Well, by not seeing evidence that it is useful.
Therefore, I have configured my best guess yet as, “It is not useful.”
Okay. Can you tell me what the difference is then, between belief and knowledge?
For me, there is very little, because I see knowing and believing as human actions, happening in one mind at a time. A claim of knowing is simply a stronger claim than a claim of believing.
Here’s an excerpt from an essay I once wrote:
I reckon that back in the day, we humans needed a word to express great certainty about something. A small wandering clan, parched and desperate for water, sent out two scouts. The first scout returned and said, “I believe there is water a half-day toward the blue mountains.”
But then the second scout walked up: “Wait. I know there is water a half-day toward those woods in the other direction.”
Which is fine and good and very useful in upping the odds that our ancestors would get to the water, thereby surviving and producing us—two urges which seem pretty important.
But is there actually any difference between knowing and believing? I mean, are we humans doing something different when we are knowing something as compared to when we’re only believing it?
I don’t see how. It seems like both actions are the same. Whether we are knowing or believing, we are feeling confidence that our conception of the world matches the external one. [end of excerpt]
In my years of debate, I engaged in several discussions of the JTB, and the point where many of my opponents disengaged was at this question: What is the difference between belief and knowledge?
All beliefs are justified, else we wouldn’t hold them. All are thought to be true, else we wouldn’t hold them.
Whether a formal definition of knowledge-as-distinct-from-belief is useful, I just don’t know. I’m not an epistemologist.
Anyway, we could clear away all this confusion and turmoil with one simple move: Appoint me as the chairman of the Justification Board. Then everything will make sense, and I will agree that beliefs must be justified in some exterior way.
So, you’ve said that there’s little to no difference between truth, knowledge, and belief.
That makes perfect sense given the way you use those terms.
1 Like
Thanks. I would only add the caveat, again, that the meanings of those terms often change depending on the communicative event of the moment, but I have no objection to your general statement regarding what is happening to us internally.
I don’t believe in prophets of God. I think we are apes who live in a dark and silent cave, trying to figure it out as best we can.
And I see your answer as just a little unclear. It isn’t that you “don’t know”, it’s that you CAN’T know, and neither can any other being.
That’s me. A man on the street. I have a lifelong interest in, and love for, philosophy and serious thought, but I have no academic qualifications in philosophy at all.
Yes, I would see it as an effort to persuade by asking an unanswerable question, so that your correspondents will realise this, and perhaps say so? 
Interesting. 
Yes, I agree, but with a little reservation. The meaning of words is ‘fixed’, in a general and approximate sense, by dictionaries etc. This enables others to learn and use our language for the purpose of communication. So words start off with meanings that are roughly “fixed”, and are then refined by temporally-local conversation and context. IMO.
Isn’t this an easy one? To avoid confusion — especially among philosophers, who are very prone to it 
— those words are usually employed to mean “something I HOPE is true” (belief), and “that which I KNOW to be true” (knowledge).
I understand that is your opinion. It is also my opinion.
But the gypsy lady disagrees. She has a justified true belief that Jones is correct about the lion.
We can argue with her, claiming her justification is bad and that there is no T in her JTB… but that’s just apes arguing with apes unless one of us is a prophet with an infallible view of reality.
Brother!
Yes, that’s close. But I did not realize that some folks could not let go of their sacred definition of knowledge, even for a moment. That was a surprise.
Sure. But you might be surprised how many seem to view the dictionary just as some see holy scripture. For those people, words mean what they mean–which is to say their favorite definition from their favorite dictionary. Some of them even think a word means the same in each and every instance.
The other issue is that all dictionaries are outdated by the time they are published. Lexicographers are watching us right now, noticing how we use our words, for the next (instantly outdated) edition.
And yet we have folks suggesting we study a 400-year-old French-language guy in order to figure out what knowledge and certainty mean to Americans in 2026.
I’m not sure I would agree about hope. If I believe that germs cause disease, I don’t hope they do.
And if I know that germs cause disease, it seems the same as believing it, except that I have greater certainty about it.
Is it true that germs cause disease? Well, those who embrace the scientific method as infallible will say so. But those who consult with their local witch doctor (who has a direct connection to the spirits of their ancestors) might know that bad karma is to blame for the chicken pox outbreak.
I would not tell the witch doctor that he only thinks he knows. I would tell him I think that he’s mistaken about reality.
What I find strange is the following statement: viz, “especially among philosophers,” because you’ve been doing philosophy from the very first post. Almost every belief system has philosophy built into it, so if philosophers are prone to it, then you’re prone to it.
Hey, Sam. I read @patternchaser as joking, but you raise an issue of some interest for me.
You may see ‘philosopher’ as having a clear meaning—equal to ‘serious thinker’—but I have suffered trauma at the hands of its ambiguity.
I met a guy socially, and we were talking. He asked me to define myself. “Of all the things you do, what is the one you use to define yourself?”
And I made the mistake of answering ‘philosopher’.
Well, this man had a degree in philosophy, and he became quite angry with me. He was outraged that I claimed to be a philosopher. He was angry at my use of the word.
It was an unpleasant event. We were grown men, and my mention of philosopher ripped a serious hole in the social fabric.
