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Jiro comments on Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Three types exist.
1) Belief as association AND Belief as anticipation
2) Belief as anticipation ONLY
3) Belief as association ONLY
Only #3 Type beliefs would leave the believer making excuses in advance. They don't actually believe a claim to be true (anticipation), but they believe that assenting to the belief is important (association).
See Dennet's Belief in Belief and Sagan's Garage Dragon for more info.
I don't think it's quite and cut and dry as this, by the way. People have their personal probabilities in regard to how strongly they hold anticipatory beliefs. It's not all or nothing.
Empirically I don't find this to be the case. I think most skeptics do have believes of anticipation that various paranormal effects won't happen. At the same time bring a skeptic in situations where his beliefs about the domain might reasonably get challenged they might make excuses in advance.
Most people don't use probability for their beliefs. They use mental processes such as the availability heuritistic, that doesn't correspond directly to probabilities.
Neither Dennet nor Sagan are a psychologist or have similar experience with working with beliefs in other context. If you use their discussions that are essentially about ontology as being discussions about how humans reason you are going to make mistakes.
I can guess that if you were to meet a flat-earther with the intent of engaging with his ideas, you would start thinking of what things he might show you and why those things wouldn't actually demonstrate a flat earth. That does not mean you are making "excuses in advance".
"He's probably going to show me how ships disappear on the horizon, but I know that is affected by air refraction." "Oh, you're just making an excuse in advance."
What empiric standard would you use to classify things as making excuses in advance?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that "I can respond to any claim he's likely to make" isn't it. I'm not sure there is such a thing at all, short of having your idea be outright unfalsifiable.
It seems like there something that the OP means with "making excuses in advance". It might not what you think would be rightly called "making excuses in advance".
I don't think that category exists in a way where it can be successfully used to distinguish people who have anticipations and are identified with a belief from people who are just identified with it.