Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

I think that David's interpretation of "belief" implies some act of
faith that is possibly not supported by readily observable evidence.

I originally went on to discuss my own use of "I think" in that sentence
but this seemed tangential so I checked the OED definition of belief
which is interesting (I have only reproduced the first three definitions):

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    1. The mental action, condition, or habit, of trusting to or
confiding in a person or thing; trust, dependence, reliance, confidence,
faith. Const. in (to, of obs.) a person.
  (Belief was the earlier word for what is now commonly called faith.
The latter originally meant in Eng. (as in OFrench) ‘loyalty to a person
to whom one is bound by promise or duty, or to one's promise or duty
itself,’ as in ‘to keep faith, to break faith,’ and the derivatives
faithful, faithless, in which there is no reference to ‘belief’; i.e.
‘faith’ was = fidelity, fealty. But the word faith being, through OF.
fei, feith, the etymological representative of the L. fides, it began in
the 14th c. to be used to translate the latter, and in course of time
almost superseded ‘belief,’ esp. in theological language, leaving
‘belief’ in great measure to the merely intellectual process or state in
sense 2. Thus ‘belief in God’ no longer means as much as ‘faith in God’
(cf. quot. 1814 in 2). See BELIEVE 1, and 1b.)

    b. absol. Trust in God; the Christian virtue of faith. arch. or Obs.

    {dag}c. out of belief: unbelieving, outside the pale of the faith. Obs.

    2. Mental acceptance of a proposition, statement, or fact, as true,
on the ground of authority or evidence; assent of the mind to a
statement, or to the truth of a fact beyond observation, on the
testimony of another, or to a fact or truth on the evidence of
consciousness; the mental condition involved in this assent. Constr. of
a statement, or (obs.) a speaker; that...; belief in (a thing);
persuasion of its existence.

    3. The thing believed; the proposition or set of propositions held
true; in early usage, esp. the doctrines believed by the professors of a
religious system, a religion. In modern use often simply = opinion,
persuasion.

    b. The term is applied by some philosophers to the primary or
ultimate principles of knowledge received on the evidence of
consciousness; intuition, natural judgement.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They do to me as well, in normal speech.  But this discussion started
with the following exchange:

On 11/01/2010 19:11, Garrett Wollman wrote:

I was discussing the meaning of "I believe" in the context of religion
and faith and whether an person can say he has no "beliefs".