How is this definition of "belief"?

...back to the topic, the pretence distinction between "blind guesses" and "informed guesses", while useful in simple contexts, is ultimately deceiving as guesses are by definition blind.

What I mean by it, as per what I've read about Pyrrhonism, is a truth claim about something non-evident, particularly metaphysical claims.

Based on the definition of guess, the term "informed guess" is an oxymoron. A guess is a guess precisely because one lacks evidence.

Here's the first hit on a google search for belief: 1. An acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. 2. Something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion or conviction. It seems to me that all we have going on here is a word game which attempts to avoid using the word belief, which is a perfectly acceptable term for what we do in a world of uncertainty. As i've said twice now, Frank doesn't like the word belief because he got hammered over his selective agnosticism which leads him to claim he is agnostic about the existence of a god, but not about any other supernatural beings. It's a polemical position on his part, and he has trashed a perfectly good thread which was attempting to come up with a reasonable definition of belief just so he could attempt to insist upon his guess/"i don't do belief" bullshit. He came up with that because he couldn't handle the criticism of his position in debate.

FBM wrote:

What I mean by it, as per what I've read about Pyrrhonism, is a truth claim about something non-evident, particularly metaphysical claims.

That's just about exactly the dictionary definition of a guess--something for which there is no evidence--it certainly doesn't necessarily match a reasonable definition of a belief. I cannot but dissent from your claim that if one admits that one could be wrong, one is not entertaining a belief. When you don't know, or can't know, belief is all you have to operate with. Acknowledging that, ultimately, you don't know to a certainty is just honesty. You still need a basis upon which to act--unless, of course, you're going to sit home all day, and wait for others to provide you the wherewithal to survive--in which case you would do well not to be paranoid.

guess (gs)
v. guessed, guess·ing, guess·es
v.tr.
1.
a. To predict (a result or an event) without sufficient information.
b. To assume, presume, or assert (a fact) without sufficient information.
2. To form a correct estimate or conjecture of: guessed the answer.
3. To suppose; think: I guess he was wrong.
v.intr.
1. To make an estimate or conjecture: We could only guess at her motives.
2. To estimate or conjecture correctly.
n.
1. An act or instance of guessing.
2. A conjecture arrived at by guessing.

Belief
First published Mon Aug 14, 2006; substantive revision Sun Nov 21, 2010

Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn't involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Nor does the term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it's the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk. Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology. The “mind-body problem”, for example, so central to philosophy of mind, is in part the question of whether and how a purely physical organism can have beliefs. Much of epistemology revolves around questions about when and how our beliefs are justified or qualify as knowledge.

Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a “propositional attitude”. Propositions are generally taken to be whatever it is that sentences express (see the entry on propositions). For example, if two sentences mean the same thing (e.g., “snow is white” in English, “Schnee ist weiss” in German), they express the same proposition, and if two sentences differ in meaning, they express different propositions. (Here we are setting aside some complications about that might arise in connection with indexicals; see the entry on indexicals.) A propositional attitude, then, is the mental state of having some attitude, stance, take, or opinion about a proposition or about the potential state of affairs in which that proposition is true—a mental state of the sort canonically expressible in the form “S A that P”, where S picks out the individual possessing the mental state, A picks out the attitude, and P is a sentence expressing a proposition. For example: Ahmed [the subject] hopes [the attitude] that Alpha Centauri hosts intelligent life [the proposition], or Yifeng [the subject] doubts [the attitude] that New York City will exist in four hundred years. What one person doubts or hopes, another might fear, or believe, or desire, or intend—different attitudes, all toward the same proposition. Contemporary discussions of belief are often embedded in more general discussions of the propositional attitudes; and treatments of the propositional attitudes often take belief as the first and foremost example.

...no you are not playing an honest game Frank...please link me to a quote where you think you have provided a sufficient definition of believing according to your lexicon so that we can objectively evaluate the self consistency of your claims...

You wish...its not up to me to back up what you claim to have stated...if you want to prove it very well if you wont no worries its not that important...

Look Frank don't make an inversion on the onus of proof here...the claim is yours if you can't back it why should I care ? Do you think I'm worried on whether you have the heart to back what you say ? Why should I if you are making my case ?...

