[Schrodinger's Cat]

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

Schrodinger, you said something interesting in building a taxonomy for "belief" and "fact" that I think bears further investigation.

Lets take the definitions you've given for each (i'm assuming they're from OED or dictionary.com, or some such?) and construct the relationship between them.

Close enough - American Heritage Dictionary, online version.

Originally Posted by smoothmoniker

In normal, empirical investigation, the causal chain of knowledge goes something like this

[thing in reality] --> [perception of thing in reality(sensate or logical)] --> [knowledge construct of perceptions] --> [belief in knowledge construct]

Take this chain in relationship to the existence of the chair I'm currently sitting in.

[chair exists] --> [I perceive visual and tactile information from the existence of the chair] --> [I interpret the perceived data as being evidence of a chair existing in reality, and reduce the perceptions down to that knowledge construct] --> [I believe in the existence of the chair in reality, to such a degree that i act in accordance with that belief, and sit in the chair]

Note that in this case, the difference between fact and belief becomes a question of degrees; we might say that a fact is a belief that has reached a certain threshold of evidence so as to be normatively accepted by any reasonable person with access to the same data. What we *cannot* say (in terms of our own mental states) is that a fact is a thing which exists in reality, because we have no access to that information! We only have access to our perceptions and knowledge constructs of it. We can speak ideally about things in actual existence, but in terms of our own personal knowledge, there is in no sense a distinction between belief and fact - a fact is a belief of a certain type.

True, we can "believe" in facts. We can also believe in superstitions, religious dogma, magic, or politicians. What is the difference between soeone who has no understanding of science, yet accepts the atomic theory; versus a fundamentalist who believes in the "rapture index"? Very little, really. One believes blindly in science, and the other believes blindly in the Bible as the ultimate authority. If I believe blindly in the atomic theory or the second law of thermodynamics without ever having studied the observations and without understanding the logical steps which gave rise to these these two constructs, I'm really no more enlightened in my thinking than a peasant in the Middle Ages who believed the sun and the rest of the universe rotated around the earth.

It's important to note that a fact is still contingent on the accuracy of the data received and the accuracy of the knowledge construct drawn from it. If i find a way to alter your brain state so that you perceive a chair in every normative way, even though that chair does not exits, for you that chair reaches the threshold of being fact. You "believe" it to be real, right up to the point where you try to sit in it, and your ass hits the Persian throw rug under it instead. At that point, you have new perceptions that alter your knowledge construct, and so your belief.

I would submit that in the example above, you are describing an individual who suffers from a delusion, and calls that delusion "fact." I may see a chair where no one else does because my brain chemistry or ability to percieve has in some way been altered, but my belief does not make a fact out of something which has no basis in reality.