Interesting question Jennifer. I do think there is a difference between knowing something and beleiving it. For example if you have four quarters on a table you know that if combined they equal $1.00. The other end of the spectrum is that in most instances a mental or emotional idea must be believed or not and basically can not be "known" empirically. I suppose what I am trying to say is that while I believe that belief and knowledge are two different things it has more to do with the differences between physical realities and non-physical ideas.

How's this... I believe people can have knowledge and I know people can have beliefs, and ultimately , for me, they are two very different things.

I think "belief" is more related to emotional understanding where as "knowledge" is more related to intellectual understanding.

You can believe in something without factual support (as in having faith), but you can't really know something without personal experience of it or trusting an authority (or series of authorities) that tells you of their personal experiences of it.

Of course the terms "know" and "believe" are very interchangable to most people, many of which don't _want_ to recognize a distinction between the two (especially in religious debate). And philosophically, it's difficult to say whether we truely know anything or just believe that we know!

Another difference between them is that it's very difficult to disprove beliefs (you can believe in anything because you don't have to support it), but relatively easy to change what you know when provided with new information (well, at least for open minded people!).

At least, that's what I believe. ;)

Here's my first take on it here, without wading through Descartes, Hume, etc., since I am too lazy to look through. (Apatheist)

There exist belief and knowledge, knowledge being a belief plus something more.

Knowledge is when one holds a belief about that which could conceivably be verified externally, outside the brain originating said belief.

Belief is holding a proposition that is either externally unverifiable or whose verification is also (but separately) introspective.

That is, if I believe I heard the doorbell ring, and my way to verify said ringing is to appeal to my auditory memory or some other internal introspective verification, this is a BELIEF that the doorbell rang.

If I appeal to my so called common sense and think "no one rings the doorbell at 3 a.m.", I will then have a BELIEF, this time that the doorbell did not ring. And when other beliefs can support this, we get complex beliefs, "no the doorbell didn't ring because it's 3 a.m. but maybe you're tired because it's 3 a.m. and you remember that you read that people can have auditory hallucinations with lack of sleep." etc

If I believe I heard the doorbell ring, and then play back a recording I happened to have had going and I hear a bell, then I KNOW that the doorbell rang.

Yes, this can open other cans of worms, such as whether hearing a tape is not really a belief about some sensory data coming in, etc.

Also, is math a belief or knowledge? I'd say it's belief, and my evidence here would be the need to form axioms rather than answer what guides the rules of math.

-tb

I tend to answer such questions much more pragmatically. I don't KNOW that there are any sentient beings, human or otherwise, reading this response - but my present behavior indicates that I am at least hoping that you, dear reader, exist.

Quite possibly the sun doesn't rise on mornings that I don't observe it, but whether it does (or doesn't) is irrelevant to my own predictable behavior: i.e., I don't prepare each evening for the possibility that the sun does NOT rise.

I know that the atoms comprising the floor beside my bed will cooperate yet again and form in supportive patterns - or at least I THINK I know this, until the morning that it doesn't happen.

Of course there is a difference. "Knowing" comes from a process (usually called the scientific process) which includes measuring and independently verifying something. "Belief" usually entails a conclusion that is not necessarily fully supported by knowledge.

Of course there are inherent limits to "knowledge", in so far as there may be restrictions in either how closely we can measure the universe, how much trust we put in our own ability to reason and comprehend, or whether the universe is in fact coherent and describable at all (at the macroscopic level things are fairly obvious, at the microscopic level, nature does fairly wild and non-intuitive things). But frankly, short of a neverending spiral of epistemological debate, we really have no other option than to understand the world by things we can *measure*. I don't buy the argument that "well, we can't measure things with perfect precision therefore let's throw out all knowledge and presume that smurfs and tooth fairies exist".

I'm new here, but this a question that comes up here now and again, isn't it? Epistemology is not dead, that's for sure. But besides the nature of knowledge and what can be known, an important part of this question is about the function of knowledge or belief. If we stick to dictionary definitions of these terms, true, they don't seem much different, but as pointed out in this discussion there is a accepted difference from which most points stem. For example, you can know what a religious text says (the bible, for example), but not believe what it says. The function, then, is fundamentally different. I have said that the best part of religion is also the worst; belief. It is bad in the obliged blind faith that allows human leaders to tell you what is what. It is good in that it allows you to overcome obstacles and get through rough times without slitting your wrists - a belief that when it is bad, it won't always be so. Since this is an understanding of a future state, which most of us cannot know, this must be categorized as something different than knowledge.

The flip side of that coin: A fella by the name of Seligman discovered what he called "learned helplessness". Look up his experiment with the dog. Bottom line, it was the dog's belief that he could not escape the small shock, because he did not know there was an escape. Seligman applied this understanding to depressives.