Your lottery ticket example doesn't work. In that example you didn't actually believe you had the winning numbers. A belief is something discerned or perceived to be true. You may have been hopeful, and possibly even confident, but you didn't actually believe it was true. So the lotto ticket example is merely a guess, not a belief.
Hi Will, Thanks for your comment. I really like that you zeroed in on the question of "what makes something a belief?" (something that doesn't get enough attention in the literature imo). However, I'm not sure I see the distinction between "feeling confident that something is true" and "believing that something is true". Can you give me an example where someone is confident that something is true, but does not believe that it's true? Also, it may be worth noting that the lottery case is loosely adapted from epistemologist Richard Feldman's example called "Correct Predictions": > “New York is playing Denver in an upcoming Superbowl. The experts are divided about who will win, and the teams are rated as even. You have a hunch that Denver will win. When the game is finally played, your hunch turns out to have been correct. So you believed that Denver would win, and your belief was true. In [this example], you believe that Denver will win, and this is true. But you did not know that Denver would win. You just had a guess that turned out to be correct" (Feldman, "Epistemology", 2006: 14-15) To me, it seems like Feldman takes terms like "hunch", "guess" , etc. to mean "believed to be true". It's certainly possible that Feldman is wrong is group these terms together, but for now, I'm inclined to agree with him. But maybe I'm missing something -- that's always possible! - Matt
