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.
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.
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.
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.
But do you do any of this with what you “know”? Or do you choose to believe it because it is known?
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’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. Marx wasn’t just an advocate for Socialized production and eventually Communism out of any moral superiority to Capitalism, but because he applied 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.
What about the ideas that can be neither confirmed nor denied like the existence of extraterrestrial life or a machine of 100% efficiency?
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
