Knowledge and Belief

(Taken from here at ILP forum)

Generally we can imagine that belief can become divorced from knowldge, and this can happen quite easily. The problem then arises: what is knowledge, and most importantly, how do we know? Circular, of course. Knowledge governed by a mixture of utility and undeniability is the most likely culprit for an answer here. Essentially, it is not possible for me to deny that I am alive. I can perhaps DOUBT the various manners in which I might say of myself, "I am alive as such and such". These doubts arise to varying degrees depending on the extent to which I am forced to stray into extreme fantastical territory in order to justify the doubting in question. By fantastical I would mean varying from the extant conditions with which I am continuously confronted under the form of consistency. The less this form attains, the more we might be able to state that what we have is not knowledge, but something else. Yet this "something else" is not quite 'belief', not entirely, although close. The intersection here is that both this something else and belief/s can overlap, and indeed do overlap quite a bit. A word perhaps for this something else, which does not attain to knowledge (perhaps) yet cannot fully be enclosed by the notion of belief: faith, or implicit circumstance---the unquestioned. Note: NOT the unquestionable. Here utility returns to make its presence revealed: the hinge on which this distinction turns is precisely a sort of self-utility which (at least in part) determines the extent to which one examines one's "knowns" as well as one's "beliefs" from the perspective of undeniability.

Belief finds its justification within the subject and its subject-ive world/s, which includes utilities to this subject; knowledge finds its "justification" here as well, but also far more so in the relative undeniability presented as a continually confronting under the form of consistency/constancy. This relative nature never becomes non-relative, of course, except perhaps at the most extreme limit, "Something is" (another topic entirely, I am afraid...). Thus the extent of this relatively attaining repersents the inverse extent to which knowledge shrinks toward the sphere of belief, belief being that which requires no such relative presencing of an form of the undeniable. Belief being PURE utility-as-such to the subject. Also of note: within most subjects these two terms are very much confused and inter-mixed, resulting in a lack of sufficient self-awareness able to penetrate and disclose this inner differencing. Some consequences of this failure: confusion, false attribution of a status of known to beliefs, dismissal of the possibility of knowledge in part or even in entirety.