Belief
This article deals with faith in the general sense of being true. For the religious sense, see faith. For the German cook, see Jörg Glauben.
This article or subsequent section is not sufficiently supported by evidence (e.g., anecdotal evidence). Information without sufficient evidence may be removed in the near future. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and adding good supporting evidence.
Belief is understood to mean an assumption of truth without methodical justification. Faith in this sense means that a fact is held to be apparently (hypothetically) true or probable. In this, "faith" in the broader sense differs on the one hand from religious faith in the narrower sense, in that religious faith is always based on the will to believe and assumes the absolute truth of the content of faith (e.g. the existence of God); on the other hand, faith differs from knowledge, which can be understood as a true and justified fact.
Belief in everyday language is therefore a presumption or hypothesis which assumes the truth of the presumed facts, but at the same time leaves open the possibility of refutation if the presumption should turn out to be unjustified by facts or new findings. However, the verb "to believe" can be used differently in different contexts, for example (in relation to persons) in the meaning of "to trust someone" or also in legal contexts.
Etymology
The word believe comes from Middle High German gelouben, Old High German gilouben 'to hold dear', 'to approve' and goes back with the related words praise and dear, among others, to the Indo-European root *leubh. To the same etymological word family belong from other languages also English be-lieve 'believe', Latin libet 'it likes', 'is pleasing' libīdo 'desire'. Furthermore, the prefigured German words geloben, verloben, erlauben, Urlaub and Gelöbnis also emerged from the root.
Philosophy
In the philosophical and especially epistemological sense, belief means an assertion of one's own perceptions, convictions (faith, dogma, paradigm) and conclusions, which, however, do not have to be logically compelling here. This belief does not necessarily need objective justification and can be subjective.
In 1962, Jaakko Hintikka examined the logical structures of expressions of belief and knowledge in his work Knowledge and Belief, founding a new branch of philosophical logic; epistemic logic, in which knowledge and belief are juxtaposed in their pure forms as mutually exclusive opposites.
For a long time it was assumed that justified true belief is knowledge (Glaubenswissen, GWG-assertion). Edmund Gettier gave counter-examples showing that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge (Gettier problem).
