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Schrodinger, you said something interesting in building a taxonomy for "belief" and "fact" that I think bears further investigation.
Lets take the definitions you've given for each (i'm assuming they're from OED or dictionary.com, or some such?) and construct the relationship between them.
In normal, empirical investigation, the causal chain of knowledge goes something like this
[thing in reality] --> [perception of thing in reality(sensate or logical)] --> [knowledge construct of perceptions] --> [belief in knowledge construct]
Take this chain in relationship to the existence of the chair I'm currently sitting in.
[chair exists] --> [I perceive visual and tactile information from the existence of the chair] --> [I interpret the perceived data as being evidence of a chair existing in reality, and reduce the perceptions down to that knowledge construct] --> [I believe in the existence of the chair in reality, to such a degree that i act in accordance with that belief, and sit in the chair]
Note that in this case, the difference between fact and belief becomes a question of degrees; we might say that a fact is a belief that has reached a certain threshold of evidence so as to be normatively accepted by any reasonable person with access to the same data. What we *cannot* say (in terms of our own mental states) is that a fact is a thing which exists in reality, because we have no access to that information! We only have access to our perceptions and knowledge constructs of it. We can speak ideally about things in actual existence, but in terms of our own personal knowledge, there is in no sense a distinction between belief and fact - a fact is a belief of a certain type.
It's important to note that a fact is still contingent on the accuracy of the data received and the accuracy of the knowledge construct drawn from it. If i find a way to alter your brain state so that you perceive a chair in every normative way, even though that chair does not exits, for you that chair reaches the threshold of being fact. You "believe" it to be real, right up to the point where you try to sit in it, and your ass hits the Persian throw rug under it instead. At that point, you have new perceptions that alter your knowledge construct, and so your belief.
I'm going to apply this same idea to metaphysical principles, but I'll do so in a later post - now I need some eggs and coffee, and I have to take down our Christmas lights before our neighbors catch on to the fact that we're pure white trash.
-sm
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