Abstract

A familiar version of belief-credence dualism has it that outright belief is binary, while credence (=confidence) admits of degree. You can, on this style of view, be more or less confident (have a greater or weaker credence) in p; however, you cannot have a stronger or weaker belief that p. You either believe that p or you do not. But this way of thinking about belief is out-of-sync with several garden-variety observations that entail that belief states themselves come in degrees. Some may suggest that these observations have the making of some kind of theoretical dilemma for belief-credence dualists. But in what follows it will be shown that belief in one sense comes in degrees, even though belief in another sense is binary. The solution lies with understanding what belief states are (a kind of determinable state related to assent/taking a proposition to be true) and their degreed-ordered realizations (the determinate degree to which one is convinced). The upshot is that belief-credence dualists can upgrade their view to one on which we have at least two distinct types of degreed doxastic states: one related to belief and another related to credence (confidence).