William asked:

A question about belief: If I know 'p' to be true, there would be no need to believe it, since I know it to
be true. However, if I know 'p' to be false, again there would be no reason to believe it since I know it
to be false. Conclusion: belief should have no epistemological status.

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Well, first, there seem to be many people who know things to be true but still manage not to believe
them. Perhaps knowledge shouldimply belief, but does knowledge thatsomething is true imply that
one knows whyit's true? In that latter case, one might doubt one's knowledge, i.e., that one actually
doesknow. The same would hold for knowing something is false. Looking at it the other way around,
if knowledge is justified belief, then belief itself, without justification, is insufficient for knowledge. So
we can set up the proposition: if knowledge then justified belief, and say that the contrapositive holds:
if no justified belief, then no knowledge. But neither the converse: if justified belief, then knowledge
(because we can doubt the justification); nor the inverse: if no knowledge, then no justified belief (for
much the same reason), are necessarily true.

But if we can say, "if no justified belief, then no knowledge", then we have to say that belief plays at
least some part in epistemology, since if we believe in something, but cannot justify it, we must say
that we have no knowledge of it. And indeed one might consider the whole above discussion as
working out some of the more obvious epistemological implications of knowledge and belief (if you
take knowledge to be justified belief), which does bring belief into meta-epistemology, at least.

Steven Ravett Brown

Sorry, I can't buy this one. I think that, whatever else 'knowing' entails (and people argue at length
about that), it must entail 'believing'. I can't see how you could consistently say 'I know that grass is
green' but also say 'It doesn't matter if I believe it or not'. Knowing is a type of belief — belief plus
something(s) else. The standard somethings are 'justified' and 'true', but both of these are
contestable. I can't see how you can contest the 'belief' part.

Tim Sprod