How can we distinguish between knowledge, belief and opinion?

What this prompt is really asking

Each of the twelve TOK concepts gives you a different way into a prompt. These are the ones that do the most work here.

• Justification

  Grounds of Knowledge · primary lens

  The three terms are usually separated by what supports them, so the prompt is really asking what justification adds to belief.

  The reasoning that connects evidence to a conclusion. Two knowers can hold the same evidence and be justified in different beliefs if their inferential standards differ. Justification is what separates knowing something from happening to be right about it.

• Truth

  Status of Knowledge

  Belief and opinion can be true by luck, so any distinction has to say how truth attaches to knowledge non-accidentally.

  The property a claim has when things are as it says they are. Whether truth is correspondence to a world, coherence within a system, or what enquiry would settle on in the long run is itself contested, and different areas of knowledge lean on different answers.

Where the knowledge framework bites

Reached through this prompt’s concepts, in the framework’s canonical order.

Scope

Justification: The strength of justification a field demands is calibrated to what it is for. A discipline whose errors are expensive sets a higher bar than one where a provisional answer is useful, so justification standards are partly a statement about a field's purpose.

Truth: Areas of knowledge do not all mean the same thing by a true claim. Mathematical truth is truth within a system of assumptions, historical truth is answerable to surviving evidence, and asking whether a work of art is true requires a different sense of the word altogether.

Methods and tools

Justification: A discipline's methods encode its standard of justification: peer review, replication, source criticism and proof are all answers to the question of when an inference has earned its conclusion. Comparing those standards across areas of knowledge is more revealing than asking which is strictest.

Truth: Each discipline has procedures for provisionally settling what will be treated as true: proof, replication, corroboration of sources, critical consensus. Studying those procedures is the practical way into the question of what truth is here.