Is belief equivalent to knowledge?

I do not believe in the tooth fairy but I know the little guys in my family will enjoy the illusion of her existence for several more years.

I know that people with a multitude of different belief systems co-exist, sometimes badly and sometime surprisingly harmoniously

Isn’t “belief” how we describe the positions of other people, and “knowledge” how we describe our own?

I often use the two words interchangable, as in I believe it’s too hot outside today.

Knowledge can be created in many ways. The most commonly accepted way is through the scientific method. However, certain people believe that knowledge can be found in books that are true. They believe these trues are true, and thus they accept the knowledge to be as much knowledge as knowledge created through the scientific method is thought to be knowledge.

So I would say that for some people, belief is a good enough proof of knowledge. It is not for me. I have a more rigorous standard for knowledge. I think the scientific method provides us with more accurate knowledge than any other way of gaining knowledge.

I would say any knowledge acquired outside of first hand experience is based on some level of belief or another.

I just heard a radio interview of someone attending a Romney rally. She said she didn’t like the way Obama was taking the work requirement out of welfare. The reporter pointed out to her that every single fact-checking organization had found this assertion by Romney to be an outright lie. She then said “Well, I just believe Romney, and I don’t believe Obama”.

I think that sums it up pretty well: people have an overarching worldview based on feeling and conviction, and only “facts” that fit in nicely with that belief system get certified as “knowledge”.

”...certain people believe that knowledge can be found in books that are true. They believe these trues are true, and thus they accept the knowledge to be as much knowledge as knowledge created through the scientific method is thought to be knowledge.”

I know I don’t understand those two sentences. I believe that @wundayatta can rewrite them so that I will.

Belief is complete and certain about things that cannot be known. Knowledge is partial and tentative about things that can be known and so we need them both.

No need for a prolonged debate here, it is simple imo: Belief is belief – truth is irrelevant when you are convinced you are right. Unless used to point you to the right conclusions in which case your beliefs change… at least for some people that’s true.

I can refuse to believe in gravity, but it will still hold me down to the planet despite my best efforts. I think some people confuse belief with truth. You can believe in something true, but believing it doesn’t make it true.

@fremen_warrior—Isn’t that simply what you believe about it? Good point about a believers certainty though!—
@flutherother Great point about knowledge being tentative!
@thorninmud We choose what we believe, no doubts there! But can we choose what we know?

Belief is believing in something that isn’t necessarily true.
Knowledge is information gained from either your own experiences, or other people’s experiences. Both can be based on truth, or fiction.

@MilkyWay Isn’t second-hand experience something that you have to believe in anyways?

@ninja_man haha I knew someone was going to point this out. Yes, I believe it is ;-)

Hell if we take this argument further, you could say that science is a sort of religion – you have to take the word of certain experts from time to time as you cannot be an expert in everything there is to know about the world. Soo you believe them to be right.

@ninja_man Both can be based on truth, or fiction.
Sure. The other person’s experience can be based on fiction.

Belief and and knowledge are not the same, but using the words believe and know in a sentence is practically interchangeable. When someone believes something it almost doesn’t matter whether it is true or not objectively, the point is from their perspective they think it is true. I do use the terms slightly differently. I use believe when I am willing to say I might be incorrect, but this is the way I understand something to be. “I know” is more emphatic.

So let’s say, person A says something and person B, hearing the report, says that it’s true. Does that mean B believes or knows? Just to make it concrete, I’ll give examples of things A might say.

We have found the Higgs Boson in the data generated by CERN.

The Lord has spoken to me, and directed each of you kill his own first born.”

Birds descended from reptiles, not mammals.

We have produced sustainable cold fusion in the laboratory, proving that cold fusion is possible.

The Lord has spoken to me and given me these ten commandments to pass on. They are the word of God, and you must obey them.”

I love you, but I’m not in love with you.

You believe everything you know, but you don’t know everything you believe. Knowledge is factive—you cannot know something that is false. You can say that you know something false, but the discovery that it is false is sufficient for demonstrating that you never really knew it. Belief, however, is not factive. You can believe something that is false, and discovering that it is false—though hopefully causing you to discard the belief from that point forward—does not demonstrate that you never really believed it.

@SavoirFaire Quite logical!

