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 correspond directly to probabilities.
See Dennet's Belief in Belief and Sagan's Garage Dragon for more info.
Neither Dennet nor Sagan are a psychologist or have similar experience with working with beliefs in other context. If you use their discussions that are essentially about ontology as being discussions about how humans reason you are going to make mistakes.
Most people don't use probability for their beliefs. They use mental processes such as the availability heuritistic, that doesn't correspond directly to probabilities.
I meant "personal probability" as the confidence at which people intuit a belief as actually anticipatory (vs. a belief they merely assent to as an association.) This level of confidence is on a sliding scale (vs. all or nothing).
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