What I wanted to tell the teacher was, “If arguments + evidence are compelling enough, you have no choice but to believe. In general, belief is not a choice.” But then she’d have thrown Sartre and radical freedom at me, which would have completely missed my point.
If arguments + evidence are compelling enough, you have no choice but to believe
This is trivially true by definition of “compelling enough”, and the corollary is “if she chooses not to believe, the arguments and evidence are insufficiently compelling”. You have no choice but to accept THAT, right?
Your actual disagreement is whether a given set of arguments and evidence is compelling enough to believe. And this can certainly vary person to person, as you start with different priors and give different weight to evidence based on different modeling.
The real disagreement is probably about whether the teacher would change her how-to-treat-evidence preferences if she were exposed to more information. Is her view stable, or would she see it for a confusion and mistake if she knew more, and say that she now sees things differently and more clearly?
I feel like the best approach is using your position to make them question themselves. Say, pointing out that a lot of their commitments sound like religious fundamentalism or some such device. You’re studying creative writing, do some creative arguing XD
What I wanted to tell the teacher was, “If arguments + evidence are compelling enough, you have no choice but to believe. In general, belief is not a choice.” But then she’d have thrown Sartre and radical freedom at me, which would have completely missed my point.
This is trivially true by definition of “compelling enough”, and the corollary is “if she chooses not to believe, the arguments and evidence are insufficiently compelling”. You have no choice but to accept THAT, right?
Your actual disagreement is whether a given set of arguments and evidence is compelling enough to believe. And this can certainly vary person to person, as you start with different priors and give different weight to evidence based on different modeling.
The real disagreement is probably about whether the teacher would change her how-to-treat-evidence preferences if she were exposed to more information. Is her view stable, or would she see it for a confusion and mistake if she knew more, and say that she now sees things differently and more clearly?
I feel like the best approach is using your position to make them question themselves. Say, pointing out that a lot of their commitments sound like religious fundamentalism or some such device. You’re studying creative writing, do some creative arguing XD