Curt Jaimungal: Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Gets "Belief" Wrong
episodePreviously titled “Neil deGrasse Tyson Doesn’t Understand What “Belief” Means | Curt Jaimungal” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the “no‑belief” fallacy and why does Curt say Neil deGrasse Tyson gets it wrong?
When Neil deGrasse Tyson says that I don't believe anything, I know that you believe that there is fear mongering over AI.
I don't believe anything. Uh it's not don't say I believe anything.
Your wincing is indeed justified. Now it's not just the scientist. The insidious disdain for the usage of the word belief is echoed even here in this infamous Deepak Chopper exchange.
Now you stated before that All belief is a cover up for insecurity, right? Mm-hmm. Do you believe that? Yes. Thank you. I think.
The statement that I don't believe anything is said so self-assuredly, so swiftly, so loudly, and with a tinge of condescension that you know something else is going on. It's a semaphore for, hey, look how enlightened I am. Aren't I so rational? Unlike those poor, unsound religious folk. So the phrase I don't have beliefs is either trivially true, which you can read as empty. it's semantically confused, which is equivocating between belief and faith, or it's completely demonstrably false. Now let's work through this rigorously. In analytic epistemology, belief is a propositional attitude. It's a mental state with a proposition as its content. And then to believe X just means that you hold that proposition to be true.
Now it doesn't mean that I hold this proposition true to be true no matter what. It doesn't mean that you can't update your beliefs subject to new evidence. In fact, there's an entire field called Bayesian epistemology about belief updating. So when you say you have beliefs, it doesn't mean that you're a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is unambiguous. Contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a propositional attitude.
How does analytic epistemology define belief as a propositional attitude?
The key point is that belief doesn't have to imply faith nor certainty. You can believe you have a head. You can believe two plus two equals four. You can believe that Neil is more logical than the person that he's speaking to. I think he does. So those who say when you ask them, hey, well, what is it that you believe about so and so, they say, Oh, oh me, I don't hold beliefs. Ask me a different question. I'm a scientist. They think that the word belief is some confession of irrationality. No, it's just a basic piece of furniture in your mind. If the scientist wants to say I don't have beliefs, it would require a non standard definition of belief and thus muddle the conversation with uncharitable and unstated redefinitions, which is actually itself unscientific.
So one of the more charitable interpretations of the no belief claim that this rational person is is using is to say that belief means something like faith. And faith to them means belief without adequate evidence. Or perhaps belief has some property of obstinate resistance to updating when encountering new evidence. But this is semantic equivocation. Standardly, when people say and philosophers use belief and faith, they distinguish belief that. So that's a proposition I'm holding P to be true. Or they can mean faith in, like an attitude, a trust-based, a trust relation that could, although it doesn't have to involve resistance to change due to counter evidence. By the way, Kierkegaard is important here because Kierkegaard has a similar sort of a rational or extras rational, whatever we want to call it, type of faith.
There's a video here that I made about Kierkegaard that went quite viral. I'll link it. On screen and in the description. Now, the no-belief rationalist can look up these words in the dictionary, and I want to just take it a tad further by going to the Stanford Encyclopedia. Richard Swinburne labels this the Thomist view of faith. The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that there is a God. However, even Aquinas distinguished faith from ordinary belief. In theology, faith means One of these. So belief in propositions that are not fully seen or demonstrable, it could mean that, or it could also mean volition, a type of trust beyond mere assent. And it could also mean that resilience to a certain kind of counter evidence.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the “no‑belief” fallacy and why does Curt say Neil deGrasse Tyson gets it wrong?
0:00–1:46
2
How does analytic epistemology define belief as a propositional attitude?
1:46–4:56
3
What is van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism and how does it relate to scientific belief?
4:56–7:35
4
Why does Curt argue that fallibilism is an essential epistemic virtue for scientists?
7:35–10:16
5
How do faith and propositional belief differ in the context of science and spirituality?
10:16–12:59
6
What does the “belief‑norm of assertion” tell us about scientists’ statements on hypotheses?
12:59–13:56
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
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Jacob Tsimerman: He Won Math's Highest Prize. Then Announced the End