@SavoirFaire Does your position dictate that we never say, “I know,” “he knows,” or even “science knows,” since anything may be disproved in the future?

@6rant6 No. For while we cannot know anything false, we can know true things without being certain they are true. Furthermore, there is a pragmatic reason for making ascriptions of knowledge in the absence of certainty. These are both reasons to favor fallibilism over skepticism.

I believe it will rain tomorrow. I know it rained yesterday.

To be meaningful a belief must be translatable into an action. If I believe that something is a door, then I may try to open it. If you claim to believe that God created the Universe then you are talking nonsense, since this supposed belief can not be translated into an action.

Knowledge is that subset of beliefs that can, directly or indirectly, be shown to correctly translate into actions.

@SavoirFaire Are you now equating “I know” with “I’m pretty darned sure?”

In English, doesn’t this: “making ascriptions of knowledge in the absence of certainty” mean, “saying I know when I don’t really know”?

@LostInParadise “To be meaningful a belief must be translatable into an action.”

I believe you are wrong. Not that I can do anything about it…

^^I know that I agree with you, this time.

Unless you can translate your supposed belief in my wrongness into an action, it does not even count as a belief.

@6rant6 Again, no. You are conflating separate philosophical issues. The question of what constitutes knowledge is distinct from the question of when we are justified in ascribing knowledge. Indeed, the same argument that I used to distinguish knowledge and belief can be used to distinguish knowledge from being “pretty darned sure.” Knowledge is factive—you cannot know something that is false. You can say that you know something false, but the discovery that it is false is sufficient for demonstrating that you never really knew it. Being “pretty darned sure,” however, is not factive. You can be “pretty darn sure” of something that is false, and discovering that it is false—though hopefully causing you to discard your conviction from that point forward—does not demonstrate that you were never “pretty darned sure” of it.

“Making ascriptions of knowledge in the absence of certainty” only means “saying I know when I don’t really know” if we are infallibilists about justification. But there is no reason to be an infallibilist about justification. Indeed, the infallibilist cannot even defend his own position because every argument for fallibilism is a reason to be uncertain about infallibilism—thus making infallibilism in need of rejection on the infallibilist’s own terms. The skeptic embraces this result, of course, as he wishes to suspend judgment about everything. The fallibilist, however, is in a position to say that one can know without being certain. It’s just a condition on knowledge that what is known is true despite the fact that we might not be certain of its truth. This is part of the explanation for why ascriptions of knowledge are acceptable in the absence of certainty.

@LostInParadise It seems to me that your “translatable into an action” claim is either trivially true or patently false. Every belief can be translatable into the action of professing the belief. Moreover, your specific example of believing that God created the universe is translated into action all the time: worship. If these actions count, then your claim is trivially true. If they do not count, however, then it is patently false. Any account of belief that denies people believe in God rejects a central part of the phenomenon up for explanation and therefore cannot possibly be correct.

I do not say that people cannot believe in God. For example, a belief in the power of prayer is manifested in the action of praying. The belief that God created the Universe, however, has no such manifestation. There is no course of action that I can take that will distinguish a belief that God created the Universe from a belief that God did not create the Universe.

In general, moral beliefs differ from factual beliefs. You cannot verify the truth of a moral belief. If I believe that something is a door, the validity of this can be ascertained by being able to open it. If I believe that some particular act is moral, there is no corresponding way of verifying its truthfulness. Nevertheless, moral belief is manifested in action. A person’s morality follows from what a person does. Do as I say, not as I do, is hypocrisy. My morality is not what I say that should be done. It is what I do.

@LostInParadise The ability to verify a belief is not the same as holding a belief. Indeed, holding a belief is a prerequisite for verifying it. Otherwise, you are verifying something other than a belief, if you are even verifying anything at all (as opposed to, say, discovering it). What people have responded to is your assertion that something does not even count as a belief unless it can be translated into an action. Verification is quite irrelevant to that claim.

I agree that verification stands apart from belief. That does not alter the fact that belief translates into action. If I believe that morality derives from what is written in the Bible, the extent of my belief is ascertained by the extent to which I follow the what is written. If I believe that God can answer prayers then I will perform the action of prayer. If I believe that moral behavior leads to salvation then I will act morally. There is, however, nothing that I can do that can translate into action a belief that God created the Universe. It is completely irrelevant to whether or not God can answer prayers.

no.

