Definition of "belief" []

• The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever. (noun)
• Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief. (noun)
• Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Just as the significance of belief in God can vary with social context, with the result that it can make little sense to think of ˜belief in God™ as a meme, so the function of some DNA sequence can vary with organic context, with the result that it makes little sense to identify some sequence type as a gene for the purposes of evolutionary analysis."
• "The belief that God, or a group of gods, is identical with the whole natural world; pantheism comes from Greek roots meaning “belief that everything is a god."
• "If there is a complex unity 'Desdemona's love for Cassio', consisting of the object-terms related by the object-relation in the same order as they have in the belief, then this complex unity is called the _fact corresponding to the belief_."