I am not sure that I believe anything.
That sentence sounds more dramatic than I intend it to be. I do not mean that I actively reject every proposition, or that I have somehow escaped the practical necessity of taking things to be true.
The problem may simply be that the word belief feels unusually strong to me.
When I try to say what it means to believe something, I tend to associate belief with an absence of doubt. If I genuinely believe that P, perhaps I should no longer be wondering whether P is true.
But I also speak of provisional beliefs, and that creates an obvious difficulty.
Perhaps I use the word belief at two different levels without noticing it. At one level, belief means something close to certainty. At another, it means that among the positions currently available to me, one seems better supported than the alternatives.
Or perhaps I am simply using the word inconsistently.
At the moment, I cannot tell which. What I can identify more easily are weaker states. I can say that a position currently seems the most reasonable. I can use it as a working assumption. I can act as though it is true. None of these requires the disappearance of doubt.
I may be uncertain about what I believe, but uncertainty does not suspend the rest of life. Decisions still appear. Some of them are trivial and reversible. Others involve money, other people, or consequences that cannot easily be undone.
The threshold I use will therefore change with the situation.
If a small practical assumption causes friction or inefficiency, I can change it quickly and see what happens. If the decision is difficult to reverse, I will probably require more before proceeding.
I do not think this is a difference in kind. It seems more like a difference in threshold.
This also makes me suspicious of statements such as:
I can always change my mind if better evidence appears.
The sentence sounds reasonable, but by itself it may not say very much.
What counts as better evidence? How much is enough? What kind of observation would matter? Would I actually change my position if such evidence appeared?
I rarely specify these conditions in advance and I am not sure that doing so would always help. A revision rule defined too precisely could exclude forms of evidence I did not expect.
Perhaps what matters is not whether I can list every possible condition under which I would revise a position, but whether revision remains genuinely possible when something relevant appears.
This is also how I currently think about dogmatism. I am less interested in how strongly a position is stated than in what happens when it is challenged.
Someone may speak with great confidence and still revise a position when a sufficiently strong counterexample appears. Someone else may describe a view as provisional, repeatedly say that they could be wrong, and yet never allow anything to count against it.
The second person may be more dogmatic than the first.
So strong commitment and revisability do not necessarily conflict.
I can say:
Given the evidence currently available to me, P is the most reasonable conclusion.
while also saying:
I may be wrong.
The second statement does not cancel the first.
It only leaves open the possibility that another position may later turn out to be better justified.
My usual response to a claim is to look for where it fails.
Counterexamples are useful. They expose boundaries. They prevent a convenient formulation from surviving merely because accepting it would be useful or practical. But the same habit can continue past the point where it remains useful.
What begins as openness can become an inability to accept anything. Years ago, I sometimes wanted to have some kind of belief and found myself unable to do so. Every position seemed to admit another objection, another missing condition, another possibility that had not been excluded.
Open-mindedness can fail too.
If I insist that every position must remain indefinitely suspended because it could be wrong, I may turn revisability itself into something I refuse to revise.
There is something strange about becoming dogmatic about not being dogmatic.
I do not yet know exactly where the boundary should be. Abstract and philosophical questions seem to pull me more strongly towards suspension. Ordinary practical questions often force me towards provisional acceptance.
But even this distinction is unstable. Suspending judgement is itself a position. Saying, “I am not certain, so I will not decide,” is no more neutral than saying, “I am not certain, but I will proceed.”
Both have consequences.
This is one reason I increasingly separate belief from action.
The two propositions:
I believe that P is true.
and
I will act as though P is true.
feel almost independent to me.
The second can exist without the first.
In fact, it often has to. Life does not wait for epistemic resolution. This does not mean that action is arbitrary.
I still want the strength of a conclusion to be proportional to the grounds available for it. I still want to distinguish between a position that is merely possible and one that is well supported.
I also want to continue observing what happens after I act.
If a position creates friction, contradiction, loss, or some other unexpected consequence, that becomes additional information.
I do not seem to treat experience as a category separate from reasoning. I tend to turn it into propositions too.
Something happened.
A prediction failed.
A consequence appeared.
A person responded differently than expected.
These can become counterexamples just as easily as formal arguments can.
This is probably related to another tendency I have noticed in myself: I find it difficult to accept a change in position unless I can explain why the change occurred.
If I once accepted P and now accept Q, I want to identify what happened between them.
What changed?
What new information appeared?
Which premise failed?
Why should the new position replace the old one?
Even if I cannot explain the transition, I may still recognize that it happened. Perhaps the change occurred gradually or outside conscious attention.
But I will probably continue trying to understand it. For me, revision seems to require explicitness almost as strongly as understanding does.
There is an obvious danger here too. A demand for explanation can become another way of refusing change. Not every relevant process will present itself in a form I can clearly grasp.
Sometimes the most accurate statement may simply be:
My position has changed, and I do not yet know why.
I think I can accept that sentence now.
None of this gives me a clean rule for belief.
I still do not know whether I use belief in two different senses or simply use the word inconsistently. I still do not know exactly when suspension becomes avoidance, or when openness becomes instability. I do not have a fixed procedure that determines in advance what evidence must change every position I hold.
What I have instead is something closer to an operating preference.
I want the strength of my conclusions to be proportional to the grounds I have for them. I want to keep observing. I do not want to preserve a position merely because it is mine. I do not want to weaken a position merely to appear open-minded. Finally, I do not want to be afraid of changing my mind.
If I am wrong, I want to be able to revise.
The possibility that I am wrong does not require me to have no position at all.