Belief, confidence, knowledge and counting gumballs

[Curious George]

Its something your born with. There is one inherent FAITH everyonelse must get through love and friendship.

I am not quite sure how that relates to tje OP. Could you elaborate?

 

[Brickjectivity]

Why do you think action is necessary for belief.

You haven't really explained what kniwledge is if it is not justified true belief. You have said it is justified but that is all.

Knowledge is information you have access to. It could be information in your brain, or it could be something you are seeing or the book in your hand. It could be correct or incorrect knowledge but knowledge.

Belief is not required to know information. "Ow that hurt" is not belief. You can know things but not believe them and believe things but not know them. Belief is imaginative and creative. Its in same area as creativity, courage, curiosity and effort. It can be that you want something to be true and choose to believe that it is.

 

[Curious George]

You can know things but not believe them

Can you?

In your example of ow that hurts, are you suggesting it would be possible to believe that that doesn't hurt?

 

[MonkeyFire]

I am not quite sure how that relates to tje OP. Could you elaborate?

You can't acquire faith. Its something you do.

 

[Brickjectivity]

Can you?

In your example of ow that hurts, are you suggesting it would be possible to believe that that doesn't hurt?

Let me quote the OP:

What constitutes belief. How we acquire belief. How we distinguish belief from knowledge. How we distinguish belief from non-belief.

If you are looking for definitions of belief then I have provided one that suits my opinion. "Ow that hurts" is knowledge requiring no belief on your part, because it just hurts. You could believe that it doesn't hurt though. That would take effort. Some people do that, and apparently they can make things seem to hurt less by doing so. Next time you bang your head on a kitchen cabinet try saying "That doesn't hurt!" Maybe it will help. Maybe it won't, but it will be belief (by this definition).

The kind of belief I am talking about takes effort. I realize lots of people think belief is passive. Maybe there is some sort of passive believing, but its not the same thing. When you believe in something purposely its just not the same as accepting something passively.

 

[Curious George]

Let me quote the OP:

If you are looking for definitions of belief then I have provided one that suits my opinion. "Ow that hurts" is knowledge requiring no belief on your part, because it just hurts. You could believe that it doesn't hurt though. That would take effort. Some people do that, and apparently they can make things seem to hurt less by doing so. Next time you bang your head on a kitchen cabinet try saying "That doesn't hurt!" Maybe it will help. Maybe it won't, but it will be belief (by this definition).

The kind of belief I am talking about takes effort. I realize lots of people think belief is passive. Maybe there is some sort of passive believing, but its not the same thing. When you believe in something purposely its just not the same as accepting something passively.

Yes, I am looking for opinions. But that does not mean that I will not question and scrutinize those opinions once I have found them.

Does simply saying "that doesn't hurt" entail belief, even when you are thinking that it does hurt?

 

[Brickjectivity]

Yes, I am looking for opinions. But that does not mean that I will not question and scrutinize those opinions once I have found them.

Does simply saying "that doesn't hurt" entail belief, even when you are thinking that it does hurt?

Yes if you will accept that people can think two ways at once and can believe and disbelieve at the same time, which I accept. Who has ever believed and not doubted at the same time? I don't know of anybody who could convince me of that. I could try to believe otherwise.

 

[Curious George]

Yes if you will accept that people can think two ways at once and can believe and disbelieve at the same time, which I accept. Who has ever believed and not doubted at the same time? I don't know of anybody who could convince me of that. I could try to believe otherwise.

And how do you square that with the law of noncontradiction?

I would assert that your example is telling of confidence levels not of whether someone believes and does not believe at the same time.

To this end, my example was designed to explore just that phenomenon. I would propose belief occurs at the moment a person holds that the truth of a proposition is more likely than the falsity of that same proposition.

 

[Brickjectivity]

And how do you square that with the law of noncontradiction?

You made that up?

I would assert that your example is telling of confidence levels not of whether someone believes and does not believe at the same time.

Confidence levels are a statistical tool in which the sample mean is presumed to be within a certain number of standard deviations from the supposed population mean. Human brains are not so single. We don't have confidence levels. We have competing thoughts and feelings.

