Evidence-Proportioned Belief: A Credence-First Reframing of Faith and Rationality
A credence-first argument for treating rational belief as confidence scaled to evidence rather than as a binary yes-or-no state.
Source Paper
This page is a simplified guide to the paper. The source document is linked below; the guide here keeps the main idea accessible and tied back to the site’s model.
Open on Academia.eduLow-Register Abstract
This paper starts from a practical idea: belief should come in degrees. If the evidence is weak, confidence should be low. If the evidence is strong, confidence can rise. If the evidence changes, confidence should move with it.
The paper pushes against language that treats faith, belief, or conviction as valuable simply because it is firm. On a credencing view, firmness is not the achievement. Calibration is the achievement.
How It Fits Credencing
This paper supplies one of the site’s central norms: do not ask only whether someone believes a claim. Ask how confident they are, what evidence that confidence is tracking, and whether the confidence would change if the evidence changed.
It also supports the Bayes theorem pages, where the point is not mathematical performance for its own sake but disciplined movement from prior confidence to posterior confidence.
How to Read It
Read this as the plain-language doorway into the whole project. Then use the Bayes section and the credence skills pages to practice scaling confidence instead of merely choosing sides.
Adjacent References
These are starting points rather than exhaustive citations. They connect this page to nearby work in probability, calibration, cognitive bias, and social epistemology.
- |Thomas Bayes, "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" (1763).
- |E. T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003).