When I was a kid, I came to the "realization" that I couldn't actually be certain about anything because for anything I thought was true, it was at least possible that I was wrong. The seeds of this idea began when I was in the 2nd grade trying to remember an incident a year or two earlier in which I fell asleep in the bushes beside a tennis court near my house. I couldn't remember waking up and crawling out of the bushes, which made me wonder if I was still asleep and just having a vivid dream. This thought haunted me for several years.
At some point, I took the thought a little further. If it was possible that I could still be dreaming, then it's just as possible that the whole kit and caboodle was a dream. Maybe I even dreamed that I fell asleep by that tennis court. Maybe nothing I took to be true was real. Maybe I've always been in a dream state. Maybe humans don't even exist. Maybe I'm an alien. Maybe there is no physical world at all, and it's all just perception.
These thoughts eventually lead me to the conclusion that I didn't really know anything. However, I wasn't a total skeptic either. I accepted that I was probably a real person living in a real world. It's just that I could never be absolutely certain. That meant I didn't really know anything. I just had degrees of confidence. I had beliefs, but not knowledge.
I made a conscious effort to stop saying I know stuff and to say, "I believe," instead. I pictured belief to be a spectrum of degrees of confidence, and that I could never be 100% sure of anything. This idea may have lasted into my early 20's, but I'm not sure.
Although I didn't make any effort back then to define belief and knowledge, it appears that I took knowledge to amount to 100% certainty. Anything short of that, and you don't have knowledge. You just have belief.
Later on, I came to the realization that there were at least a few things that I could be certain about, including my own existence, basic math, and the laws of logic. But most things were still beliefs that fell somewhere on the confidence spectrum. I knew I existed, but I didn't know what kind of being I was or whether I had a physical body. I only believed I was a physical human being.
I changed my mind about what it meant to know something in one of my philosophy classes in college. My teacher, whose name I think was David Sosa, walked us carefully through the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief. It all made perfectly good sense to me, and I've accepted that understanding of knowledge ever since. I became a lot more comfortable saying I know stuff because a person could have a justified true belief even if they lacked 100% confidence.
He didn't just hand us the definition and explain the ingredients. He gave us thought experiments and asked us questions to lead us to the definition. One thought experiment he used was a situation in which somebody guessed the right lottery numbers, actually believed they were the winning numbers, and ended up being right. Then he asked us whether the person knew the right lottery numbers. We intuitively recognized that he didn't. What was the missing ingredient? This thought experiment was meant to illustrate that having a true belief was not sufficient for knowledge, and that justification was also required. I have been using that same thought experiment ever since.
One reason I accepted his definition of knowledge was because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his definition was implicit in the way people actually used knowledge in our daily lives anyway. It was the definition implicit in the way I used the word in unguarded moments when I wasn't trying to be a persnickety philosophy kid. There were lots of times I claimed to know every day things for which I lacked 100% certainty.
Words get their meaning from the way they are commonly used. In every day life, when people say they know something, they don't mean they have infalliable knowledge. They don't mean they are 100% confident. They just mean they're aware of some fact. For example, when people say they know where something is, or they know what time the show starts, or they know who ate the last cookie, they aren't claiming absolute certainty. They're just claiming to be privy to information about something that's true, i.e., they are claiming to have a justified true belief.
My intentional refusal to use the word, knowledge, to refer to anything I thought when I was a kid was just silly. I remember when somebody would ask me if I knew some mundane thing, like where the nearest gas station is, I would say something like, "I don't know where one is, but I believe one is just a block away." I was just trying to be consistent, but I was really being silly, and people were right to think me a little weird.
Since settling on the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief, I still run into people who hold what I consider to be muddled ideas about these things. For example, I ran into a Mormon bishop one time. When I asked him if he believed such and such, he said, "I don't believe it; I know it." To him, knowledge and belief were mutually exclusive. But according to the standard definition, you can't know something if you don't at least believe it. To believe something is merely to think it's true. You can't know something is true if you don't even think it is true.
I've run into people who refuse to say they believe anything. They tell me they either know something or they don't. They don't have beliefs. These people strike me as being just as silly as I was when I was a kid, except they were silly in the opposite way. Whereas I claimed to only have beliefs and no knowledge, they claim to only have knowledge and no beliefs.
Although I've asked, I can't remember ever getting a straight answer from one of these people when I asked them to define what they mean by "knowledge" and "belief," so I can only speculate. I think they take belief to amount to something like arbitrary assent. If you think something is true, but you have no justification, then that's a belief. But if you have justification for thinking something is true, then you have knowledge. So to them, there's no such thing as a justified belief. For a lot of these people, belief is a religious term that's roughly equivalent to blind faith. A good question to ask one of these people is, "Suppose you think something is true for what looks to you to be good reasons, but it's actually not true. You're mistaken. Do you have knowledge in that case? If not, is that a belief? What would you call it?"
Blind faith is clearly not what most people mean when they say they believe something. By the ordinary use of the word, to believe something is merely to think it's true. If you think the polar ice caps are going to melt in the next ten years, then that's what you believe. It is possible to believe something for good reasons, flimsy reasons, or no reason at all. Whether you have justification or not for thinking something is true, it's still a belief. It's possible to believe something and be right about it or wrong about it. Whether it's true or not, it's still a belief.
The standard definition of knowledge makes good sense. Imagine a person says, "I know the earth orbits the sun," but then turns around and says, "I don't think it's true that the earth orbits the sun." Would we not think they were contradicting themselves? Or, imagine a person says, "I believe you can get a taco for $2 at yonder food truck," but then followed it up with, "But I know you can't." Would that person not be contradicting themselves? How can you claim to know something if you don't even think it's true? I don't think you can do that consistently.
It doesn't make sense to say you know something if you don't at least think it's true. And if you think it's true, then you believe it. Believing just means you assent to it, you think it's true, it is your point of view, it's what you take to be accurate, etc. Belief and knowledge, then, are not mutually exclusive. They're complimentary. It's possible to believe something and not know it, but it's not possible to know something and not believe it.
I suppose the only exception might be in a case where deep down somebody knows that something is true, but they're just in denial about it. That's the only scenario I can think of where a person might know something in some sense without believing it. But that's debatable because if they know something deep down, then they probably also believe it deep down. Their denial is surface level and not entirely honest, so it's probably not a real belief anyway. The psychological mechanics of what it means to be in denial might warrant a blog post of its own.
The bottom line is that from just observing the way people talk, and introspecting on the way I talk, it looks to me like the common every day use of the word, "believe," just entails that somebody thinks something is true. Belief doesn't mean blind faith. Belief and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Knowledge does not require certainty, but it does require belief.
Even if knowledge did require certainty, wouldn't it be certain. . .belief?
I addressed the Gettier problem on another blog post.
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