ABSTRACT
Belief fixation is the formation and maintenance of beliefs. Humans, despite their epistemic foibles, often engage in rational belief-fixation – thereby forming and maintaining doxastically justified beliefs. We will here argue for the following claims. First, rational belief-fixation typically is inferential, in a way that draws holistically and abductively upon rich amounts of pertinent evidence possessed by the belief-forming cognizer. Second, much of this pertinent evidence is – and must be – accommodated during belief fixation without getting represented during the process. Nevertheless, third, the doxastic justification of a given belief depends heavily and constitutively upon conscious appreciation of the evidential support that accrues to this belief – even though, typically, much of this evidential support never becomes overtly present in consciousness during belief fixation.
