What does it take for an idea of human mind to become a belief? What does it take for an idea or a belief to become objective knowledge?

Home - Quora Link

You’ve arrived at the basics of the philosophical field of epistemology, which concerns itself with defining and categorizing knowledge. Your question was answered by the ancient Greeks, and there have been only minor tweaks since then.

Knowledge comprises three aspects. Belief, truth, and justification. Beliefs are very simple, they are things held in mind. Every single statement I’ve made in this essay is a belief. Beliefs are the currency of cognition, it might seem a little disingenuous to include them as a component of knowledge, but it’s inclusion captures an important aspect of knowledge often overlooked, relevance. If few people hold statements of belief in mind, then there’s no real point in bothering with the other aspects. In this day and age where marketeers and hucksters try to plant “knowledge” in your head, it’s worth asking just how many people are interested and why.

The beliefs can be true or not. Truth means “in accordence with a set of rules.” Truth encapsulates objectivity as a “normal” person sees it. If the beliefs aren’t true in that sense, then, again, there’s no point in going forward. Truth is a relative thing, much to the chagrin of people looking for an absolute guide to life. You cannot separate truth from people’s conceptions. I mean, you can make simple statements of objective truth like, “the videotape shows that Jim killed that bank teller,” but the easy parts aren’t what we want to deal with here, we want to make our subjective understandings objective.

To do that, we need the final component of knowledge, justification. Justification is a body of pre-established facts that, taken together, justify the treatment of a true belief as knowledge. The trick to remember with justification is that a true belief is only knowledge to the extent that the justification provides. And justification can be thin indeed.

For example, most people understand scientific knowledge to be the highest form we can create, the “gold standard” if you will. While this is true, one must bear in mind that the justification of scientific knowledge rests heavily on empirical verification. Empirical means ‘observed with the senses’. A scientific conclusion is only as good as the experimentation that led up to it.

Just like before, the easy determinations aren’t all that interesting. Humans want to expand the domain of ideas and methods they believe are powerful. But without grounding those beliefs in truth and justification, then they’re just beliefs. And humans are prone to ignoring shaky commonsense that would threaten to upend the truth of believed in ideas, and they even more frequently don’t accede to justification regimes that make more sense than the ones they’d like to use. Saying something is ‘scientific’ when it doesn’t actually refer to any empirical understanding is the most common error I see.