The settling thesis about belief says: the functional role of belief is to settle whether p for the purposes of reasoning and action. The thesis has an intuitive problem. Many belief ascriptions represent ascribees, explicitly or implicitly, as insufficiently confident to rely on their belief in reasoning and action. Contra likely expectations generated by the settling thesis, these ascriptions are felicitous and common.

In fact, they are. I argue that this is no problem for the settling theses. Unsettled belief ascriptions ascribe doxastic seemings, i.e., states in which it seems to the ascribee that p, given all the evidence they know. This is revealed in the similarity (and appropriate difference) of unsettled belief ascriptions involving “believe” to ascriptions of ordinary seemings. The paper also distinguishes two belief-believer relationships. In one, beliefs are doxastic seemings, suspending the other, more common one, in which in they fulfill their functional role.