I'm actually kind of enjoying this discussion.
Trippy
Yes, if one is not talking about knowledge. We believe many things that we cannot say we know. I believe my dog loves me, it's a fairly rational belief based on her behavior, but I don't know that it is a fact. I have a rational, evidenced faith that my dog loves and cares for me.
This is a good example of rational belief.
But knowledge of things means faith in them is not a requirement.
Yes and no - for example: Do you own a radio telescope, and have you performed measurements of the Taylor-Huse binary yourself?
If you haven't then how can you claim to
know that the rate of orbital decay in the system is consistent with the predictions of relativity?
You don't. You can, however, posess the rational belief that it is justified by the evidence presented to you by others provided you consider those others to be credible: IE you can justify your faith in accepting their results.
I mean - look at what happened with Andrew Wakefield.
With the caveats of there being no certainty and the limits of what knowing means(Matrix, perception and whatnot), those things are known, not believed. In addition, knowing the rigor and self checking of the Scientific Method(as imperfect as it can be in the short term)I have confidence in the accumulated knowledge we have, but none of it do I hold as a belief and any part of it I would abandon overnight should evidence falsifying it be confirmed(again, by the Scientific Method), that includes Relativity.
That's the difference between a rational belief and a religious one. Being willing to abandon something in the light of new evidence does not preclude it from being a belief. The only thing it precludes it from being is a religious belief - the kind of unquestioning "Belief as a child" that the christian bible calls for.
Belief has two meanings.
The first is: "An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof." This is religious belief. This is about the 'faith as a child' that the christian bible calls for.
The second is: "Trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something". This is where rational belief enters into the picture - we use the evidence to justify our trust or confidence. Should the evidence contradict the belief, we are free to no-longer have trust or confidence in the matter and abandon the belief. Trust has to be earned, it's true even in science, except in science scientists earn the trust of their colleagues by presenting evidence. This is the trust that Andrew Wakefield betrayed.
You simply cannot abandon beliefs, they aren't necessarily based on facts and logic.
Yes you can, I used to believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy, however, I abandoned those beliefs as I grew older and became aware of evidence contradicting that belief.
Many a battered wife will drop charges(again)in the belief that he can change.
And some men do actually manage to get the help needed to change, justifying the belief of their spouses. Many do not. As I have said, belief that can be justified by evidence is rational belief, belief that is contradicted by evidence is 'religious belief'.
Belief is a mental state, knowing is provisionally accepting as true.
This may be the crux of our disagreement.
I consider 'knowing' to be that which I have measured, confirmed or verified for myself.
I consider accepting the hypothesis of another on the basis of the evidence provided to support that hypothesis and the results of others who have endeavoured to replicate their results to be a rational belief.
When I consider, for example, the summation of my knowledge of chemistry I consider it to be a collections of things I believe to be true, and things I know to be true. The things that I believe to be true, are the things that I myself have not nececssarily examined or experienced directly, however, on the basis of my confidence in the evidence presented to me I accept as being true.
For example, I have never inhaled carbonyl nickel for myself, do I don't know that it will nickle plate my lungs, however, on the basis of the evidence that this is what happens that I have been presented with, I'm willing to accept that it is true and heed the 'do not inhale' warning.
They simply aren't the same thing, they should not be described by the same words.
I'm not saying they are.
In my posts everywhere on this forum, I have designated the things I believe might be true from the things I know to be true. Human's have beliefs, sometimes they are rational beliefs, but scientific knowledge(in most fields)is a different thing, the result of a non-human process that filters belief out by adversarial agency.
Collectively science can know relativity and evolution to be true, because collectively scientists have experimented and verified the predictions of those theories, however, individual physicists might only possess the rational belief that evolution is true and individual biologists might only possess the rational belief that relativity is true.
I've studied relativity, however, I have never performed an experiment that demonstrates length contraction. In spite of this I am willing to accept the rational belief that the experiments performed by others measuing muon fluxes demonstrate it to be true.
The whole process is attempting to DISPROVE the claims of scientists, stripping their claims down to what they can actually show, not what they believe they can show.
I mostly agree with this with one exception, a prediction is what an individual believes the result of the experiment will be, and the justification for that rational belief is either the success of the theory at predicting other phenomena or the results of previous experience.
If a theory survives that process we can dispense with belief and accept it as knowledge(until it is falsified by someone else, that is).
I don't actually disagree with this, the only thing that I am saying is that while it might be true that collectively science can consider it knowledge that it is true (until demonstrated otherwise) that for some scientists that knowledge represents a rational belief that they are willing to discard should evidence to the contrary be presented.
I posted a link to a paper somehwere recently discussing rational faith and rational belief but I'll be dammned if I can find it again.
