Perhaps it isn't. Please excuse me if I go over at least a bit of what is familiar ground to you. By the late 1950s/ early 60s propositional knowledge - knowledge that p - as analysed in terms of justified true belief:
S know that p at time t if and only if p is true at t, S believes at t that p, and S is justified by the evidence (e) avilable to her at t in believing that p.
An internalist view of justification and evidence was generally assumed:
S believes that p at t on the basis of evidence e at t only if S is aware that she has e at t by introspection or immediate sensory awareness. (This neeeds tightening but we can work with it for now.)
Ed Gettier's bombshell in 1963 was to show that the justification condition could be met and the other conditions as well, and S still not know that p by ordinary standards of knowledge. Attention fixed mainly on the justification condition, which was qualified, refined, had sub-conditions added without, so far as I know, a winning candidate emerging. There was no reworking of the justification condition(s) that then or now secured anything like majority consent or clearly passed the test of counterexamples.
Belief as such and on its own never mattered - was never judged remotely sufficient for knowledge - only true belief and belief which we were justified by the evidence available to us in believing.
Jettisoning belief: abandoning internalism
On a different tack externalism abandons the introspection and immediate sensory awareness requirements. No matter what S believes on what evidence at t or any other time. What does matter is how S's acceptance - perhaps only dispositional - of p has come about. If there is a reliable causal connexion between S's mental/ physical state at t and a state of affairs that produced - caused it - then S knows that p at t. The belief condition falls away as otiose.
Imagine an example. If I am asked what the Latin word, mensa, means and I spontaneously reply 'table', I may have no evidence available to me at all that I am right; but I am right, and do know that the mensa means 'table' (in the relevant sense of 'table') because I was taught Latin by a reliable teacher from a reliable textbook; and moreover there is a reliable connexion between teacher, textbook and across the centuries the use of Latin by the ancient Romans. But how can I tell that such a connexion obtains? I can't and don't need to. We have abandoned internalism. The causes of my state of mind/ physical state of my brain are sufficient.
Jettisoning belief: back to Plato & intellectual vision
Some trace the justified true belief analysis of knowledge to Plato's Theaetetus (201c-210d). I hesitate over exactly how we are to take Plato's 'true belief with a logos'. Fortunately the Republic serves my purpose better.
In the central books of the Republic while the Forms are (I'll risk it) ultimate realities and perfect examples of which the corresponding objects of experience on earth are only highly imperfect approximations, Plato's philosophers can at the culmination of a long process of education apprehend the Forms. They do not form beliefs about the Forms. Rather, the Forms (or so I understand) disclose their natures in a moment (for the philosophers) of intuitive self-disclosure lor intellectual vision. The philosophers recognise - penetrate - the nature of the Forms in a sudden encounter of self-evidence.
Now, whatever one may think about this, what is depicted here is knowledge without prior or accompanying belief. Belief has no work to do. Perhaps Spinoza's scientia intuitiva exhibits parallels as might Descartes' self-validating and incorrigble clear and distinct ideas. (I have to pass over here the Form of the Good in Plato and the role of God in Descartes, which provide the metaphysical framework for their respective epistemologies.)
I offer the above discussion not (impossibly) as a full and correct answer but in order to rotate your perspective away, as I think you are looking for, from belief in the analysis of knowledge.
