Evidence influences belief. Joyce (2005) suggests that there is an important difference between the weight of evidence and the balance of evidence. He argues that this is a distinction that precise probabilists struggle to deal with and that the distinction is worth representing. This idea has been hinted at by a great many thinkers including J.M. Keynes, Rudolf Carnap, C.S. Pierce and Karl Popper (see references in Joyce 2005; Gärdenfors and Sahlin 1982). Here’s Keynes’ articulation of the intuition: