  In I 13, Sextus gives two senses of the verb translated ‘to have beliefs’ (δογματίζειν), and he does so by means of distinguishing two meanings of the word ‘belief’ (δόγμα). One meaning is broader (koinoteron) than the other. So the first meaning should encompass the second. Sextus clearly intends this to be so: in the first sense of dogma, a dogma is assent to anything, and in the second sense it is assent to a certain subclass of things (‘some unclear object of investigation in the sciences’). In arguing that the Skeptic has dogmata in the first sense, Sextus simply needs to show that the Skeptic does assent to something. And this he does by telling us which things the Skeptic assents to: he assents to the ‘feelings forced upon him by appearances’. When Sextus says what it is that the Skeptics don’t assent to, we are told that it is the ‘unclear objects of investigation in the sciences’. If it’s right that the talk of assenting to impressions is Stoic, then it could sound as though here Sextus is talking about assent to a different kind of thing here, something more like a proposition. It could sound as if Sextus means to differentiate between the type of thing that the Skeptic assents to (appearances) and the type of thing he doesn’t assent to (objects of investigation, i.e., propositions). Indeed, it may be that this lies behind the interpretations of Barnes, Burnyeat, Perin, and Fine: what the Skeptic can assent to are his own impressions, but not to matters of fact! But on closer inspection, Sextus does describe the object of this second kind of assent in epistemological or psychological terms: the forbidden kind of dogma involves assenting to ‘unclear objects of investigation in the sciences’. So it is not difficult to put this in terms of impressions: Sextus is saying that the forbidden kind of dogma involves assenting to impressions which are not clear. Why should the impressions garnered during the course of an investigation in the sciences be unclear? For a Pyrrhonist such as Sextus, the answer is obvious: any impression that P which comes to him during his investigation will be counterbalanced by an impression that not-P (or some other conflicting impression). These impressions or appearances do not carry with them any pull because they are always countermanded by another equal and opposite impression. Thus, to assent to one of these impressions is to go beyond appearances; it is no longer a matter of responding, passively and without an act of the will, to the weight or pull of the appearances, but rather a matter of going beyond how things appear; in such cases, one’s assent is instead dictated by certain theoretical commitments one has (or, more broadly, by one’s accepting something as a reason for assenting to the non-apparent thing). 