Belief or knowledge?

One of things I learned very quickly while studying at a German university (though I had, in a somewhat lighter mode, been exposed to the approach in my undergraduate days in the States) is that if you are going to use terms (or, better, "concepts", "notions", etc.) you should be clear on what you mean by them. This applied just a well to new, technical terms as it did to everyday concepts as well. As I've been bantering around one such term in the past few posts, I thought it might be worthwhile to use it as an example of what I'm talking about.

The word I've been using, of course, is "belief". We all know what it means, regardless of what might be in the dictionary (for, after all, dictionaries are not authorities, rather they are the documentation of what is generally accepted at a given point in time ... words change meanings over time, which is another reason why it's good to stop and think hard about them every once in a while, like I'm doing now). One method of helping to make definitions and understandings clear is to compare or contrast them to similar terms and notions. One such helpful term in this case would be "knowledge". In other words, what do the two ideas have in common, but perhaps more importantly how they are different. Let's take a look.

A "belief" is something we think is true. We are convinced, for any number of reasons (or for no reason at all) that what we believe is true. It's "how things are" or "what something means" or anything along that line. By contrast, knowledge is something that we know is true. We are convinced in particular because there is some kind of verifiable evidence that others are aware of and acknowledge and hence we agree is "how things are" or "what something means". It would seem that the difference between "belief" and "knowledge" is the difference between thinking and knowing.

This difference is subtle, to be sure, but it is important. Others may believe what we believe; that is, others are aware of something and acknowledge it, yet the difference lies in the fact that the "evidence" is missing. Oh, believers may even believe they have evidence, but upon closer examination we find that it is not hard and fast evidence, rather it is an indication, a phenomenon of sorts, that the believers interpret in some way. To be fair, on the hard-evidence side, there is often data that needs to be interpreted, but here there are often strict rules of interpretation to assist in the interpretation process.

In the general and normal course of everyday life, this fine distinction isn't always that important, but it is becoming increasingly so, and for all the wrong reasons. When people have beliefs that contradict knowledge and insist that their beliefs are more significant/important/convincing/correct than knowledge, we have a bit of a problem. When beliefs go from being mere beliefs to this stage we can safely speak of ideologies, rather than mere beliefs. An ideology is, then, a set of beliefs (a way of thinking) that has been elevated to absolutivity; that is, it is presented as if it is knowledge. But, it simply is not.

Too many public discussions and too many decisions these days are being based on ideologies, not knowledge, and it's starting to become a serious problem.