taken as a principle of denial rather than a principle of withholding judgment, this is a good principle, but many would say that it is.

I agree with Peter, but would mention a famous debate on just this subject--the debate between William James (in his famous essay, "The Will to Believe"), who contends that there can be non-evidential reasons for certain kinds of belief of the sort you seem to be talking about, and W. K. Clifford in "The Ethics of Belief."

Question If you don't have any reasons whatsoever to believe that a certain thing exists, should you deny that it exists, or simply withhold judgment on the question? Accepted:October 18, 2005

Question If you don't have any reasons whatsoever to believe that a certain thing exists, should you deny that it exists, or simply withhold judgment on the question?

Accepted:
October 18, 2005