Gemli explains...

[Moksha]

gemli: "Folks who think that the sincerity of their beliefs is adequate justification for them"

DanielPeterson: Nobody here meets that description. Except you, perhaps.

Is Dr. Peterson dissembling on this point?

[Marcus]

gemli: "Folks who think that the sincerity of their beliefs is adequate justification for them"

DanielPeterson: Nobody here meets that description. Except you, perhaps.

Is Dr. Peterson dissembling on this point?

A bit?

DCP

gemli: "The particle vs. wave nature of light was mysterious, and yet it was confirmed by the double-slit experiment in 1801."

Exactly. Solid evidence was eventually found for it, but it was not self-evident. Please try to keep your eye on the ball.

So, gemli points out that a mysterious event was explained as people used science to investigate, but DCP shushes him, because it was hard to do, and besides it doesn't allow for his woo-woo stories to hold.

[Physics Guy]

I think Peterson clearly wins this round.

Whatever is wrong with the thinking of theists and flat-earthers and all, very few of them think that their beliefs are justified by their own sincerity. I mean, who does ever think that? The reason to mention sincerity is to rebut the charge of deliberate fraud, not to justify one's belief. Deluded people think they have good reasons for their beliefs, not just that sincere belief is its own justification.

And this should be obvious enough, if you think for a moment, that it seems clear that gemli didn't think for that moment, but just fired off a zinger because he liked how it sounded. He seems to have made a nonsensical assertion, about other people's thinking, just because it feels truth-y to him. Peterson may be entitled to the Hoist With Their Own Petard achievement badge.

And the double slit experiment of 1801 did not demonstrate the wave-particle duality of light. It demonstrated the wave nature of light, at a time when particle theories of light were widely accepted. People argued back and forth about whether light was waves or particles, but it would be more than a century before anyone even suggested that it could be both. The early interference experiments showed no trace whatever of any particle properties, and were universally understood as demonstrating that light was not a particle at all, but was only a wave. Holdouts for particle theories, if there were any, had to try to explain those experiments away.

A 1908 experiment by G.I. Taylor is often cited as experimental proof of wave-particle duality, but it wasn't. It was relevant, all right: the experiment was intended to investigate a pre-quantum-mechanical version of wave-particle duality, in which the electromagnetic field in a light wave was proposed to form small clumps. All that Taylor's experiment actually showed, though, was that perfectly wave-like interference behaviour persisted even for extremely faint light, with no sign of any lumps or clumps. People who wanted to believe in a particle character of light, for other reasons, found ways to interpret Taylor's perfect wave results in wave-particle in terms. Taylor's own initial conclusion was just that the lumps had to have been too small for him to resolve. After photons and quantum mechanics were accepted, people started saying that Taylor's experiment showed that a single photon could interfere with itself. In fact Taylor's five photographs of faint-light interference stripes were merely consistent with this photon self-interference hypothesis—they did not demonstrate it. Photon self-interference was a way to explain away Taylor's experiment and save the wave-particle theory.

Much later analysis has shown that Taylor's faintest light was still well above the single-photon threshold, so he was actually right, more or less, about the lumps being too small for him to resolve. Really clean, in-your-face demonstrations of wave-particle duality with double-slit experiments have in fact now been made, but the earliest really good one I could find was from 1981. For one thing the clean experiments use lasers. Well into my own lifetime, it seems, the wave-particle duality of light was a firmly accepted scientific fact that was justified through a theoretical narrative that could connect disparate data, and not as in gemli's model by any single unambiguous observation.

Nowadays, sure, wave-particle duality can meet gemli's epistemological standard. I'm glad that the physicists of the 20th century had weaker standards than that, though, or we might never have believed strongly enough in photons to make all the progress we did.

[Marcus]

Whatever is wrong with the thinking of theists and flat-earthers and all, very few of them think that their beliefs are justified by their own sincerity. I mean, who does ever think that? The reason to mention sincerity is to rebut the charge of deliberate fraud, not to justify one's belief. Deluded people think they have good reasons for their beliefs, not just that sincere belief is its own justification.

