Knowledge & Belief Need a Divorce
Knowledge and belief need a divorce. Let’s face it, it was a good run, but they were never a good fit. There’s some undeniable physical chemistry, but their core values are too different. The standard story is that Plato fixed them up, but I’m sure they were eyeing each other before that.
Why do people find the connection between knowledge and belief so seductive? It must be because knowledge and belief are so often aligned. However, saying that knowledge is justified true belief is assuming that the two are always aligned and that’s just not the case.
People have raised some concerns over the justified true belief theory of knowledge before, but the objections usually revolve around the concept of justification. Gettier Problems are the most famous of these. Basically, Edmund Gettier asked the simple question, “What if you hold a true belief, but the justification is wrong?” An example of this is if you claim to know that Jane is currently in New York City. The reason you claim to know this is because you believe that Jane lives in New York City. The thing is, unbeknownst to you, Jane moved to Connecticut a little over a month ago. However, Jane is in New York City at the moment you make your claim because she is visiting a friend. So, the belief is true, but the justification is faulty. Is this knowledge or just belief or just a lucky guess?
I attack the problem a bit differently. My claim is that knowledge and belief are not always aligned. It’s possible to know things that you don’t believe and to believe things you know to be false. I’ll go into more detail soon, but we can look at counterintuitive facts for the former and superstitions for the latter. Before we get to that, though, we need to know what knowledge and belief are.
To put it in the annoying way that a dictionary might, knowledge is knowing that something is the case. That’s a little circular for my tastes, though. Another way to put it is the holding, or possession, of information that successfully maps onto the real world. Some may recognize this as similar to knowledge reliabilism (K-Reliabilism). However, standard accounts of K-Reliabilism include that the knower believes in what she knows and that that belief is formed by a reliable cognitive process. My version of reliable is agnostic about cognitive processes. The reliability is in the world, not the head. If the possession of information is reliable, it’s reliable, however one came to possess it and that’s enough for me. I know this requires a longer explanation, but that would make this a different essay. We’ll leave it here for now.
Belief is easier to explain. I believe (see what I did there) in a dispositional definition of belief. This basically means that if you hold a belief, you will act as if the belief is true. I flip it, though. If you act like a belief is true, then you hold that belief. The reason I flip it is because reflexive actions show your true dispositions. It’s easy to say you don’t believe in free will, for example, but it’s impossible to act as if there is no free will. That means that people who claim there is no free will actually believe in free will.
Now for some examples. One thing that I know but don’t believe is that putting salt on ice melts the ice while making it colder. I know this is true. I’ve seen the experiments. I can’t wrap my head around it, though. I don’t believe it. My disposition is to say that water is warmer than ice. I believe that water is warmer than ice even though I know that’s not always the case.
Another example of something I know to be true but don’t believe is quantum entanglement. Mind you, I’m not saying I understand quantum entanglement. I’m making the more modest claim that I know it is a real thing. I know people have done experiments proving it. But the idea is that “What happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, even if they are really too far apart to affect each other.” It’s the large distance part that I don’t believe even though I know it’s true. How are two things that are too far apart to affect each other affecting each other? I simply don’t believe what I know to be true.
It goes the other way, too, where I believe things I know to be false. I mentioned superstitions before. I know beyond a doubt that nothing I do in my living room has any effect on a game I’m watching on TV. Yet, when I watch the Red Sox, I always sit in the same seat with my legs crossed at the ankles and my arms folded across my chest. If, for some reason, I’m not sitting in the proper way, I blame myself for any bad things that happen. I know better, but I believe in my bones that I’m making a difference.
Another type of belief that persists despite knowledge to the contrary is phobias. I know many people with a fear of spiders. Even though they know that, where we live, there are no dangerous spiders and that the spiders that are here are beneficial, they believe that spiders are dangerous. A spider, no matter how harmless, will activate the person’s threat response. There is a disconnect between the person’s beliefs and knowledge.
Of course, these examples are not universal. I’m sure there are people who both know and believe in quantum entanglement. Likewise, I’m sure there are people who don’t believe in superstitions. But it only takes one case of knowing something you don’t believe or believing something you know to be false to blow up the knowledge as justified true belief theory. I easily came up with four examples. I suspect most people, if they are honest, can come up with at least one.
So, where does that leave us? It seems that knowledge has to learn to stand on its own, just be single for a little while. It will do us all some good.