I’m not interested in what the dictionary says or a textbook definition I’m interested in your personal distinction between the two ideas. How do you decide to put an idea in one category versus the other? I’m not interested in the abstract concepts like ‘objective truth’ I want to know how it works in real life for you.
That’s a pretty simple distinction, but you’ve asked for us to define abstract concepts without using definitions or abstract concepts. So let’s just say, knowledge is what you know and beliefs are what you believe. A belief implies some level of doubt, while knowledge is just the information you have in your head. There is a lot of overlap. I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, because I understand how the earth rotates and orbits the sun. I believe it will happen because I understand physics and observable phenomena. Put it another way, it is a high-confidence belief based on the knowledge obtained through observation and study. Some beliefs are based on nothing more than hope, and some knowledge is beyond any doubt. I believe the Phillies can win the World Series, but I know our bullpen pitches cantaloupes and our hitters are streaky as shit.
Your last example reminds me of someone editing Wikipedia to list Ronnie O’Sullivan as the winner of the World Open, about 20 minutes before the final match finished.
They were right, and anyone would agree that it was all-but-certain, but it hadn’t actually happened yet.
What if you should have some doubt (belief) but due to ignorance or hubris do not and so you elevate a concept to ‘knowledge’ that should not rightfully be there? I’m not trying to be argumentative, I’m genuinely curious about that gray area of misplaced confidence.
Then you apply the scientific method and/or research in search of truth.
It sounds like you’re interested in epistemology. Take a dive into this Wikipedia article and give at least the parts on Justified True Beliefs a read.
No I’m not. I am not interested in academic study. I am interested in real world application. I am aware of justified true belief and that most people don’t apply it. My curiosity is in how people acnually think about the concept.
What you’re asking about there seems like it’s really: “Is something being knowledge vs belief subjective or objective?”
The answer, just like for “is cereal soup?”, is that it’s all semantics. It’s not like there’s some Authority who’s created the Platonic Form of Knowledge that Beliefs cannot partake of, and there’s a clear delineation between Knowledge and Belief. We’re just using these weird shapes, sounds, hand gestures, or whatever else to try to do telepathy and get our thoughts into someone else’s head. Like all semantic questions, what this comes down to is: have you chosen the right word to convey your thought? If people seem to not be getting it, try the other one.
That’s a fair question, but we’re in danger of conflating two different concepts. Knowledge is the information, and belief is the action. It’s a little bit like having money vs spending money. You can have money, you can spend money, and you can have spending money, and you can spend money you don’t have. These are all slightly different concepts despite using the same words.
When you think you know something, but you are mistaken, we call that a “belief” even though you did not doubt it. You believe you know something without a doubt, but you are wrong. You do not know, and you should doubt your belief. But you would never describe it as a belief, because you do not believe you do not know for certain.
I’m confused. You don’t know that the sun will rise tomorrow - you believe it will. Science is our best guess at how the universe around us works. Geocentric was how we believed the universe worked until that theory was proven to be wrong.
You know the current theory, and based on that knowledge you can believe it will rise. There could be some phenomenon that will turn the sun dark for 7 days that is not part of the current model. It’s unlikely, but possible.
Knowledge is the understanding of that which will not change. Yes, you can modify the theory tomorrow but it will not be the same theory as today. That’s why it’s knowable
Anything is “possible”. Forecasts of the future can’t be 100%. But not everything is plausible. If you round to 100 significant figures, the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is 100%. You’ll never get to true 100%, past, present, or future. Even after watching something with your own eyes and watching the video documentation 100 times over. It’s “possible” someone faked the video, and eyewitness testimony is known to be incredibly bad evidence for a reason.
Knowledge is strongly backed by evidence. Belief ranges from “the evidence is inconclusive/not strong enough/doesn’t exist” to “the evidence can’t exist”.
knowledge is provable, repeatable, demonstratable. faith is by its very nature none of those.
Just to help, you can’t have knowledge about something that is based around faith. For example, the Bible requires faith for you to believe in God, however you can have extensive knowledge about what the Bible says without actually believing any of the religious bullshit.
One could argue that the more knowledge one has of the bible, the greater degree of faith one needs to believe in it.
At some point on that linear curve, a make or break decision needs to be made. Here, I made a graph:
indeed
But do you do any of this with what you “know”? Or do you choose to believe it because it is known?
i do what applies to events in my life and watch others do the rest snd use their examples to confirm or deny what has been posited
I’m a Marxist-Leninist, so the dialectical theory of knowledge. What starts as ideas are tested and confirmed or denied in reality, which then sharpens ideas to be retested and confirmed or denied in reality again, in a spiral. Ideas come from real, material conditions, and it is through this cycle that theory meets practice, sharpening each more effectively.
What about the ideas that can be neither confirmed nor denied like the existence of extraterrestrial life or a machine of 100% efficiency?
Why believe in it beyond the conception that it’s possible?
What’s Marxism have to do with it? Sounds exactly like the scientific method to me. Applying it to politics is an unnecessary step in this discussion.
How familiar are you with Dialectical Materialism? That’s a Marxist conception, very similar to the scientific method. Marx wasn’t just an advocate for Socialized production and eventually Communism out of any moral superiority to Capitalism, but because he apllied Dialectical and Historical Materialist analysis to Capitalism to predict where it was headed: monopoly and centralized syndicates, ripe for siezure and public planning.
The Dialectical theory of knowledge is similar to an endless refinement and spiral of the scientific method.
Not familiar at all, that’s why I asked! Thanks, I’ll have to read some.
My favorite primer is Elementary Principles of Philosophy, it’s great and starts from the very beginning.
I define it by whether something is independently verifiable.
I am told that there are 8* planets in our solar system, and where they are located. If I wanted to, I could buy a big telescope, point it at the sky and find all 8.
I am told that it is possible to boil water through nuclear fission. If I had the means, I could take a number of resources, spend decades researching nuclear physics, build my own test reactor, and verify that this is possible.
I am told that the earth is flat. I could get a pilots license, buy a plane, and fly to Antarctica to see the ice wall. I would find that there is no ice wall, just a number of scientists who are very passionate about ice samples. Therefore, it is not independently verifyable.
I don’t have the money to verify all of these claims, but they are all claims that have been verified by hundreds, if not thousands of independent people and organizations throughout history.
We just choose who to believe, I don’t KNOW how computers work, I’ve just chosen to believe it’s thinking sand and not some kind of ghosts/magic, I don’t even have tools or any other means to test it, I mean why we even trust those IT guys in the age of internet, when the access to knowledge is abundant it’s weird there’s no conspiracy theories about that, like we see now in all others domains, bunch of armchair specialists sitting in their parents basements knowing better than specialists about medicine, climate, earth shape and everything
Technology is magic. I know how to operate a lot of it, but I have no idea of the inner workings. I’m poking my fingers on a lighted piece of glass with liquid inside to type this message… And that works because some wizards a thousand miles away are using angry rocks to boil water to make domesticated lightning.
The veil lifts too easily and I hate it.
I don’t classify ideas in my head into those two categories like that. They are all beliefs. I have a sense of how confident I am of each idea. Like how surprised I would be if they were proved wrong. And I try to maintain awareness of why I have that confidence, like other beliefs that support it, evidence, etc.
That’s imperfect, like I can’t claim that there aren’t ideas that, if challenged, I’d think about what my supporting evidence is and come up with bupkis. Anything is up for doubt and reevaluation.
I feel pretty strongly that this is the right approach, and that people failing to have a similar approach is a serious problem in the world.
Belief doesn’t need confirmation, but knowledge assumes some confirmation.
I would say that beliefs are unprovable, and knowledge is provable. If I claim the sun will rise tomorrow, we can test that. If I claim god exists but is hiding, we cannot test that. The former is knowledge, the latter belief
Knowledge = Belief + Evidence
What really matters is how good of a critical thinker you are, and what you’ll accept as evidence, but if you’re decently educated, you should be able to manage it. The key is not accepting secondhand evidence from untrustworthy sources, and to seek firsthand evidence that you can see with your own eyes.
As for “Objective Truth”, that doesn’t exist. Not only are our experiences obligatorily filtered through our subjective human perceptions, but relativity allows for multiple conflicting truths to exist simultaneously in spacetime, so it literally can’t exist, and even if it could, we would be blind to it.
