A Pragmatist's Question

[ryanatau]

What comes first knowledge or belief? Can we ever know something without first believing it?

(Notice this is not what should come first only what does come first.)

[lsbskins1]

How 'bout the idea that knowledge and belief come simultaneously? I mean, as you learn that fire is hot by touching the flame, you come to believe it is hot.

[caphis]

Quote by: ryanatau What comes first knowledge or belief? Can we ever know something without first believing it? (Notice this is not what should come first only what does come first.)

I don't think there's a general answer that applies to all situations. With respect to, say, a courtroom case, you'd usually want to know all the facts before believing if the defendant is guilty or innocent.

With respect to religion, no one *knows* that God exists, but that doesn't stop millions of people from believing it. That belief may be passed down as knowledge, but in the end, it's just a belief.

[Technosoul]

You would have different ways to establish what you mean by "belief".

And so without elaboration on how you intended to use the word "belief" we cannot really answer that question without giving a lot of examples about the behavior of belief, in all it's interpretational complexities.

In an anology belief is like a seed.

A tree poduces nuts that fall to the soil and take root to become trees, and that circular pattern goes around and around as long as the circle is not broken.

So it all depends on where you jump into that circle when determning what came first. At one point the seed is in the soil, at another point the seed is a tree, at another point the tree gives birth to the seeds (nuts) that hang on the limbs. There is no real starting point however if you stand way back and look at the complete circle fully connected.

So what you need to know about is the center point around which the tree-seed circular motion orbits around. That anonymous center we might call God. (spirit).

[Morality Games]

The meanings of the terms 'knowledge' and 'belief' are too various for this to be a sensible question (this does not reflect poorly on you for asking it), even when narrowed down to the parameters of contemporary language, but they typically reference the existential status of information in relation to human beings:

'Knowledge' is information validated (shown true) by rigorous analysis and 'belief' is information that has yet to be validated by much besides the agent's confidence that it is the case (and therefore has not been shown to be true).

Thing is, information blocks are frequently mixtures of knowledge and belief, the degree of validation necessary for information to pass as knowledge is uncertain (because people adopt different standards), and people often refuse to acknowledge the standards used by other people as authentic. These three common complications make it easy to screw up the terminology so that the whole matter becomes incomprehensible.

So, at least as far as my understanding goes, the answer to your question, which comes first, knowledge or belief ... is 'either one', since people will process information that is both belief and knowledge, and probably not recognize the difference (information is information, knowledge or belief, fact or fiction, truth or lies).