Explain the difference between knowing something and merely believing it

Explain the difference between knowing something and merely believing it as we defined it in class, using the concepts of certainty, evidence, and sentence competitors. Illustrate your explanation with examples; one example being whether or not you can know that your lotto ticket is a loser and why, and an example of your own choosing. 1. Knowledge requires certainty, and you can only be certain of something if your evidence lets you rule out all of its competitors. 2. In order to know that your car is where you parked it, you need to be certain, and this means that you need to rule out the possibility that it got towed for no good reason (or a good reason). • Explain Descartes’s philosophical purpose: what does Descartes mean when he compares his body of beliefs to a building, and why does it need “rebuilding?” How does his method of radical doubt serve Descartes’s purposes, and what does he mean by doubt? 1. Like the bricks of a building, some beliefs are built “on top” of other beliefs. If we lose confidence in the beliefs at the foundation of this structure, then our entire body of beliefs is threatened. Descartes has lost his belief that the earth is the center of the universe and therefore his entire worldview needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. 2. Descartes decided to start all over, and uses doubt as the “wrecking ball” to clear mental space for new beliefs. Anything he previously believed will be discarded if he finds any reason to doubt its truth at all. Only those beliefs he cannot doubt will be kept. 3. A belief is doubtable if you cannot rule out all of it’s sentence competitors.