 (iii) Assent and Belief. Does adherence to persuasive impressions involve belief? Carneades coins a term for the kind of adherence he has been describing: approval (Cicero, Acad. 2.99). He distinguishes it from assent in the sense of Stoic and other dogmatic theories, which establishes a belief that something is in actual fact true; but he nevertheless describes it as a kind of assent (Cicero, Acad. 2.104). Carneades’ disciples disagree on whether approval is any kind of genuine assent. That is, they disagree on whether, in approval, one forms a belief. Philo and Metrodorus think that Carneades allows for some kind of belief, close to or identical with belief as the Stoics understand it. Clitomachus disagrees, and Cicero follows Clitomachus (Acad. 2.78, see also 2.59, 2.67). Scholars continue to debate these issues (Allen 2022), and the basic problem remains unchanged. It is not clear whether there is a plausible notion of belief according to which belief falls short of ‘holding to be true’ (or according to which, though some kind of ‘holding true’ is involved, the relevant affirmation-as-true is weaker than in beliefs as Stoics and other dogmatist epistemologists conceive of them). In any event, affirmations as true, at least of the full and flat-out (“in actual fact”) sort the Stoics think of, are precisely what the skeptic does not make.