 Jessie believes that Stalin was originally a Tsarist mole among the Bolsheviks, that her son is at school, and that she is eating a tomato. She feels different degrees of confidence with respect to these different propositions. The first she recognizes to be a speculative historical conjecture; the second she takes for granted, though she knows it could be false; the third she regards as a near-certainty. Consequently, Jessie is more confident of the second proposition than the first and more confident of the third than the second. We might suppose that every subject holds each of her beliefs with some particular degree of confidence. In general, the greater the confidence one has in a proposition, the more willing one is to depend on it in one’s actions.