Knowledge vs Belief

What comes first? Knowledge or belief? Is knowledge possible without belief? Is belief possible without knowledge? What makes facts anything more than true propositions?

 

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Is belief possible without knowledge? That's pretty much the definition of belief. Holding a view in the absence of evidence is belief. Otherwise, it takes no belief.

 

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What is belief according to evidence called? Is it not still belief?

 

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No, unless you are playing the Write4U game and playing around with the varying meanings of words.

You might say I believe the sun will come up tomorrow. But you actually require no belief for saying that. You know the sun will come up tomorrow based on evidence and if you happen to use the word that way, that's fine in a colloquial sense as long as you realize that you don't actually mean "believe".

If you have evidence, you don't need belief, you have evidence.

 

I'm not playing any game. I'm simply asking questions. So how do you define belief?

 

A viewpoint that you have no evidence for.

 

Here's a dictionary definition of belief:

be·lief
/bəˈlēf/
noun

1. 1.
   an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.
   "his belief in the value of hard work"

Doesn't say anything about having no evidence for it.

 

I'm sure Sarkus will be along soon. I'm not that interested in prolonging discussions such as this one. I probably shouldn't have answered but no one else had so I jumped in. I'm really not that interested in the semantics of this so maybe someone else will jump in soon.

 

How MR's questions are answered probably depends on whether we are talking about propositional knowledge or 'knowing how'. My reply below will mostly address propositional knowledge.

Well, since knowledge is arguably a subset of belief, I'd say that belief comes first. If we accept the common 'Justified True Belief' account of knowledge, then knowledge is belief that happens to be both true and is justified in some acceptable way.

I might know how to perform some task (riding a bike, say) without me believing that I can do it.

But when it comes to propositional knowledge, I don't think so.

Sure, happens all the time.

I might believe that Bells is 15 meters tall, but since it (probably) isn't true I can't be said to know it. Or I might believe something for some bad reason (or for no reason at all) and just happen by chance to be correct. In that case, we wouldn't say that I know it, because my true belief would lack suitable justification. Lucky guesses aren't knowledge.

In fact one might plausibly argue that most (all?) of our beliefs lack suitable and sufficient justification, hence most (all?) of what we take to be knowledge (episteme) really is just belief (doxa). That's the classic position of the ancient skeptics.

Well, I would define facts are real existing extra-linguistic states of affairs. Defined that way, facts are neither true or false, they simply are.

But in everyday speech we often say things like 'I'm just stating the facts!' In that case 'fact' becomes synonymous with 'true proposition' and is transformed out of ontology into language. One might argue that 'stating a fact' in this kind of usage is weaker than 'knowledge' since the justification for the truth of the proposition might be weak or missing. Which would leave 'I'm stating a fact!' as just a forceful and perhaps pretentious way of saying 'I believe this very strongly!'

 

Yes. I think that it is.

I'd say (paraphrasing the Oxford Guide to Philosophy) that 'belief' is a mental state, with a proposition as its object, in which the truth of the proposition is asserted.

Just because we believe something doesn't imply that it is true. And even correct assertion of the truth of a proposition needn't have good reasons for that assertion.

But in some cases we want to say that our belief (assertion of a proposition's truth) is both correct and well justified. And that subset of beliefs we call 'knowledge'. Knowledge doesn't cease being belief just because we supposedly know it (we are still asserting the truth of a proposition, after all). Knowledge is simply justified true beliefs.

 

I think of belief as a current position on a subject. We could all read the Bible, the God Delusion and selected scholarship on the OT/ NT say but end up all believing something different.

Abortion is a good example too, we all read the stats, the medical position and moral implications but end up with a different belief.
Moral, not moral, should be legal, illegal or allowed sometimes.

We are all different, genetics, different experiences, upbringing and knowledge so our beliefs are formed on those.

 

When I think back on all the things I thought I knew, I find that I only believed them, and often without much evidence. When I was a devoted biblethumper, I took the scriptures as evidence for my beliefs, which were pretty much motivated by subjective feelings of spiritual excitement and comfort. And even as I have over the years replaced my former beliefs with scientific knowledge, I still find myself believing things I really don't have adequate evidence for. Is there a basis here for skepticism, that "knowing facts" in the end amounts to little more than having subjectively biased beliefs? Even our reliance on evidence assumes an unswerving belief in that evidence. Can we really only know what we are immediately perceiving?

 

Due to potential instances where each might reciprocally subsume the other, I'm not sure a definite hierarchy can be settled without rebellious reservations arising from time to time. Both can at least be assimilated by some broader category ("cognitive content" or whatever labeled concept with specific members in it).

Belief might be regarded as what has passed one's own individual standards in terms of having confidence in it or deeming it true.

Whereas knowledge might be what has passed group or collective standards (that of science, the state, educational system, or whatever public establishment or even trade/practice).

Both can be mental representations about affairs that are putatively independent of an individual mind, but the descriptions of such can be stored, expressed, and distributed externally.

In some cases, however, belief or knowledge can refer to subjective items themselves -- like "I had a dream about ___ last night". Which may be fact, but barring lab conditions, may be information only available to that person in terms of confirmation. Thereby, it might be knowledge as having occurred to the sole "witness" (so to speak), but may be judged in suspended belief context by others (maybe so, maybe not).
_

 

“You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

 

I don't think a fact is anything separate from its statement of being so. We can say it is a fact that the man is wearing a hat, but without that statement the event or state does not stand out or become observed as something that is the case in our experience. It is only by stating the fact as such that it is known and realized to be so. Language enables facts to become abstracted from the welter of our experience as matters real in themselves. There are no facts outside of statements of such and such being so.

 

But it is only a fact that the man is wearing a hat if it is true that he is wearing a hat. And truth is a property of statements. The fact lies in the statement being true.