Three types exist.
1) Belief as association AND Belief as anticipation
2) Belief as anticipation ONLY
3) Belief as association ONLY
Only #3 Type beliefs would leave the believer making excuses in advance. They don't actually believe a claim to be true (anticipation), but they believe that assenting to the belief is important (association).
See Dennet's Belief in Belief and Sagan's Garage Dragon for more info.
I don't think it's quite and cut and dry as this, by the way. People have their personal probabilities in regard to how strongly they hold anticipatory beliefs. It's not all or nothing.
Empirically I don't find this to be the case. I think most skeptics do have believes of anticipation that various paranormal effects won't happen. At the same time bring a skeptic in situations where his beliefs about the domain might reasonably get challenged they might make excuses in advance.
People have their personal probabilities in regard to how strongly they hold anticipatory beliefs. It's not all or nothing.
Most people don't use probability for their beliefs. They use mental processes such as the availability heuritistic, that doesn't correspon...
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