Plato said that knowledge is justified true belief. There is, of course, disagreement.

@LostInParadise I have already given an example of how a belief that God created the universe might translate into action. You have said nothing to undermine that example. If you have nothing to offer but argument by assertion fallacies, then I see no reason why I should not continue to hold that your thesis is either trivially true or patently false.

Worship is just words. Words are not a good test of belief. I can say that I believe in anything, but that does not mean that I believe it. I could be a hypocrite. Only by my actions do I affirm belief. As they say, actions speak louder than words. In the case of believing that God created the Universe, there are no actions that differentiate belief from non-belief. It is nothing more than a manner of speaking.

@LostInParadise Worship may also be based on other things – gifts, service, etc. The part of worship that counts is the intent behind it, not its form.
Your actions and character affirm your belief, and your belief may produce them, but they do not determine your belief. What matters is the actual relationship, not how it looks to others. It is worth noting here that you can believe in God but also not want anything to do with Him. Not the best course of action, but there are people like that out there.

@LostInParadise Then your claim is patently false. “Belief” is simply what we call a particular phenomenon, of which “belief that God created the universe” is a paradigm instance. That this counts as a belief is fundamental data on which any theory of belief must incorporate, and that no proper theory of belief can deny without suffering from self-refutation. QED.

I think we are at an impasse. If a “particular phenomenon” exists only in words, it is devoid of meaning. It has no referent, nothing that can alter our perceptions. It is what Wittgenstein referred to as “bewitchment of thought by language.”

I suspected that (a misinterpretation of) old Ludwig was lurking behind your position. That is not, however, what Wittgenstein means by “the bewitchment of thought by language.” Nor does the private language argument support the idea that beliefs must be translatable into external actions beyond assertion to count as beliefs. Wittgenstein does not deny that there are things that go on inside our heads, after all, but only that they can be both real and inexpressible/incommunicable. Making an assertion is an expression/communication of a belief, so there is nothing in Wittgenstein’s thought that suggests such beliefs are unreal or meaningless.

Regardless, worship is not just words (as @Nullo points out). Belief that God created the universe can manifest in actions beyond saying “I believe that God created the universe.” It can even result in actions beyond arguing about whether or not God created the universe (which I suspect you might dismiss as “just more words”). People have been killed over both the assertion and the denial of claims like “the Christian God created the universe” by those who held the opposite belief. Surely this is a radical enough action to count as more than just words?

Don’t you think it rather sad that people are killed over their manner of speaking, which, in the final analysis is what differences in religious belief ultimately boil down to.

How can we refer to a belief that is incommunicable? “Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent.”

@LostInParadise Yes, it is rather sad that people are killed over their religious beliefs. But those killings are still actions, which is the point relevant to our actual topic. I am not sure that they boil down to different manners of speaking, however, as those beliefs refer to different understandings of the metaphysics of the universe. One belief says “the universe is like this,” while the opposite belief says “no, the universe is like this.”

When we realize that, we can see other actions that said beliefs inspire. A great deal of medieval science was the result of people trying to find empirical evidence that the world was like their beliefs predicted it should be. To this day we have arguments with regard to what our findings tell us about the feasibility of various religious and non-religious models of the universe (where those models include both physical and metaphysical elements).

Finally, I agree that we cannot refer to a belief that is incommunicable. I never said otherwise. What I noted was that what Wittgenstein was discussing is not comparable to any of the examples I have given here. The beliefs you questioned and for which my examples were designed are communicable. So while the whereof/thereof dictum may be perfectly sound, it is not applicable to this conversation as of yet.

The action of religious fighting does not follow directly from the religious statements. If one person says that Jesus is the son of God and another says that the Koran was dictated to Mohamed, the disagreement provides no justification for combat. Neither person’s beliefs poses a threat to the other, especially since both people profess to believe the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule and love for one’s neighbor. The fighting certainly does not relate to the statement that God created the Universe, since both combatants are in agreement on this point.

@LostInParadise Differences in religion do not come down to word-play. Compare Yaweh to Kali, for instance, and you’ll see that there’s a fair amount of difference – real difference, not semantic – between the two.

