Belinda wrote:I'm afraid that I've misunderstood what I had thought that you previously wrote about maintaining a dichotomy between truth as propositional truth and truth as useful faith. Doubtless we agree that propositional truth is impossible because all 'truths' are contingent. I had understood that you thought that if a faith supports life then it's true.
Terrapin Station wrote:That you consider it justified and that you judge it to be true. Neither of those requires certainty or proof. Again, it's best to just throw out any concern with certainty or proof, pro or con. Conceptualizing epistemology in those terms is a mistake in my view.
Londoner wrote:I don't think that makes sense, not even in the religious sense. How could one claim one 'believed' something, while also being aware that one had no reason for doing so? You would more likely say you had 'assumed' something. And I think that is what the religious use is meant to imply; 'faith' in the sense of putting your trust in something. It does not imply certainty, quite the contrary.
And isn't the problem with 'information', meaning something that furnishes knowledge, i.e. something that comes from outside ourselves, that we can never identify what that something is? We cannot be sure that anything in our heads comes from outside them, but we can be sure that nothing in our heads comes entirely from outside them. That knowledge, or what we call knowledge, is shaped by our existing consciousness and by what we have previously accepted as 'knowledge'.
Hobbes' Choice wrote: Belief has no place in my lexicon, except to demonstrate a faith held position.JTB is equivalent to knowledge. All knowledge is contingent on the information which furnishes it. Belief requires no justification but faith.
I think it makes more sense to draw a line between the two ideas. In the same way I prefer why to focus not on the hows but on intentionality.
The world is round (well roughly more than a square or flat). Is that a fact? A belief? An opinion? True? Knowledge? An assumption? Etc.
Language is imprecise and people often disagree about the proper usage of and the proper meaning of words.
How about evolution? (its essentials, natural selection, genetic variation, descent with modification) is that true? Is it knowledge?
The universe is deterministic? An opinion, a fact, an assumption, a theory, a belief, truth, knowledge?
Certainly there is a wide range of different degrees of justification for the various “conceptions” which people hold to be true, or knowledge, or facts. Often people do not agree on the facts much less on the theories, beliefs or opinions derived from them. The world is round seems a justified and true belief. Evolution likewise seems a justified and confirmed theory in its broad outlines. The deterministic nature of reality seems much less so, quantum physicists roughly divided between indeterministic and deterministic interpretations of their field. Treating time as physical spatial dimension (the spatialization of time) some would regard as factual but I regard it as a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. Trying to bring the discussion back around to the original beginnings.
I don’t think faith and belief are equated in common usage. Faith (usually used in a religious or fiduciary context) is a form of belief but belief has much wider user. For instance I might believe in the lochness monster, the abominable snowman and the Yeti but I don’t have faith in them.
