Belief, Knowledge, and Language

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines belief as the psychological condition in which a person holds a proposition to be true. Now, propositions of this sort can be divided into 3 categories: Necessary propositions such as 2+2=4 or all husbands are married; contingent propositions such as The moon is nearer to the earth than the sun or Madrid is the capital of Spain; or subjective such as Torture is bad or Speaking truth is good.

The definition of belief includes all three cases. If I believe Madrid is the capital of Spain, I also “believe” that the population of Madrid is less than Spain, the area of Madrid is less than that of Spain, or Madrid is a part of Spain. But we do not consider these as distinct beliefs, we consider these as logical consequences. Similarly, 2 + 2=4 0r 3 + 6= 9 is derivable from Peano’s postulates and hence they are not beliefs. If someone says that he believes 998 * 796= 7756838, this statement can be taken as a belief as due to the limited computing power of the brain such statements are not instantly derivable from Peano’s postulates. However, when we admit that they are beliefs, we consider them as falsifiable. Secondly, when we say that we say that X is my belief I admit that in other circumstances, I could have considered not X as my belief i.e. I chose what I believe. So, belief is optional- I can have belief X or belief Y or no belief about an entity A. Thirdly, a belief about something needs some awareness about that thing. A belief cannot exist in a vacuum, it needs some prior awareness. Fourthly and most trivially, belief is known i.e. I know my beliefs and X cannot be my belief if I do not know it.

The encyclopedia said that if we accept that language is necessary for belief, we have to accept that 3-year old children, who do not have the capacity to distinguish between reality and appearance have no belief. Can so-called adults distinguish between reality and appearance? As long as we believe that there is a reality outside us, we can never be sure of the reality of that reality or our knowledge about that reality. And to believe is to believe that there is a reality outside us. I think the quality of being falsifiable is a necessary condition for belief and this condition is possible only if we have the concept of belief. Hence, language is necessary for belief.