“Belief” is not something you have; rather, it’s a relationship between thought and action.

I came across this piece by John Ziman from 1989, in the middle of the “cold fusion” hoopla:

When scientific controversies erupt like this, one must obviously try to grasp the essential points at issue. The mere fact that these points are seriously disputed affects one’s world picture. But if one is not then prepared to participate fully in the dispute, the proper scientific attitude is temporary suspension of belief-forming activity. Most of the philosophies of science are weak in treating ‘belief’ as something one ‘has’, instead of seeing it as a relationship between thought and action. Even the sociological norm of ‘organised scepticism’ suggests a more decisive role for active thought than a situation might demand.

I like that: “belief” as a relationship between thought and action.

This is related to my preference for the term “prior information” rather than “prior belief” in Bayesian inference. It’s not just a choice of words; it also has applied relevance, as demonstrated for example in several examples in the first chapter of our Bayesian Data Analysis book.