Making Sense of Edge Beliefs

Miriam Schleifer McCormick argues that the best way to defend doxasticism about edge beliefs is to challenge the standard view of the connection between belief and evidence. While I agree with this general strategy, I deny that we have good reasons to classify belief as an emotion. I argue that the features invoked in support of this classification cannot, on their own, explain the resistance of edge beliefs to counterevidence. Moreover, I contend that the explanatory program succeeds only by appealing to auxiliary hypotheses that are insufficiently grounded in Schleifer McCormick’s analysis of belief as emotion and that are vulnerable to independent objections. I illustrate these difficulties by examining some explanations of evidence resistance and Schleifer McCormick’s attempts to draw normative distinctions among edge beliefs. I conclude by suggesting that a more promising approach is to analyze evidence sensitivity directly as constitutive of belief, while allowing for flexibility in its manifestations.