Knowledge v. Belief
Apr 10, 2014
About five years ago, I experienced a cascading series of personal setbacks that ultimately caused me to start questioning things I thought I "knew". Being a wordsmith kind of guy, that eventually led to some questions about what the word "know" means, and what it means to "know" anything. Specifically, for me, it meant re-assessing the difference between "knowing" and "believing".
"Know" comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word "ken", which you don't hear much anymore except maybe occasionally in the expression "that's beyond my ken". Webster uses the following words in his definition of "know": perceive, apprehend, have full information of, be acquainted with, familiar with, possess experience of, recognize, distinguish, discern. That's a lot of words, but they all point toward the idea of an intimate understanding based on personal experience with stuff you can see, touch, taste, hear, smell.
The connection with vision is particularly important for both "know" and "ken"; in fact, one definition of the word "ken" used to be "to look around". You get sort of the same idea from our words "notice" and "ignore", which are both based on the idea of "knowing", but basically mean to pay attention to or to deliberately not pay attention to. If you don't look at it, you can't know it—you ignore it, so you remain ignorant.
Conversely, you can't really know what you don't notice, what you don't look at, what you don't pay attention to, what you haven't seen. You can have all kinds of interesting ideas in your head, but you don't "know" what you haven't seen and experienced for yourself. This idea is captured in our expression "I saw it with my own eyes", implying that 'now it's real'.
"Believe", on the other hand, is a horse of a different color. The definition includes phrases such as "to credit upon the authority or testimony of another", "to be persuaded by evidence or by circumstances other than personal knowledge", "to regard as true". [Question: Is there any kind of knowledge other than "personal"?...] The root word that "believe" comes from is the same word that gives us two old words, "lief" and "leave" (in the sense of "by your leave"). Both of those words have to do with preference, or choice, based on some personal valuation. In fact, the word "love" comes from the same root meaning of choosing what is dear to us. The things we believe are the things we choose to regard as true based on evidence we've looked at, or based on someone else's authority, or sometimes just because that's what we choose to believe, because that's what we want to believe.
More tomorrow; time's up for today.
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