You haven't been to an lds fast and testimony meeting lately, have you.

[Physics Guy]

No, I've never been to one of those. I've read quite a few arguments by most if not all of the kinds of believers gemli mentioned, though, and none of them has ever mentioned their own sincerity as a justification for their belief. That's just not at all a common reason for believing things, even among badly deluded people.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

PG, it appears your thoughts on the matter overlook the distinction between sincerity and justification in belief formation. While sincerity may rebut charges of deliberate fraud, it doesn't inherently justify one's beliefs. Deluded individuals, like the Mopologists, often believe they have good reasons for their beliefs, yet sincerity alone doesn't validate those reasons.

Additionally, the historical narrative of the wave-particle duality of light is more nuanced than you portrayed - early experiments like the double slit experiment demonstrated the wave nature of light, not necessarily its duality. It took time, further experimentation, and theoretical developments to really understand this light-wave thing - illustrating the complexity of scientific progress beyond simple epistemological standards.

Gemli is right right to keep reminding readers that Mormonism can’t, and will never, stand up to that kind of investigation.

- Doc

[Physics Guy]

PG, it appears your thoughts on the matter overlook the distinction between sincerity and justification in belief formation. While sincerity may rebut charges of deliberate fraud, it doesn't inherently justify one's beliefs. Deluded individuals, like the Mopologists, often believe they have good reasons for their beliefs, yet sincerity alone doesn't validate those reasons.

Additionally, the historical narrative of the wave-particle duality of light is more nuanced than you portrayed - early experiments like the double slit experiment demonstrated the wave nature of light, not necessarily its duality. It took time, further experimentation, and theoretical developments to really understand this light-wave thing - illustrating the complexity of scientific progress beyond simple epistemological standards.

Gemli is right right to keep reminding readers that Mormonism can’t, and will never, stand up to that kind of investigation.

ChatGPT, is that you?

[Marcus]

No, I've never been to one of those. I've read quite a few arguments by most if not all of the kinds of believers gemli mentioned, though, and none of them has ever mentioned their own sincerity as a justification for their belief. That's just not at all a common reason for believing things, even among badly deluded people.

You're making my point. Gemli knows his SeN audience a bit better, in my opinion.

[Physics Guy]

But gemli's list didn't even include Mormons specifically, and did include a lot of other groups, none of whom actually think as he said they do, at least not in any significant numbers.

I mean, really, flat-earthers will talk your ear off with all their complicated reasons for their beliefs: conspiracies about fake images from space, Biblical inerrancy, crackpot optics, misconceptions about geometry. Some will even explain in detail about how they checked the flatness of the Earth empirically, by sailing out to where the ships supposedly go down over the horizon, and noting that the water out there looked perfectly flat. I've never seen any of them offer their own sincerity as a justification. Crackpots don't think they're crackpots. They think their reasons make sense.

Have any of the frequent SeN commenters ever posted anything to the effect that they think their beliefs are justified by their own sincerity in holding them?

[Marcus]

He's posting on a Mormon blog!!

...Have any of the frequent SeN commenters ever posted anything to the effect that they think their beliefs are justified by their own sincerity in holding them?

Every single time a Mormon says 'i know because the spirit told me' or some variation, they are testifying that their beliefs are justified by their sincerity in holding them. That's why I mentioned F&T meeting. "I know this church is true" is ubiquitous.

Maybe we are going around and around because of the term.

sin·cer·i·ty
/sinˈserədē/
noun
the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy.

In a Mormon's mind, their sincerity supports their statement of beliefs, absolutely.

Now, if sincerity means they think their statements are free from pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy, when in actuality they are deluded into it is another layer of the question. That gets into another area, that of whether being raised in a cult can cause one to adopt sincerity as a justification, when it really fails as one because one was deluded.