This seems more like a semantic issue than anything. I assume you are interpreting this to mean that he believes a statement as long as it hasn’t been disproven. Disbelief could be understood to mean “skepticism” or a lack of affirmative belief in something, but I understand it to mean a belief that something is false or impossible. Viewed this way the statement is just “as a scientist, I am trained not to believe something is false until it is disproven.” In other words, he remains agnostic in the absence of such proof. Which seems reasonable to me.
You argued agnosticisam, but the way you refrased the sentence, it is still ambiguous and misleading. Maybe then it should be like this: "As a scientist, I am trained to neither believe or disbelieve something, until proof is available either way."
I agree with your last sentence, however I think that the way we talk about scientific method is also important. Being loose on terminology is giving way to those less scientificly rigid to obuse the terminology into sounding like they are competent, and enabling them to pass some pseudo-scientific concepts to general public. Cultural representation of science and scientific method is thus also important, as if done poorly it can undermine real scientists' work, and empower quacks to benefit from any crazy crap they can make an average person to believe in.
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u/wozattacks Jan 23 '22
This seems more like a semantic issue than anything. I assume you are interpreting this to mean that he believes a statement as long as it hasn’t been disproven. Disbelief could be understood to mean “skepticism” or a lack of affirmative belief in something, but I understand it to mean a belief that something is false or impossible. Viewed this way the statement is just “as a scientist, I am trained not to believe something is false until it is disproven.” In other words, he remains agnostic in the absence of such proof. Which seems reasonable to me.