To this end, my example was designed to explore just that phenomenon. I would propose belief occurs at the moment a person holds that the truth of a proposition is more likely than the falsity of that same proposition.

In my opinion that presupposes a level of composure that human brains don't have and also that belief requires no effort which doesn't seem to fit the facts. If believing were easy there would be no point.

 

[Curious George]

You made that up?

No.

Confidence levels are a statistical tool in which the sample mean is presumed to be within a certain number of standard deviations from the supposed population mean. Human brains are not so single. We don't have confidence levels. We have competing thoughts and feelings.

Certainly we have confidence levels. You want to equivocate with a meaning that I did not intend or imply. The way I used confidence regardless of semantic parsing remains.

In my opinion that presupposes a level of composure that human brains don't have and also that belief requires no effort which doesn't seem to fit the facts. If believing were easy there would be no point.

I would suggest belief is effortless and even more I would assert that belief is unconscious. But you would argue otherwise. I want to hear your reasoning for such. Why must belief require effort? What facts do we have that suggest any effort is involved?

 

[Twilight Hue]

For some people I think a belief serves an alternate purpose regardless as to whether any object of belief happens to be true or not.

 

[Curious George]

For some people I think a belief serves an alternate purpose regardless as to whether any object of belief happens to be true or not.

For instance?

 

[Brickjectivity]

Certainly we have confidence levels. You want to equivocate with a meaning that I did not intend or imply. The way I used confidence regardless of semantic parsing remains.

Its just my way of complaining and illustrating how you have been so truculent with the terms belief and knowledge, equivocating them terribly. If belief were merely knowledge we would not have a separate term for it, but that is not what I am arguing. What I am arguing is that a good definition for belief is that it is creative and imaginative, involving something you aren't sure of that you are trying to make happen. That's nothing like 'Levels of confidence'. Levels of confidence require no action, and therein is the difference as I pointed out from the beginning of this conversation. Belief takes effort. Knowledge doesn't. Belief involves risk. Confidence levels are merely knowledge of potentials.

I would suggest belief is effortless and even more I would assert that belief is unconscious. But you would argue otherwise. I want to hear your reasoning for such. Why must belief require effort? What facts do we have that suggest any effort is involved?

My argument continues in the previous paragraph, but in addition there are examples I have. Certainly people can claim to believe something without making any effort, but I think that unless they have made effort we can call that mere misunderstanding. Suppose that Thomas Jefferson claims that he believes slaves ought to be free (and he does), but suppose he owns many and does not free them (and he doesn't free them). What indication do we have that he does not believe what he says? We have his actions. Keep in mind it is a moral judgment not a matter of probabilities. He fails to believe his own words, yet he is convinced that the words are true. If we allow belief to be merely knowledge that slave holding is evil, then we leave out the human element. Thomas Jefferson is a human, and there is more to him than knowledge. There are actions. In fact every evidence indicates he does not believe despite his words and knowledge, except that he might make some token gestures. In this case he is certain that slavery is wrong but fails to believe it. His knowledge does not translate to belief.

 

[Curious George]

Its just my way of complaining and illustrating how you have been so truculent with the terms belief and knowledge, equivocating them terribly.

I can not see any equivocation on my end. Perhaps I have not articulated something well enough. If you can pinpoint what you think the equivocation was we can explore that.

If belief were merely knowledge we would not have a separate term for it, but that is not what I am arguing.

Nor am I. Nor have I asserted that you are suggesting that.

What I am arguing is that a good definition for belief is that it is creative and imaginative, involving something you aren't sure of that you are trying to make happen. That's nothing like 'Levels of confidence'. Levels of confidence require no action, and therein is the difference as I pointed out from the beginning of this conversation. Belief takes effort. Knowledge doesn't. Belief involves risk. Confidence levels are merely knowledge of potentials.

