 Questions about what  belief  is and how it is formed have typically played a marginal role in the ethics of belief debate. There is agreement among most analytic philosophers that belief is (roughly) a dispositional, affirmative attitude towards a proposition or state of affairs. To believe that p is to take it that p is true—to take it that the state of affairs described by the sentence “p” obtains. Note that this doesn't mean that the subject explicitly believes the proposition that p is true, however, since the latter is a different and higher order belief (mere belief that p doesn't require possession of the concept of “truth”, for instance, whereas the belief that p is true does). It is also widely agreed that the majority of our beliefs are not occurrent at any given time, and that belief comes in degrees of strength, confidence, or firmness.