How does one distinguish fact and belief?

Question

I have seen a similar question, but I am looking for the distinction between fact and belief, and not knowledge and belief. Also, I do not seek, necessarily, Plato's view.

In order to distinguish fact and belief, I started by the definition of the concepts: first the definition of fact and then belief.

Accordingly to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Facts, philosophers like to say, are opposed to theories and to values (cf. Rundle 1993) and are to be distinguished from things, in particular from complex objects, complexes and wholes, and from relations. They are the objects of certain mental states and acts, they make truth-bearers true and correspond to truths, they are part of the furniture of the world.

Apart from that and seeing that a fact may be used in at least two different ways, we read

What might a fact be? Three popular views about the nature of facts can be distinguished:

• A fact is just a true truth-bearer,
• A fact is just an obtaining state of affairs,
• A fact is just a sui generis type of entity in which objects exemplify properties or stand in relations.

If one searches Stanfords Encyclopedia of Philosophy for belief, one finds

Contemporary Anglophone 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.

And

the belief just is the fact or proposition represented, or the particular stored token of that fact or proposition

From the above, and here, it seems one can assume that a fact is to be the truth at the time one is using the word(s), making a specific proposition.

Considering "Truth" as something one believes to be true, due to any of several possible reasons.

And to think "believing in something makes it a fact" seems to be wrong.

The concepts fact and befief (and truth) seem to have a strong relationship. As these resources I mentioned alone do not help me fully grasp them, are there references (philosophers / books) that reflect on these concepts? How do they distinguish them?

Answer 1

When a person is arguing some point of uncertain truth, and to justify his argument he says, "it's a fact that X," what he means is that he asserts X is true and also he considers the truth of X to be firmly supported. It may carry a connotation that his listener would be irrational not to accept X. The arguer would not say "it's a fact that X" when referring to some uncertain point or supposition. Calling X a fact in this context implies some level of definiteness and confidence about the belief in X.

There is another sense of "facts," though, in which facts are just states of the world, irrespective of beliefs about them or the confidence in these beliefs.

In both senses, there is a clear distinction between fact and belief. Beliefs are states of the mind, and facts are states of the world. You may hold a belief about a fact. You do not hold a fact about a fact, or a fact about a belief.