What is Belief? or Where Do We Go From Here?

In this post I will address a certain problem in philosophy that I have been in nearly constant confrontation with: what is a belief?
Psychologists regard beliefs as states of the brain in which a person holds a certain proposition to be true or false. Thus, I can either believe that the statement "God exists" is either true or false. Beliefs are thoughts about the truth value of propositions. We then act upon those beliefs. That is the psychological story.

The philosophical story is much less clear. A pure definition of the term 'belief' is hard to come by. Most philosophers argue that the term 'belief' is in direct reference to the three tiered structure of the traditional formulation of knowledge: Justified true belief is knowledge. The problem here is that this does not give us a solid understanding of what a belief is. If we take the psychological stance of a belief being a state of the brain that holds certain propositions true or false, then we can join that with justification (whatever test for that we can determine later) and an actual objective determination of the truth value of the proposition, we then have knowledge. Whatever the case may be, we see that until it gets called knowledge (as in successfully passes the test), the truth values of beliefs in reality are undetermined. How that determination occurs, if in fact it does, has been a matter of debate for most of the past two centuries of Anglo-American philosophy. In the end, we either have said determination or we do not. If we do, if we have some sort of naturalized epistemology (that is, an epistemology grounded in empirical understanding of the natural world via science), then we can be successful in considering something to lie in the category of knowledge.

For example, I have a belief that the proposition "today is Wednesday" is true. I am justified in believing that the proposition is indeed true, and as far as we can tell, it is true. Here I know that the proposition "today is Wednesday" is true. I contend here that I no longer belief that the statement "it is Wednesday" is true, I know it to be true. Thus, belief is no longer in the equation. Here lies the dragon: beliefs depend upon the uncertainty of the truth value of the proposition in question. Once the truth value has been determined via some sort of agreed upon procedure (such as empirical investigation), then we add it to the body of knowledge we possess. We no longer believe it, we know it to be true.

The argument in the above paragraph rankles the contemporary analytic philosopher because it chops at the knees justified true belief as being a constant state for a piece of knowledge. We are led from that argument to picture a process of moving from belief to knowledge in such a way as to clear out the belief from the brain. A new state is in effect and the old state is gone. This is more in keeping with modern psychological research, however, and so we must be willing to consider it to be the case. Belief is not part of knowledge, but something separate from it.

Even if we have this new conception of belief as a temporary state on the road to knowledge, we still have not determined what exactly the requirements for the test of determining the truth value of a belief are. We like to say that empirical verification is where it's at, but verificationism has multiple problems that require either ad hoc revisions or an outright jettison of certain supposedly verified statements that are blatantly false. If we decide that verificationism is a failure and we move on to falsifiablilty, that does very little to actually confirm the truth value of any proposition. In fact, in the end, we tend to see that it is nearly impossible to say for certain (outside of very special sorts of statements) that any proposition is true or false. It becomes an approximation game, a probability contest.

If the probability contest is the model we actually use in determining the truth value of propositions, then those values can be suspect. This means that the last, and most important tier of the justified true belief model of epistemology is nearly impossible to achieve. Thus, we believe most things, but know very little. Justification and determination of the truth value of the claim become the same thing. This is troubling to many, but for me, it is another opening of the door, another widening of the gap between what we claim to know and what we know. We confront. once again, our lack of ability to reach certainty.