@LostInParadise No actions follow directly from statements. This, indeed, is one of the upshots of David Hume’s work. Actions are the result of a combination of beliefs and motivations (which may themselves be based on beliefs). No action follows from the belief “a bus is coming toward me at 75 miles per hour.” It is only in combination with other beliefs (e.g., “if the bus continues to come at me at 75 miles per hour, it will hit me” and “if the bus hits me while going 75 miles per hour, I will die”) and motivations (e.g., “I do not want to die”) that any given belief can produce an action.

Moreover, your own argument acknowledges the separateness of beliefs and actions. That is the consequence of saying that actions follow from or must be translatable into actions for them to be meaningful. Leaving aside that this is an unsupported assertion on your part so far—particularly since the Wittgensteinian argument you attempted to invoke in fact supports my counterargument—the in principle separability of beliefs from actions suggests that there could be beliefs without actions. The most obvious example is when a belief causes us to refrain from doing something.

Perhaps you would reply that omissions are actions. I would, as it turns out, agree. I do not believe that omissions are of a different kind than actions (but rather that they are a different kind of action). But if this is so, then we again can see a flaw in the rather two-dimensional account of action that you have given to us so far (where “action” seems to refer to intentional physical activities involving movement, but for some reason excluding talking—despite the fact that talking is a rather complicated procedure, especially assertions). If omissions are actions, I can manifest my beliefs by sitting still.

Finally, I wonder if you are equally willing to say of non-religious beliefs what you are willing to say about religious beliefs. Is it meaningless to say (or believe) that one up quark and two down quarks make up a neutron? I cannot imagine any action that said belief would cause me to undertake, yet it is part of a rather important knowledge structure. You might suggest that the belief could lead to certain actions in a particle physicist, but would that mean that the exact same belief—by which I mean content, not just words—can be meaningless when expressed by one person but meaningful when expressed by another person (even when both people have the same reasons for holding the belief)?

Beliefs are not the same as actions, but they can be translated into actions. There is no contradiction in saying that a combination of beliefs is required to determine an action. It still follows that an alteration of any of the beliefs in the combination will result in a different type of action.

I am not going to pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but the belief in the existence of quarks was conjectured from experimental results and verified by predicting other experimental results, belief translated into action.

There has been some criticism of string theory that it has not been experimentally verified. The complaint has been made that physics has become a kind of mathematical beauty contest, where the winning theory is the one that is judged most elegant. It is my understanding that the CERN super-collider is supposed to be able to test at least some parts of string theory.

A relevant quote from Sartre:
There is no reality except in action.

@LostInParadise The quote, on its own, is argument from authority. What’s the argument for it? Regardless, assertion is an action. People tend to forget how much is involved in making assertions. It is a way of putting oneself on the line. There are norms of assertion, and asserting something commits us to actions such as defending what we have asserted. Why thought and speech should be considered so lowly makes no sense to me.

I accept that beliefs, as latent mental states, are not themselves actions. I have not once said otherwise. The problem comes when you claim—without argument, no less—that asserting is not an action. You tried to use Wittgenstein as your support for this, but misinterpreted Wittgenstein’s argument. He, in fact, disagrees with you completely. So again: what can you say by way of defense of your basic claim?

This is particularly important given that everything you say about quantum mechanics in response to my earlier question can be said about religious beliefs. As mistaken as I think they are, it is still the case that religious beliefs are early attempts to explain observations about the world. Religious practices are just as much beliefs translated into action as science is on your account. As such, I still have no reason to accept your claim.

In one sense, saying anything at all has to be regarded as an action, including the burbling of infants. However, for a statement to be meaningful, for it to have some real world referent,. it must suggest some form of interaction. Otherwise we are discussing the equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I take this to be common sense freed of the bewitchment of language. The quote I give from Sartre is used as a nicely stated expression of my belief and not as proof of its truth, as well as showing that I am not alone in my thinking.

What distinguishes quantum mechanics from religion is that the statements point to reproducible results. What is an experiment after all but a highly specified action? As I pointed out, string theory has come under criticism for being like religion in not making verifiable statements. There is a book that reflects this point of view, reflected in its title Not Even Wrong.