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.
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 told 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
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.
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.
Keeping a close eye and tight rain on bias and fallacy, observation beats word of mouth. A peer-reviewed scientific study is exactly equal to observation.
Mathematical proof is also observation.
Lack of observation does not in any way indicate lack of truth. Because you feel or don’t feel some way and have or have not seen something happen to someone else in no way influences whether something actually happened to someone else. Our perception filters are incredibly bad.
Appeal to authority means very little as single people easily get biased. Discount anything said if the person telling you the truth stands to gain money power or time from it being believed.
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.
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 justified true belief.
You can’t know whether you have it or not.
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.
Huh. I guess I don’t categorize concepts like that… is it normal to? I believe what I think is true. The certainty of that belief depends on either my own knowledge of supporting facts; or the credibility of someone else’s knowledge in a field I’m not familiar with. If new knowledge reveals a belief to be incorrect, I recognize that at some point I succumbed to bullshit, and need to adjust my belief accordingly.
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.
Knowledge is evidence based and has certainty based off of repeatable observable data. Belief is educated hope, based on the unknown when compared to the known.
Belief doesn’t need confirmation, but knowledge assumes some confirmation.
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.
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’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.
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?
Degree of certainty is the difference
many are very certain in their beliefs though
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?
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.
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.
