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.
Knowledge can be externally verified by an independent party.
Belief can be corroborated but not verified.
I think this is a really interesting question. To me, if I hear a claim, I might say I accept it as knowledge or believe it as a worldview.
For example, I get irked by people asking if I “believe” in climate change. To me, it’s not a matter of belief: there is a body of knowledge being scrutinised by extraordinarily smart and talented people. I accept the existence of and need to mitigate climate change.
On the other hand, do I believe we’re not alone in the universe? I can’t rely on knowledge, it’s a lot of intuition.
I have seen a lot of scientific evidence that shows how life can form from natural processes. Using that and my understanding of evolution, I have little doubt that there is life on other planets. I’m also convinced that there exists what we would call intelligent life on other planets. When it comes to life that can traverse the universe I hesitate to have any confidense. If we find it to be possible, with warp technology or wormholes, then I will assume it could have been discovered somewhere else as well. The biggest hold up I have for such advanced species is the tendency for extinction from societal competition or extraplanetary forces from asteroids to star death.
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.
Belief is when a claim comes from a source I trust. In some cases, it’s a source I’m choosing to trust.
Like, my nephew is staying with me. He’s had meth issues in the past. His alternative is a shelter. He claims that he has a seizure disorder, and that puts me in a difficult spot because he says it gets worse on the street and also in shelters.
That’s pretty believable, but there’s a part of me that’s aware it could be a manipulation, this whole claim. I haven’t asked for evidence, despite the feeling of doubt.
This is a belief of mine. I am choosing to believe his claim.
If he were to show me authenticatable hospital paperwork documenting the seizure disorder, then it would be knowledge. Then I would know.
This is an example of the difference between the two in my own life right now. It’s a belief because to a certain degree I’m taking his word for it.
Incidentally this is the same way I think the word works in religion. People believe in God because they choose to. I feel like I know God exists, because I’ve encountered it during mushroom trips. But others, who haven’t had those direct contact experiences, believe.
There should be absolutely no room for any kind of personal distinction between the two.
Knowledge can be proven.
Faith/belief cannot be proven.
If you can prove something is real then you cannot believe in it.
I don’t believe the moon is real because I have knowledge that it is indeed real, and I can prove it by telling you to just look at it.
I cannot factually know that God doesn’t exist because I cannot prove that using any kind of experiment or test, so I cannot “know” that it’s true no matter how strong my belief in that statement is.
Any “personal definition” of either of those is factually wrong. If we could all walk around with our own personal meanings behind concepts we wouldn’t have a functional language.
As neat and tidy as your explanation is, I think you are vastly oversimplifying the concept.
You say the moon is real because you can see it, and you can prove it’s there by telling other people to just go look at it. Alrighty then, I’ve seen bigfoot. In fact, lots of people say they’ve seen bigfoot. Therefore he must exist too, right? The photos “prove” his existence just as much as you pointing to the sky saying the moon exists cause there it is.
Now, I realize that there’s probably some degree of hyperbole in your statement, so I’ll walk this back a little. If the defining metric of your separation between these concepts is whether the hypothesis can be proven through experimentation, that’s all well and good. However, I would argue that, in 99.9% of cases, it’s still a belief statement. Let’s continue with the moon example, but, rather than “seeing is knowing”, let’s apply the same standard that you applied to God. So, you “know” the moon exists, not just because you can see it, but because it’s existence can be empirically proven through experimentation. What sort of experiments would you conduct to do that, exactly? Have you done those experiments? Or, like the rest of the rational world, do you accept that scientists have done those experiments already and decided, yup, moon’s there? Cause, if you’re taking someone else’s word for it, do you personally “know” what they are saying is true, or do you believe them based upon their credentials, the credentials of those who support the argument, and your own personal beliefs/knowledge?
As another example, let’s imagine for a sec we’re philosophers/scientists of the ancient world. I have a theory that the heavier something is, the faster it will fall. You may know where I’m going with this if you remember your elementary school science classes. I believe in the power of experimental evidence, and so, to test my theory, I climb to the top of the Acropolis and drop a feather and a rock. The feather falls much more slowly than the rock. Eureka, I’ve proved my theory and therefore I now KNOW that an object’s weight affects its fall.
Now, anyone not born in 850 BC Athens in this thread will point out that it’s a flawed experiment, since I’m not controlling for air resistance, and if you conducted the same experiment in a vacuum chamber, both objects would fall at the the same rate. However, the technology to test my hypothesis with all of the salient variables controlled did not exist at that time. So, even though it’s now widely known that my experiment was flawed, it wouldn’t have been at the time, and I would have the data to back up my theory. I could simply say try it yourself, it’s a self-evident fact.
Finally, your statement about subjectivity of definition being an obstacle to functional language is so alarmist as to border on ridiculous. If this question were “how do you personally define the distinction between ‘yes’ and ‘no’”, then sure I can get on board a little bit more with your point. However this is much more like ‘twilight’ vs ‘dusk’. Crack open a dictionary and you’ll find that there is a stark, objective distinction between those terms, much as you pointed out that belief and knowledge have very different definitions. For the record, since I had to look it up to ensure I wasn’t telling tales here, sunset is the moment the sun finishes crossing the horizon, twilight is the period between sunset and dusk when light is still in the sky but the sun is not, and dusk is the moment the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. So, I know that these are unique terms with specific, mutually exclusive definitions. But let me tell you something, I believe that if I randomly substituted one term for another based purely on my personal whimsy, people are gonna get what I mean regardless.
That’s incredibly naive I’m afraid. This sort of logic works in very simple cases, but quickly breaks down in any complex scenario. The reality is that a lot of knowledge cannot be easily verified because it’s just too complex. Take a peer reviewed scientific study as an example, the study might reference a different study as its basis, that references another study, and so on. If one of the studies in the chain wasn’t conducted properly, and nobody noticed then the whole basis could be flawed. This sort of thing happens all the time in practice.
What you really have is an ideology, which is a set of beliefs that fit together and create a coherent narrative of how the world works. A lot of the knowledge that you integrate into your world view has various biases and interpretations associated with it. Thus, it’s not an absolute truth about the world, but merely an interpretation of it.
Saying something can be proven in principle isn’t very useful in practical terms. The fact of the matter is that the real world is simply too complex for the human mind to fully understand from first principles. Science is fundamentally about creating models of the world that are useful approximations of reality, it’s not a black and white thing. Asimov explains this well here https://mvellend.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/Asimov_anglosaboteurs.pdf
