What is the difference between belief and knowledge

As long as a particular belief is justified, it is considered to be knowledge. Cite APA 7 Franscisco,. Differences Between Belief and Knowledge. Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects. MLA 8 Franscisco,. Belief in the religious sense generally means Blind belief without supporting certified facts.

It appears that most people cannot or will not get past this point, either through successful indoctrination or fear. Plus there is the comfort factor which backscup the belief. Freud called this Wish fulfillment! Those fortunate to apply critical thinking plus logic, get past this point and embrace life with a new energy and enjoyment.

To throw off the shackles of indoctrination is empowerment indeed! Why is the philosophical definition of belief differ from the common academic version? Why does the same seem to equate knowledge with truth which is different from the common definition? Why is knowledge equated with justification? Name required. Email required. Please note: comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment.

There is no need to resubmit your comment. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. The propositions we believe about an entity may be very numerous, and it might be that all of them are true. Still, such belief is a poor substitute for knowledge by acquaintance, though better than nothing. It is indeed a third best. The second best, in this case, is knowledge by description. But sometimes we only believe that there is something to which such and such a description applies; and even when we do know this, we may only believe and not know that there is only one thing to which the description applies.

It may well be that much of the knowledge by description which we ordinarily claim to have is belief rather than knowledge, if only because so much of it depends on testimony 1 , spoken or written, and the reliability of the testimony is often taken for granted without much or any investigation. We often believe that p , when we do not know that p is true. I cannot know that William will answer my letter by return of post.

I cannot even know that he will get it. But I believe that he will. The post office is a fairly efficient organization, though not infallible. I also believe that he will answer by return of post, because I asked him to; he is a kind-hearted person and businesslike rather than otherwise. Of course, he may be ill or incapacitated or away from home; but if he were, the chances are that I should have heard about it.

So I can believe with some confidence, though not with complete conviction, that he will answer my letter by return of post, and that his answer will reach me at breakfast time on the day after tomorrow. This belief, though inferior to the knowledge I should like to have, is much better than nothing.

It gives me some guidance in my inferences and my actions. I do not just have to wait and see, although my plans are made with some reservations. It is true that in the practical sphere, as in the cognitive, there is a contrast between knowing and making a mistake.

Moreoever, in both spheres alike one may forget what one formerly knew, and in both alike the forgetting may be either permanent or temporary. A man may forget how to tie a bow-tie, though he once knew how to do it.

Or on a particular occasion, when he is ill or in a great hurry or very tired, he cannot remember how to do it, though ordinarily he can. But there is no contrast here between knowing and believing. But this is a case of believing that. He believes that the correct way of doing it is so-and-so. Or he might answer, more oddly. He believes that he has acquired a certain sort of skill or proficiency, but he is not quite sure that he has.

Does Watson know how to get an aircraft out of a spin? No, not quite, but he has some idea how to do it.

Having an idea how to do something might be described as an imperfect or half-baked skill. It has the same practical character which knowing how has. Like knowing how, it manifests itself in actual performances, but not all of them are successful. If a person has some idea how to get out of a spin, without knowing how to, he will get out of it on three occasions out of five, perhaps, but on the other two he will only be saved from death by the intervention of the instructor.

And even on the three more fortunate occasions, he will probably make some bungling movements with the control stick or the rudder-pedal before success is achieved. A man who knows how to do something may be quite unable to tell us, or himself, how he does it. When a skill is only half-learned, we are more likely to give ourselves verbal instructions.

But still, it need not be. The beginner in bicycling has difficulty in learning to mount his bicycle. If all goes well, a time comes when he succeeds more often than not. We then say he has some idea how to do it, and so does he. But he is very unlikely to be able to describe the bodily movements and muscular adjustments that he makes. It corresponds rather to the relation between knowing all about something and knowing a little about it. I believe it will be raining by lunchtime to-day, and in fact the weather remains fine for the rest of the week.

If rain had begun to fall at 2. But when a man has some idea how to do something, he is not completely devoid of skill, and his performances are not wholly different from those of the man who knows how to do it. What he does is not wholly wrong; it is only partly wrong, even though he may not succeed in achieving the end he aimed at.

But some of our beliefs are wholly wrong. It is also a complex and baffling one. We shall have to discuss it in detail later. Surely believing in fairies amounts just to believing that there are fairies, and believing in the possibility of interplanetary travel is just believing that interplanetary travel is possible? It becomes more obvious if we consider another example, believing in representative government. This does not consist merely in believing that there is such a form of government.

