ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the difference between knowing and believing. Many philosophers, starting with Plato, have erected it into quite a complicated problem and have committed people to work out what are the proper objects of knowledge on the one hand and of belief on the other, and how these two types of object differ from each other. Believing is a purely dispositional verb, whereas knowing in some of its uses, is not just this. To grasp the significance of the particular believe-statement requires some dispositional verb; but this is by no means an unusual feature of believe-statements. In this case the required knowledge is that some competent Cartesian critics over that Descartes was hypocritical in his protestations of religious sincerity, being secretly a free-thinker or even an atheist, while other equally competent critics claim that, notwithstanding one or two perplexing things he said on religious issues, he was nevertheless sincere in his claims to be a loyal Catholic.
