There is no distinction between belief and knowledge.
Why?
Because whatever we think is knowledge is only, and can ever be, what we believe to be true. If we do not believe in it, we do not think it is true.
How do we get to truth? By virtue of our previously held beliefs. As such, beliefs imply one another.
Lets take a question that is often ignored due to it being supposedly anti-science or irrationalist: “How do you know the Earth is round?”
The answer, of course, would rely upon an appeal to textbooks, to which rests on the appeal to expertise, which rests on an appeal of trust, and so on. Ultimately, this exercise would end up on some irrational inferred assumption or faith (“it’s obvious” or “it’s intuitive”)[1]. Therefore, whatever beliefs we hold are rested on beliefs we already had and we are led to an anti-foundationalist epistemology.
As such, whatever objective reality there is out there, we have no access to it, so long as “objective reality” implies a place “before” or “outside” belief. Such a place, it is implied, requires a perceiver without an presuppositions—a type of empty observer. If “no perspective” and “no belief” are required to objectively view this objective reality, then there can be no perspectives and no beliefs about it.
There is no way to dig oneself out of belief. We only believe in things we believe to be true, and only call things true if we really believe them.
There is no distinction between beliefs and knowledge.
Collapsing the Belief/Knowledge Distinction
There is no distinction between belief and knowledge.
Why?
Because whatever we think is knowledge is only, and can ever be, what we believe to be true. If we do not believe in it, we do not think it is true.
How do we get to truth? By virtue of our previously held beliefs. As such, beliefs imply one another.
Lets take a question that is often ignored due to it being supposedly anti-science or irrationalist: “How do you know the Earth is round?”
The answer, of course, would rely upon an appeal to textbooks, to which rests on the appeal to expertise, which rests on an appeal of trust, and so on. Ultimately, this exercise would end up on some irrational inferred assumption or faith (“it’s obvious” or “it’s intuitive”)[1]. Therefore, whatever beliefs we hold are rested on beliefs we already had and we are led to an anti-foundationalist epistemology.
As such, whatever objective reality there is out there, we have no access to it, so long as “objective reality” implies a place “before” or “outside” belief. Such a place, it is implied, requires a perceiver without an presuppositions—a type of empty observer. If “no perspective” and “no belief” are required to objectively view this objective reality, then there can be no perspectives and no beliefs about it.
There is no way to dig oneself out of belief. We only believe in things we believe to be true, and only call things true if we really believe them.
There is no distinction between beliefs and knowledge.
This also collapses the religion/science, rational/irrational distinctions.