It is a valuational attitude as well. The belief in Winston Churchill which most Englishmen had during the Second World War existed in those who knew him by acquaintance as well as in those who did not. It may be, however, that many of those who know a person only by description may believe in him firmly, while those who know him by acquaintance have little belief in him or none at all.

Probably the Duke of Monmouth was in this unfortunate situation in and it helped to make his rebellion the tragic failure that it was. It seems, then, that there is no neat and tidy way of contrasting belief in a person with knowledge of him by acquaintance.

Until we have considered these distinctions, we do not clearly understand what question we are trying to answer. Perhaps we can now formulate it a little more clearly.

Now this distinction, if applicable at all, applies both to knowledge and to belief. In both cases alike it is a highly controversial one, and in both the controversy is important. The difference between the traditional occurrence analysis of belief and the modern dispositional analysis is indeed one of the main themes of these lectures.

It cuts across many other distinctions too, for example that between hope and fear, or between love and hate. We might say that its domain is hardly narrower than the whole of the philosophy of mind. They may be tabulated thus:. As we saw, we are accustomed to contrast belief with knowledge, and to think of it as an inferior substitute for knowledge. Believing a person is not contrasted with knowing him by acquaintance, as considerations of syntactical symmetry might lead us to expect.

Then, in its turn, this knowledge that a certain description applies to one and only one entity is contrasted with the belief that it so applies, which is a third best. The conclusion suggested by our discussion is this. When we enquire into the relation between belief and knowledge, we are mainly concerned with the relation between belief that and knowledge that.

What are we to say about it? We may begin our discussion with a platitude, since one of the chief occupational hazards of a philosopher is neglect of the obvious. If someone knows that p , then p is true. Of course, he may say he knows this, or claim to know it, or others may say of him that he knows it, and p may nevertheless be false. But if he—or anyone else—does know that p , this entails that p is true. But believing that p does not have these consequences. And no matter how many people believe that p , p may still be false.

Might it be that p is not even false? It is not easy to see how anyone could. For surely there would be nothing to believe? Moreover, there seems to be some sense in which we can sincerely claim to believe a proposition which we do not in fact believe, as we can sincerely claim to know what we do not in fact know.

There are some awkward questions here which we shall have to consider later. But we may neglect them now, because they are not very relevant to our present topic. Let us assume that our believer really does believe what he says he believes and that what he believes is at least false not meaningless.

The important point at present is that it need not be true, no matter how firmly he believes it, not even if everyone else believes it too. It is also important to point out that reasonable beliefs are no exception to this rule. Reasonable beliefs may perfectly well be mistaken. A reasonable belief is one which is in accordance with the evidence. If the relevant facts which are known to me are more favourable to p than to not p , then it will be reasonable for me to believe p. But unless the evidence is conclusive i.

Before Australia was discovered, for example, it was reasonable for Europeans to believe that all adult swans are white. They had a good deal of evidence for believing so. Please send us your submission at alochonaa gmail. Categories: philosophy. Tagged as: belief , knowledge , truth. I think truth is unattainable although it should be the goal when seeking knowledge.

I think knowledge is human theories involving observation and experimentation to explain problems and find answers to human curiosity, but it is far from what reality is in actuality. I think belief is the logical outcome of our experiences with nature where we try to understand what we are doing here and our surroundings but cannot as human beings or have not as yet worked out how to understand or even lazy about making an effort to explain, from big to small, phenomena that are part of our lives as individuals and groups.

In other words, it seeks to understand how theory of knowledge is related to political theory. However, the question is, is it important to have knowledge of such a relationship? The answer seems to be an obvious yes. The value in having this knowledge comes from the need to know, on the one hand, the basis on which a political theory is looked on as the most appropriate, or the best, or the only one suitable for the political organisation of society, and, on the other, the mechanism of the human epistemic process which produced the theory.

Consider the case of Marxism, for example, the justification for its political programme comes from the perceived ability of human beings to have knowledge of social developments and the historical destiny, through an analysis of concrete economic and survival activities of human beings.

Ultimately, evidently, the political programmes of Marxism are justified on epistemological grounds, namely, through the human ability to know and the extent of what can be known. This means that the credibility of a political theory depends on the validity of the epistemology from which it receives its justification. On the other hand, if a political theory, based on an invalid epistemology, is implemented, then, this may not only produce results not intended, but generate disastrous consequences, as argued by Karl Popper against the political theory of Marxism.

One reason why Marxism was said to have failed and did so badly, was because it did not have any foundation in human knowledge.

This means that, without a theory of knowledge to back up a political theory, there can be no way of knowing why a particular political theory, rather than an alternative one, should be chosen. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Like this: Like Loading Categories: philosophy Tagged as: belief , knowledge , truth.

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