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How do you differentiate between knowledge and belief? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by an_onanist@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] jbrains@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] an_onanist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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?

[–] jbrains@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

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.