  A similar story can be told with the NRB view. The skeptic looks for the truth, on the assumption that obtaining it is of crucial importance for her life. But since she consistently fails to find it, it begins to strike her that perhaps she never will. Perhaps, it was not, after all, so important for her life to have it: maybe mere belief is all we need. But it doesn’t follow that she should give up (as false) her belief that it is irrational to hold opinions, since it would only be correct to give it up if it actually is true that mere belief is all she needs—but this is something that her arguments don’t warrant, any more than they warrant the opposite conclusion. An NRB view, then, suggests that Arcesilaus’ beliefs in the importance of knowledge and the inadequacy of opinion were explicitly non-rational, in the sense that he was not persuaded that they were warranted by a rational argument or theory, or even by the extensive arguments he devoted his life to. He believed that he hadn’t found knowledge and that it is irrational to assent to anything without knowledge, but realized, as a result of the unrestricted application of his Socratic method, that there were strong reasons against these beliefs. He was thus not in a position to give his rational assent to the belief that it is irrational to hold opinions—he just found that that was how things striked him, i.e., that’s what he believed. The Academic skeptic, on this view, is someone whose sustained but pre-theoretical commitment to rational investigation undermines her confidence in rationality. The result is not a negative theory—e.g., the theory that we can’t acquire knowledge owing to the limitations of our cognitive or rational capacities—but a pervasive lack of theory sustained by a dialectical method.