He saw ‘philosophers’ as ‘properly degreed humans in the academic field of philosophy.’ And he could not see it otherwise.
It’s my position that all language is ambiguous, and so I go around asking people questions about what they are trying to mean.
Some people move away from me on the bench when I do that, but that’s where I am with language.
Ya, there are philosophers who think that to call yourself a philosopher you need one credential or another. My contention is that we’re all philosophers to one degree or another, you can’t escape it. If you have a political view, an ethical view, a view that says something about how to raise your child, then for better or worse you’re doing philosophy. The only question is whether you’re doing it well or not. So, we come back to my view that we’re all philosophers on some level.
As for the vagueness of language it doesn’t follow from that fact that we can’t be sure of what we’re saying in a particular context. It just means we have to work at being precise with our words. On the other hand, language works perfectly well given all this, we don’t need mathematical precision, which just need a better view of how language works, and more specifically, how meaning works within various linguistic settings.
What do you mean by “regarding what is happening to us internally”?
I was attempting to make sense of how you have said that there’s little to no difference between truth, knowledge, and belief.
Here, it seems you may be focusing upon the unshakable conviction or perhaps the degree of certainty that an individual has while they make claims of truth, knowledge, or belief.
Yes, I agree. The problem comes at the claim. Do I consider myself a lover of knowledge? Well, yes. I’ve spent my life trying to figure out this place in which some Jokester placed me while withholding the handbook. Do I have a proper degree from an accredited university with the word ‘philosophy’ on it? Nope. I pursued my love of knowledge through general studies with a focus in linguistics.
Am I a philosopher? Well, it’s only a word. I don’t know God’s Opinion as to whether it legitimately names me, but I feel like a philosopher.
Plus, I’m pretty sure Plato and Aristotle didn’t have degrees, and yet most everyone calls them philosophers. I’ve got a common-usage argument.
So it seems to be a social issue more than anything. I wish I’d known that before I fell for that guy’s labeling trap. I would have avoided the word altogether.
I have thought a little bit about meaning. As best I can conceive of it, it is some kind of dance between concepts and words. We have a pile of words in our heads, and we arrange them to best express the concept we think we’re feeling. But the concept probably couldn’t exist in the first place without the words being there already. Something like that, is how I think of it.
Which is why I see humankind as progressing. In my own lifetime, I’ve seen new concepts built atop concepts which didn’t even exist when I was younger.
There are many ways to say the same thing. I use ‘the guys in the back room’ to think about the unconscious mind, for example, but I’ve never heard anyone else using that metaphor. So when I use it, sometimes I have to unpack it for the listener.
So I am never quite sure that I’m properly expressing my thoughts.
But many others seem quite certain not only that they’ve converted their thoughts into clear words, but that the other guy is either dishonest or stupid for not seeing that clear meaning.
I think we are just apes, trying to get our interiors into the interiors of other apes.
Here is a question that might clarify the whole issue. I’ve asked it earlier in the thread, but no one has yet answered it.
‘To know’ is a verb.
I say that when we humans are knowing, we are experiencing great psychological certainty. What do you say we are doing when we are knowing?
What different thing happens in the human mind when it is knowing vs. when it is believing?
If you’ll answer that question, I think we might be able to get to the heart of things.
And I appreciate you asking. Was there anything you didn’t understand about my answers?
OK. But I have to say that your use of the word ‘here’ perplexes me.
It was the point of the original question:
If Smith knows there is a lion but Jones knows there is no lion, which one really knows?
Or in your preferred language: If Smith holds great certainty that there’s a lion, and Jones holds great certainty that there’s no lion, which one of them owns the truth (reality) of the lion?
Research freely. Which one of them owns the reality of the lion?
I didn’t ask you what the difference was between knowing, believing, and truth.
To quite the contrary, I asked what the difference was between truth and knowledge, and knowledge and belief.
Truth… things believed with psychological certainty.
Knowledge… things believed with psychological certainty.
Belief… things believed with (slightly less) psychological certainty.
So now that I’ve answered, would it be possible for you to answer my bolded and italicized question from my last message?
What different thing happens in the human mind when it is knowing vs. when it is believing?
For the sake of charitable reading, and quibbles about defining a term by using it set aside, I’m pretty sure we both hold that the certainty between one who believes A(believing) and one who knows A(knowing) is basically identical.
That’s completely irrelevant to the differences between truth, knowledge, and belief, despite your penchant for treating them as equal.
The logical consequences of using the terms “truth”, “knowledge”, and “belief” the way you are include not being able to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not. If what you say were true, ignorance and knowledge are equivalent, as is truth and falsehood. We all know they’re not(assuming sanity).
The difference between knowing A and believing A is not rightly understood in just terms of one’s certainty. It’s also understood in terms of truth. One cannot know A unless A is true, whereas A’s truth is not at all necessary for believing that A is true.
One can be absolutely certain that A is true, and A could be false, nonetheless. Truth cannot be false. Hence, truth is not equivalent to or accurately described by “things believed with psychological certainty”. The same holds good regarding knowledge. In fact, I would even take that one step further and say that not all belief is accurately described by that.
Knowledge claims? Sure. That description fits well enough. ‘Truth’ claims? Sure. That description fits well enough.