It largely depends on what work you want the words “belief” and “truth” to do.
We might say a belief is a proposition we reason from as if it were true (we’ll get back to truth shortly, but I want to screen it off for now). In humans this means a belief is some kind of mental activity corresponding to some statement about the world that is integrated into the mind as part of the network of propositions used in reasoning. Beliefs can exist independent of truth values, though, as anyone who has even mistaken believed one thing and then discovered the world was otherwise knows.
We sometimes use “true belief” to refer to a set of propositions known to be true (known facts) to some entity, so then to believe a thing is true is to know it to be true. This runs into epistemological issues because it necessitates assessing whether something is true, and thus asks us to know the criterion of truth, which runs us headlong into the problem of the criterion. Although I think the problem of the criterion gets at the heart of what you are asking (which is ultimately grounded out in questions of existence), we can be pragmatic here and ignore it by taking a pre-formal leap-of-faith that we know how to asses what is true.
Then to believe a thing is true is simply to know it is how the world is.
It largely depends on what work you want the words “belief” and “truth” to do.
We might say a belief is a proposition we reason from as if it were true (we’ll get back to truth shortly, but I want to screen it off for now). In humans this means a belief is some kind of mental activity corresponding to some statement about the world that is integrated into the mind as part of the network of propositions used in reasoning. Beliefs can exist independent of truth values, though, as anyone who has even mistaken believed one thing and then discovered the world was otherwise knows.
We sometimes use “true belief” to refer to a set of propositions known to be true (known facts) to some entity, so then to believe a thing is true is to know it to be true. This runs into epistemological issues because it necessitates assessing whether something is true, and thus asks us to know the criterion of truth, which runs us headlong into the problem of the criterion. Although I think the problem of the criterion gets at the heart of what you are asking (which is ultimately grounded out in questions of existence), we can be pragmatic here and ignore it by taking a pre-formal leap-of-faith that we know how to asses what is true.
Then to believe a thing is true is simply to know it is how the world is.