believed, rather than the mental state of any particular person. When you and your friend do come to share a belief, it will be the objective belief content or proposition that you both assent to, or accept, or affirm.
The Importance of Belief
It’s crucial at the outset of this deep dive into belief and knowledge to realize that nearly everyone has an enormous number of beliefs about all kinds of things, including matters they’ve never even explicitly thought about. And if Chekov was even remotely right when he said that you are what you believe, then you have good reason to investigate whether you can be comfortable with your most important beliefs. You’d better examine them well and make sure you feel good about having them. Some of these beliefs, you are well aware of having. Others ordinarily may be hidden from view, but a little philosophical investigation can reveal what they are.
Beliefs are important for a number of reasons. Wars are fought over them. Deals are made or broken because of them. People gather together due to important beliefs they have in common. They also separate from each other because of divergent beliefs. It turns out that you will likely chart out your life in every way in accordance with your beliefs.
Many philosophers have analyzed typical human actions as a natural consequence of beliefs interacting with desires, in this simple formula:
Beliefs + Desires = Actions
What you do is a result of what you believe and what you want. If what you want is a consequence of what you believe to be good or pleasurable, then belief is indeed the ultimate wellspring of action. Having the right beliefs is then not just a matter of intellectual importance, but it’s of the utmost practical value as well.
And yet, here’s the problem. Everyone has some false beliefs. All human beings are fallible in this way and mistaken about some things. To err is human, and all that. No one is completely infallible or immune to getting things wrong. Even a traditional Catholic who thinks the Pope is infallible about matters of faith still realizes he could misplace his socks, believing they’re in the top drawer of his dresser when they’re not.
Smart people can often have false beliefs about even obvious, easy-to-check things like that. Imagine how nearly anyone can get things wrong about more subtle and complex matters.
SUPERSTITION: A TRUE STORY
False beliefs can creep into our minds in all sorts of ways. And they can affect our lives deeply. On September 13, 1996, I was flying across the country on a plane that was nearly empty. Shortly after take-off, I mentioned to the flight attendant how unusual it was to see all the unoccupied seats. She said, “Oh, that often happens on Friday the 13th. People are afraid to fly.” My seatmate, a gentleman I had just met, laughed loudly with a snort and said, “What superstitious nonsense! Unbelievable! Ridiculous!” The left lens of his glasses promptly fell out onto the cabin floor. He looked shocked and said, “Gee, I just lost a lens, and these glasses are less than a year old.” Reaching down to pick up the loose piece of glass, he launched back into his tirade against superstition, saying. “I guess I’m supposed to think that this happened because it’s Friday the 13th! Ha!” As he fumbled to insert the lens back into his frames, he looked up at me with astonishment on his face and said, “I’ll be damned. The frame just totally broke.” Indeed. It might have been enough to make a less philosophical man … superstitious.
The Ideal of Knowledge
Most people naturally and properly want their beliefs to be reliable and true, to connect well to reality, to clue them in on what’s really happening in the world and in their own lives. They want their most important beliefs to be more than mere opinions; they normally assume their convictions constitute real knowledge of what matters. But may people have never thought about what knowledge, as distinct from mere belief, really is.
PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS
Philosophers analyze ideas. They take apart concepts like knowledge and try to put them back together, to understand how they work. Like auto mechanics, conceptual grease monkeys often aim to adjust and repair rough-running ideas so that they can better get you where you want to go.
The common philosophical analysis of knowledge as something like “properly justified true belief” breaks knowledge down into what are called necessary and sufficient conditions, or, to be more exact, into individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Having a belief is necessary for having knowledge but it’s not sufficient. The belief could be false, in which case it does not attain the result of knowledge. Or you could have a belief that’s also true but it still doesn’t amount to knowledge, if for example it’s just a crazy, wild, lucky guess that happens to be right. A friend could rightly say to you in such a case, “Yeah, you were right, but you really didn’t know. It was just a lucky guess.” In order for you to have real knowledge about something, you need a belief about it, that belief needs to be true, and your having that belief needs to be properly justified and not just the result of some wacky series of mistakes. For example, you could believe that your friend Bob is at work and it could be true that Bob is at work, and you may justifiably have this belief because your mutual friend Fred told you that Bob is at work, and you know Fred is an honest man who normally keeps track of Bob, who is his best friend. So you have a belief, and it’s true, and you’re justified in holding it. But that still doesn’t count as actual knowledge of Bob’s whereabouts if in this particular case Fred was forced into lying to you, while he really believed Bob was out for the day shopping for your big surprise birthday present they both had to keep secret, and yet unknown to Fred, Bob was already finished shopping and back at work. You’d have a true belief that Bob is at work, and you’d be justified in holding it, having listened to the normally reliable Fred, but your justification would not be proper, since it depended in this instance on a lie that turned out to be false. And yes, this is how complex true knowledge can sometimes be. No wonder Socrates discovered that so many people think they know things they don’t actually know at all!
The idea or concept of knowledge is first of all an attainment, or accomplishment, or completion concept. In basketball, players shoot in order to score. Shooting is the activity; scoring is the intended attainment
