Not many serious books about culture and epistemology begin with a ghost story from a Cambridge college – a narrative exemplary in both atmosphere and inconclusiveness. But the point of this unorthodox opening is not to make us wonder whether ghosts exist so much as to wonder what makes such a story believable. What are the different questions asked by observers with diverse agendas? This opens out into a wide-ranging discussion of what we understand by “belief”. As Ward observes, the history of words related to “belief” in philosophical discussion is complex: the Greek word implies a degree of confidence; yet from Plato to Kant and after, “belief” has regularly been understood as at best an inferior form of knowing, disreputably involved with &ld