My argument continues in the previous paragraph, but in addition there are examples I have. Certainly people can claim to believe something without making any effort, but I think that unless they have made effort we can call that mere misunderstanding. Suppose that Thomas Jefferson claims that he believes slaves ought to be free (and he does), but suppose he owns many and does not free them (and he doesn't free them). What indication do we have that he does not believe what he says? We have his actions. Keep in mind it is a moral judgment not a matter of probabilities. He fails to believe his own words, yet he is convinced that the words are true. If we allow belief to be merely knowledge that slave holding is evil, then we leave out the human element. Thomas Jefferson is a human, and there is more to him than knowledge. There are actions. In fact every evidence indicates he does not believe despite his words and knowledge, except that he might make some token gestures. In this case he is certain that slavery is wrong but fails to believe it. His knowledge does not translate to belief.

It sounds to me that you jave turned belief into a version if not an identical to the abstract notion of hope.

 

[Brickjectivity]

It sounds to me that you jave turned belief into a version if not an identical to the abstract notion of hope.

Maybe. Why in your opinion should the definition of belief have no components in common with hope? Why would it be simply something you know improbably?

 

[Michelle71]

Most people do not challenge their beliefs. Most people don't even know what they believe, much less how that belief got into their head. Even with evidence that a belief is wrong, people are likely to ignore the facts in order to stick with a belief system. It is what it is.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Suppose that you are one of the founders of a new company. Do you believe you can accomplish something or not? If you don't believe you can then you cannot. Suppose you successfully built a business. You did not know that your business would succeed beforehand, but you acted as if you did in order to make it happen. If you want to build a house you must believe that you can do it. Once the house has been built then you no longer need to believe it can be built. If a thing has been realized you no longer need to believe in it. If you say that you believe you will have a successful business what you are telling me is that you don't, yet.

I think these are quite different things. When you start a company, you don't jump in blindly - or at least not if you're not an idiot.

I founded my own company. I can't tell the future obviously. Yes, I believed it had a good chance of being succesfull. Obviously, I wouldn't have done it if I expected it to fall flat on its face within the year. We're 5 years further. I don't call it really succesfull yet, but we are still alive and kicking and things go well, albeit a bit slower then expected.

My belief that it would go well, wasn't just a lucky guess. It was the result of market research. Studies and analysis were done and from the data that yielded we concluded that there was a place for us on the market.

Analogous to the gumball jar, this data would be finding additional evidence like a receipt showing the owner of the jar recently purchased a jar of 40 gumballs. And the jar holding a label saying "40 gumballs" while finding no evidence of the jar having been opened yet. You don't know that there are 40 gumballs in it unless you count them. But the "even" outcome just became more likely nevertheless.

Then there is also the part where the OP speaks about reward/detriment. That too, is something that is taken into consideration here. What will it cost when it fails and what the is the potential market cap if it succeeds?
That too, in combination with market research, will determine how much risk you're willing to take.

If there is a prize for guessing, then you make a choice; but that is not the same as belief I think. Belief that accomplishes something is different from an arbitrary choice. Its not a whim.

Well, it has gradations...
I like to play the lottery once in a while.

If anything, I believe that I won't win anything at all and that I'm just throwing away money, because I understand the chances.

But it's only a couple bucks and who knows, perhaps you're that lucky guy that will win millions - someone does almost every week.

I don't think any lottery player really believes that he'll win. Unless you're some mathematician or whatever who finds a crack in it and become a lottery farmer, lol.

That is closer to how I see it, but confidence and belief are not the same. Belief is the power to change. You can move the mountain with a spoon if you believe you can and take enough scoops. That is different from expecting the mountain to move itself, which is not really belief since it requires no investment.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that in everyday conversation, belief is the wrong word to use, strictly speaking.

To take the company founding example... That's not really about "belief". Rather about considering things more likely or less likely.

When I play the lottery, I consider it extremely unlikely that I'll win.
Strictly speaking "belief" is a rather black and white word...

To believe, means you accept something is true. "True"-true. It expresses a sense of certainty that is rarely in accordance to what people actually mean what they say "i believe that...."


It certainly is in my case, anyway.