BELIEF

Belief is usually defined as a conviction of the truth of a proposition without its verification; therefore a belief is a subjective mental interpretation derived from perceptions, contemplation(reasoning), or communication.

In the religious sense, "belief" refers to a part of a wider spiritual or moral foundation — generally called faith. Historically, faiths were generated by groups seeking a functionally valid foundation to sustain them. The generally accepted faiths usually note that, when the exercise of faith leads to oppression, clarification or further revelation is called for.

Knowledge is often defined as justified true belief, in that the belief must be considered to correspond to reality and must be derived from valid evidence and arguments. However, this definition has been challenged by the Gettier problem which suggests that justified true belief does not provide a complete picture of knowledge.

Belief can be understood as a state of mind in the process of increasing understanding that is sometimes called deduction. As people develop structures of understandings from observation or learned facts (generally accepted truths), they create a theory that is not unlike a bridge, sitting on those pillars of facts. This structure-building process is sometimes called induction.