A young child is asked what her father does, and she answers, “Daddy is a doctor.” Does she believe what she says?
Clearly her understanding of what it is to be a doctor, as well as what it is to be a father, will grow over the years, and hence her understanding of her own sentence, “Daddy is a doctor,” will grow. Can we specify—in any nonarbitrary way—how much she must know in order to understand this proposition “completely”? If understanding comes in degrees, as this example shows, then belief, which depends on understanding, must come in degrees as well, even for such mundane propositions as this. She “sorta” believes her father is a doctor—which is not to say she has reservations or doubts, but that she falls short of the understanding that is an important precondition for any useful concept of belief.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
