Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
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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What comes first? Knowledge or belief? Is knowledge possible without belief? Is belief possible without knowledge? What makes facts anything more than true propositions?
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.
What is belief according to evidence called? Is it not still belief?
No, unless you are playing the Write4U game and playing around with the varying meanings of words.
A viewpoint that you have no evidence for.I'm not playing any game. I'm simply asking questions. So how do you define belief?
It's not so much a matter of what comes first. It's a matter of whether the belief you have is objectively justified.What comes first? Knowledge or belief?
It would make no sense to claim that you know something is true and yet you don't believe it to be true, so belief always goes with knowledge. The reverse need not be the case. You can believe things that are false, and therefore not know the truth.Is knowledge possible without belief? Is belief possible without knowledge?
Why do you think facts are more than true propositions?What makes facts anything more than true propositions?
What comes first? Knowledge or belief?
Is knowledge possible without belief?
Is belief possible without knowledge?
What makes facts anything more than true propositions?
What is belief according to evidence called? Is it not still belief?
In other words, you don't care whether those beliefs are true or justified. You believe them for other reasons..... I still find myself believing things I really don't have adequate evidence for.
You missed the whole point about justification. That's an objective process, not a subjective one.Is there a basis here for skepticism, that "knowing facts" in the end amounts to little more than having subjectively biased beliefs?
No. It's right there in my signature line, from Hume: our beliefs, if rational, should be proportional to the evidence.Even our reliance on evidence assumes an unswerving belief in that evidence.
We can't even be sure that what we are immediately perceiving is real.Can we really only know what we are immediately perceiving?
+1 on that.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.
What comes first? Knowledge or belief? Is knowledge possible without belief? Is belief possible without knowledge? [...]
Yes, but only by ignoring other facts or pretending they aren't facts.“You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
The man is - or is not - wearing the hat, whether we mention it or not.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.
A particular person being aware or unaware of a particular fact is a separate matter from the existence of the relevant state of affairs that makes the thing a fact in the first place.It is only by stating the fact as such that it is known and realized to be so.
It helps to concentrate our attention, certainly.Language enables facts to become abstracted from the welter of our experience as matters real in themselves.
I disagree. Claims about facts are not the same as facts.There are no facts outside of statements of such and such being so.
The man is - or is not - wearing the hat, whether we mention it or not.