So I arrive at a final move: I will simply bite the bullet. There are no degrees of belief. This view was famously defended by Newman in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. (What Newman terms `assent,' I call `belief.' `Assent,' however, is felicitous; it relentlessly emphasizes the verific orientation of belief.) He writes: "We might as well talk of degrees of truth as of degrees of assent." And in a passage that anticipates several of the dominant themes of this book, he writes: "if assent is acceptance of truth, and truth is the proper object of the intellect, and no one can hold conditionally what he holds to be true, here too is a reason for saying that assent is an adhesion without reserve or doubt to the proposition which is given" (114).
Now this seems to contradict the obvious fact that there are degrees of commitment involved in belief. But Newman suggests an admirably clear solution to this problem, one that I have already mentioned in passing. To "partly" or "conditionally" or "to some extent" believe that p is not in fact to believe p at all, but to believe the proposition, for example, that p is more probable than not. And one believes that proposition unconditionally. At the heart of each tentative belief, there is a belief that is held with no tentativeness, although the object of that belief is not p, but a proposition that embeds p. As Newman says: "certainly, we familiarly use such phrases as a half-assent, as we also speak of half-truths; but a half-assent is not a kind of assent any more than a half-truth is a kind of truth. As the object is indivisible, so is the act" (116).
From Crispin Sartwell, Knowledge Without Justification (unpublished, although parts have previously appeared in various journals), chapter 1.
Sartwell's an interesting character, something of a brilliant philosophical eccentric who isn't afraid to take unpopular positions; his epistemological position is epistemic minimalism, i.e., he denies that justification is a requirement for knowledge (as you could perhaps have guessed from the title of the draft). Always interesting reading. He has a regular syndicated column. He's also a blogger.
