Opinion vs. belief

@TheAndSys, @tb148, and I had a conversation in the Toaq Discord server about the difference between opinion and belief. Some points from the conversation:

  • The line between opinion and belief may vary between languages. In English, one can use "I think" for both "...that the movie is good" and "...that you told me that". In Spanish, one can only say "I think that the movie is good" and "I believe that you told me that" (and still sound correct).
  • In Toaq, both & and I use chı 'believe' to refer to either statements we believe to be fact or statements grounded in reality, and mıu 'opine' to refer to subjective statements not grounded in reality.
    • By "grounded in reality", I gave the example of using chı to assert that I hold the viewpoint that it is going to rain overnight, because it's been sprinkling all day and the sky is still overcast. The point is that this conclusion was reached using observable evidence.
  • However, things start getting weird once things like ethical principles or religious belief enter the mix. Those are not easily tied to observable reality, yet form the very foundations for peoples' understanding of the world, even more so than what our senses tell us.
    • I think that such "opinions" are actually a secret third thing (let's call them "axioms") that was conflated with opinion, and a separate word is warranted.
    • However, tb148 does not draw a distinction between opinions and axioms, seeing axioms as overwhelmingly strong opinions.
    • & pointed out that axioms, separate from opinions or not, are checked first during decision-making. If something conflicts with our moral/ethical/religious/philosophical axioms, it is rejected outright, or at least massively dispreferred to other options. The axioms, in this way, have much more of an impact than preferences.

I thought this was an interesting conversation, so I thought I'd post it here. What do you think?

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Do you all believe there are cases where both "believe" and "opine" work? If so, do they result in different meanings?

For example, I feel that there is a distinction between "I used to believe that ice cream is good" and "I used to opine that ice cream is good" (if it were more idiomatic in English). For me, it would make sense if the first sentence indicates a change in knowledge about the world but no significant change in values (so that I realize that ice cream has some properties that are not good according to my values), whereas the second sentence indicates a change in values but not necessarily a change in beliefs (so that I start to find properties that I already knew about ice cream to be not good). But I don't use the word "opine" like this in English, so I have no idea where this intuition comes from and whether it's useful.

I'd have to agree there's a distinction there. Going off of &'s point about decision making, that would be two different parts of the decision-making process affected by each: the one where you check your course of action against facts you know about the world and the one where you check against your preferences.

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re: Spanish
I'm a native Spanish speaker from the United States. presuming that "I think" is "pienso" and "I believe" is "creo", for me the two are equally correct for "...that you told me that", though only "pienso" is correct for "...that the movie is good". I suppose it's English influence, but I find this interesting.

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coincidentally, just came across this on Wiktionary! unless I'm reading this wrong, apparently creer can be both...?

It may depend on dialect honestly.

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