Degree of certainty is the difference
many are very certain in their beliefs though
That doesn’t make them correct. The strength of the belief has no bearing on reality unless it’s combined with evidence to warrant that belief.
Belief regards opinions, in which people have a free choice to accept or reject the idea. There is no notion of rightness or wrongness.
Knowledge regards conclusions from a set of axioms, in which people who accept the axioms are honor-bound to accept the conclusions. To reject the conclusion while accepting the axioms would be wrong.
In my life, this governs when I can freely choose and when I am obliged to accept a claim based on whether I’ve accepted previous claims.
So, if we haven’t studied the underlying axioms or foundation of a conclusion, we cannot have knowledge of it? That seems to imply the only things we have knowledge of are the things we have invested significant time and energy into. It’s that correct?
Id say thats quite obviously the way it works. How would you have knowledge on something if you havent researched it thoroughly? If you are just parroting what someone else told you its no better than hear-say.
You don’t need to study axioms in order to accept them, but once you accept them, then you must accept any soundly derived conclusion from them. Belief doesn’t need to be logically consistent, but knowledge does.
As for investing significant time and energy, I would say that that depends on things such as the length of the chain of reasoning or the difficulty/cost of testing a hypothesis or how closely observations match your intuition. Some knowledge is cheap to acquire, such as “the sun rises in the east”, because we can observe it directly and we can clearly identify the direction of east and the sun’s path in the sky is very stable from day to day.
Knowledge is what happens when you’ve evaluated enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that something is false. If you haven’t seen the evidence, but still think it’s true or false (you don’t lack belief), then you have a belief about it. As such, knowledge is a type of belief with extra justification.
If I’ve reviewed enough evidence I’m comfortable saying I can reject the null hypothesis, that is I have a belief that it’s knowledge, I’ll call it as such. If I haven’t, I’ll couch my confidence in my belief accordingly.
For me it’s the difference between a preponderance of evidence suggesting such, and something being applied and proven until any doubt is removed.
For example, I was trying to find studs in drywall recently (last house was plaster and lathe), and looking at things Socratically, I could use a stud finder but I might be drilling into conduit or a pipe. So I was like “I can use magnets to hit drywall screws to try to confirm the presence of a stud”, and it seems reasonable, but I’ve never attempted it in practice, and there could be all sorts of things a magnet could hit, since I’ve no experience with drywall, how close a steel pipe could be, any of that. So it’s a belief. It’d be rather arrogant of me to accept this as a reliable method without testing this method, drill through a pipe and wind up with egg on my face.
So, I tested this by getting two magnets to stick vertically, then measured 16" out, got 2 more magnets to stick vertically, kept doing that until I hit half a dozen spots, all 16" apart. Drilled a pilot hole, felt resistance and the smell of wood, drilled a couple more.
I think somewhere between mounting a flat screen to fixing 3 closet shelves it became knowledge, not sure exactly when, but all the doubts were removed and it never blew up in my face. I can just waltz in a room and sink a bunch of holes in the right spot now without being skeptical of some electronic stud finder.
I guess what I mean to say is that testing something and having it consistently work and be reproducible is what leads to knowledge imo
That is like the home owner’s application of the scientific method: test the hypothesis until you decide it is a pretty solid system
There is an overlap though, but first I’ll answer your question.
Belief is anything you take as a truth, often without any means of proof. There are conscious beliefs and I guess subconscious ones.
Knowledge is anything you are aware of; your personal recollection of life data.
Therefore anything you consciously believe in requires you to first acquire knowledge of it.
Things get complicated because we usually take in most knowledge as facts and truths, which means we believe in a lot of what we know. But it’s not easy to always know which knowledge actually doesn’t represent reality.
I think everyone inhabits a sort of superposition of all possible worlds consistent with their sensory observations. But there are some of those possible worlds with which we identify more strongly—where we feel more ourselves. So belief is a kind of probability multiplied by self-recognition.
For example: “We believe these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal”, etc.—it’s not an assertion of objective truth, it’s a declaration of which world we choose to live in.
So the stronger the feeling of identifying with a concept, the stronger the belief that it is true?
