Epistemology is the topic in Philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and how we can know. Of course, epistemologists are those that think, reason, and argue about it.
Among epistemologists, a popular definition of knowledge is justified (or justifiable) true belief. As should be expected, this is not without controversy.
Many people have confusion between belief and knowledge. Such people think that if they are very confident in a belief, then they know what is believed. It should be obvious that this is a very poor definition of knowledge: how many times have we thought we knew something, that turned out to be false?
Others have a distrustful connotation with belief, that it is something that is assumed, or unjustified, just received on trust, or something merely guessed. Many such people will say, “I don’t believe this; I know it.” or “this is not a belief; it is a conclusion.”
If they mean they actually don’t believe, or are claiming to not merely believe, can be difficult to interpret. I hope to leave any readers of this with clear understanding of belief and related states, in interest of clear communications.
Believing is assigning the value True to an assertion, claim, conclusion, creed, dogma, guess, hypothesis, idea, proposition, report, revelation, supposition, theory, thesis, and such-like. Despite my overly enthusiastic listing of near-synonyms, it’s just that simple. If a concept is felt or thought to be true, it is believed. And belief is the act of believing, but a belief is something that is believed.
Additional confusion is introduced by associating faith, or trust, with belief. Some people, when they trust some news, especially in religious contexts, or in parody of those, will say, “I believe!” However, their exuberance is body language expressing their trust, or their enthusiasm.
Update: I will discuss other issues with belief, such as how voluntary it is, and ethics concerning it in a later post. I also have some minor edits, adding a link, inserting an article, and a sentence.
I will save discussion of Truth, being True, and justification, and faith, for other posts.
Thank you for your attention.
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