Bertrand Russell (1926)

Theory of Knowledge
for The Encyclopaedia Britannica)

THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE is a product of doubt. When we have asked ourselves seriously whether we really know anything at all, we are naturally led into an examination of knowing, in the hope of being able to distinguish trustworthy beliefs from such as are untrustworthy. Thus Kant, the founder of modern theory of knowledge, represents a natural reaction against Hume's scepticism. Few philosophers nowadays would assign to this subject quite such a fundamental importance as it had in Kant's "critical" system; nevertheless it remains an essential part of philosophy. It is perhaps unwise to begin with a definition of the subject, since, as elsewhere in philosophical discussions, definitions are controversial, and will necessarily differ for different schools; but we may at least say that the subject is concerned with the general conditions of knowledge, in so far as they throw light upon truth and falsehood.

It will be convenient to divide our discussion into three stages, concerning respectively (1) the definition of knowledge, (2) data, (3) methods of inference. It should be said, however, that in distinguishing between data and inferences we are already taking sides on a debatable question, since some philosophers hold that this distinction is illusory, all knowledge being (according to them) partly immediate and partly derivative.

I. THE DEFINITION OF KNOWLEDGE

The question how knowledge should be defined is perhaps the most important and difficult of the three with which we shall deal. This may seem surprising: at first sight it might be thought that knowledge might be defined as belief which is in agreement with the facts. The trouble is that no one knows what a belief is, no one knows what a fact is, and no one knows what sort of agreement between them would make a belief true. Let us begin with belief.

Belief.

Traditionally, a "belief" is a state of mind of a certain sort. But the behaviourists deny that there are states of mind, or at least that they can be known; they therefore avoid the word "belief", and, if they used it, would mean by it a characteristic of bodily behaviour. There are cases in which this usage would be quite in accordance with common sense. Suppose you set out to visit a friend whom you have often visited before, but on arriving at your destination you find that he has moved, you would say "I thought he was still living at his old house." Yet it is highly probable that you did not think about it at all, but merely pursued the usual route from habit. A "thought" or "belief" may, therefore, in the view of common sense, be shown by behaviour, without any corresponding "mental" occurrence. And even if you use a form of words such as is supposed to express belief, you are still engaged in bodily behaviour, provided you pronounce the words out loud or to yourself. Shall we say, in such cases, that you have a belief? Or is something further required?

It must be admitted that behaviour is practically the same whether you have an explicit belief or not. People who are out of doors when a shower of rain comes on put up their umbrellas, if they have them; some say to themselves "it has begun to rain", others act without explicit thought, but the result is exactly the same in both cases. In very hot weather, both human beings and animals go out of the sun into the shade, if they can; human beings may have an explicit "belief " that the shade is pleasanter, but animals equally seek the shade. It would seem, therefore, that belief, if it is not a mere characteristic of behaviour, is causally unimportant. And the distinction of truth and error exists where there is behaviour without explicit belief, just as much as where explicit belief is present; this is shown by the illustration of going to where your friend used to live. Therefore, if theory of knowledge is to be concerned with distinguishing truth from error, we shall have to include the cases in which there is no explicit belief, and say that a belief may be merely implicit in behaviour. When old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, she "believed" that there was a bone there, even if she had no state of mind which could be called cognitive in the sense of introspective psychology.

...

You got to have a nerve addressing a topic like that in a Philosophy forum, really...how's that for honesty ? How does this kind of attitude leaves your credibility, eh ? If you have provided a definition dozens of times it shouldn't be very hard to bring it up...why should I go search for something which I believe you haven't done, are you expecting me to prove a negative by going to all your posts ? I rather have you prove you have said anything about your concept of belief other that you don't do it and have guesses.

Belief
Pascal Engel
Introduction

The problem of the nature of belief lies at the crossing of a number of fields of philosophical inquiry: philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, ethics, philosophy of religion and philosophy of social science. For this reason the notion is sometimes ambiguous and used in different ways. Most philosophical treatments deal with one or the other aspect of the notion, but contemporary treatments have attempted a most systematic outlook. The main current debates concern whether belief is a passive state of mind, to be understood mostly in causal terms or an active state of mind, involving a kind of commitment whether beliefs are essentially implicit episodes or essentially conscious ones, the relationship between beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, such as judgment or acceptance, the relationship between belief and knowledge, and whether there are degrees of beliefs.

General Overviews

Because of the diversity of domains in which the notion of belief features and the variety of approaches, there is no overall treatment, but there are some good overviews for each specific domain. Price 1969 offers a good historical account mostly within the British empiricist tradition. Fodor 1981 and Dennett 1982 present classical but controversial views in the philosophy of mind. Stalnaker 1984 is perhaps the best introduction to the semantical, psychological and epistemological issues. Vahid 2008 gives a good overview of the epistemological issues. Velleman 2000 may be the best entrance point to the various dimensions of the debate. Engel 1995 and Schwitzgebel 2006 give general presentations.