 How, then, is the crucial distinction between beliefs and attitudes to be understood? Stevenson adopts a dispositional theory, according to which these states are distinguishable by their respective complex causal relations (1944, 7–8; 1950a). (More will be said about Stevenson’s view of dispositions in  Section 3.2.)  While he concedes that the complexity of the relevant dispositions makes them difficult to specify, he does think that beliefs and attitudes are easily distinguishable in our daily experience. Consider an onlooker who witnesses a chess expert open weakly against a novice and wonders: