 Doxastic attitudes. Suppose you perceive a child falling on the street. In this perception, you have cognized a given state of affairs, but you have not yet adopted any doxastic position towards that state of affairs. You do that when you form the positive belief that a child is falling on the street. The distinction between perception and beliefs can be easily overlooked and is illustrated most clearly by scenarios involving optical illusions. For instance, in the Müller-Lyer illusion, your perception that the two segments are of different length is clearly different from your belief that they are of equal length.