Can we believe things that could not possibly be true? The world seems full of examples. Mathematicians have "proven" theorems which in fact turn out to be false. People have believed that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, that they themselves are essentially incorporeal, that heat is not molecular motion --all propositions which have been claimed to be not just false, but necessarily false. Some have even seemed to pride themselves on believing the impossible; Hegel thought contradictions could be true, and Kierkegaard seems to have thought that Christianity, in which he fervently believed, was impossible and absurd.
In the face of these examples and many more like them, it may seem evident that we can believe the impossible; one might think that it was simply a desideratum on any theory of belief that it find a way to accommodate this fact. I believe that this is, in fact, correct. But Richard Foley 1 has recently provided interesting arguments that we cannot believe the impossible? In this paper I propose to defend a view of belief which explains how we can believe the impossible, and to respond to Foley's criticisms of the mechanisms I propose? II I begin by explaining how, in my view, we can believe the impossible. In a nutshell, the account I will defend is this: we believe some propositions in virtue of befieving others. In such cases it is our belief in one proposition, together with facts about the situation we find ourselves in, which explains or constitutes our belief in the other proposition. And it sometimes happens that, in virtue of believing a contingent proposition, together with facts external to us, we believe a necessarily false proposition.