 Instrumentalists about belief regard belief attributions as useful for certain purposes, but hold that there are no definite underlying facts about what people really believe, or that beliefs are not robustly real, or that belief attributions are never in the strictest sense true (these are not exactly equivalent positions, though they are closely related). One sort of instrumentalism—what we might call hard instrumentalism—denies that beliefs exist in any sense. Hard instrumentalism is thus a form of eliminativism, conjoined with the thesis that belief-talk is nonetheless instrumentally useful (e.g., Quine 1960, p. 221 [but for a caveat see p. 262–266]). Another type of instrumentalism, which we might call soft instrumentalism, grants that beliefs are real, but only in a less robust sense than is ordinarily thought. Dennett (1991) articulates a view of this sort. Consider as an analogy: Is the equator real? Well, not in the sense that there’s a red stripe running through the Congo; but saying that a country is on the equator says something true about its position relative to other countries and how it travels on the spinning Earth. Are beliefs real? Well, not perhaps in the sense of being representations stored somewhere in the mind; but attributing a belief to someone says something true about that person’s patterns of behavior and response. Beliefs are as real as equators, or centers of gravity, or the average Canadian. The soft instrumentalist holds that such things are not robustly real (if that makes sense)—not as real as mountains or masses or individual, actual Canadians. They are in some sense inventions that capture something useful in the structure of more robustly real phenomena; and yet at the same time they are not mere fictions. Soft instrumentalism in this sense comports naturally with approaches to belief such as dispositionalism and interpretationism, to the extent those positions treat belief attribution simply as a convenient means of pointing toward certain patterns in a subject’s real and hypothetical behavior.