To What Extent Does It Matter If What We Believe Is True

Does it matter if what we believe is true?

Knowledge is defined as a justified true belief, so, by definition, if a belief is untrue it is not knowledge. Belief differs from knowledge, in that it does not always have to be justified. Belief can be faith based, so unjustifiable and therefore, possibly untrue. In some situations, true beliefs are vital, especially if they are shared. In others, belief does not have to be true for everyone, but need only be true for an individual.

A belief that needs to be true is usually a belief pertaining to shared knowledge. If physicists are examining electric field strength using Coulomb’s law, the belief that the charge on an electron is -1.6 x 10-19 Coulombs, must be true, or the results will not pan out. Consequently, beliefs that are consistently used by many people have a large need to be true, because of all the things they relate to and subsequently prove. 

If our beliefs pertain only to us, they only need be true to us. It does not matter to the rest of the world whether what we believe is true or not, as our most personal beliefs affect only us. One example of this is believing

They see a colour and call it blue, just like the rest of the world points to the same colour and calls it blue, it is consistent with what has been told to the individual. There is a discrepancy, what is true for the colour-blind individual, is not true for the non-colour blind individual. This leads to the questioning of how a truth is determined. If truths can alter from perspective to perspective, it may be that a belief will always be untrue from some perspective, and if this were the case, it would mean almost everything could be seen as untrue in some way. So the question arises: If almost anything can be untrue from some perspective, to what extent can something ever be