I'm talking about the pyramid of knowledge that we each build for ourselves over our lifetime. That pyramid seems to be founded on a base of belief, starting with fundamental beliefs - first in our own existence, then in the existence of a world external to our selves. I claim that these are basic pieces of knowledge are fundamentally unprovable.
The knowledge pyramid is built up from there - through experience (e.g. that touching fire is painful), language (the belief in the meaning of symbols), and the belief that those linguistic symbols more-or-less accurately map our internal and external worlds. From there over time people seem to elaborate their knowledge-pyramids with ever increasing sophistication and abstraction, finally arriving at a peak consisting of extremely abstract concepts - perhaps advanced mathematics, perhaps history and social theory etc.
I claim that each of the bricks from which we build our pyramid depends for its existence on the bricks beneath it, going all the way down to the fundamental ones - I exist, the universe exists, and the two are different. If the supporting layers are removed, the layers above collapse from lack of support.
I further claim that most of what we take to be knowledge is simply belief in what we have been told by various authority figures, from parents and friends to college professors. The exception to this rule may be things that we experience directly through our senses, such as the example that touching fire being painful. Anything outside of our direct experience relies in some measure on our ability to believe in order for us to accept it as true.
Most of us accept the existence of the self as being "knowledge" because we perceive it directly, but it doesn't take much research to find schools of thought claiming that various aspects of the perceived self are constructed illusions, depending on pure belief for their existence.
This is my own epistemological perspective, I wasn't intending to impute it to you or anyone else.
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