Superstition, belief, half-belief, or practice for which there appears to be no rational substance.
Working himself up into a temporary blaze of half-belief, a possibility: a ghost in the dark.
It is about telling stories with bombast and bravado and the half-belief that if you say it, it will become true.
Of all writers, she is one that we would like to visualize accurately, in the half-belief that if we could just get a good look at her, we would be able to see something more of her world.
"Childhood is filled with a number of half-beliefs," said Stuart A. Vyse, an associate professor of psychology at Connecticut College in New London and the author of "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition" (Oxford, 1997).
On Stalnaker's view, the child's half-belief is handled by attributing her the capacity to rule out some but not all of the possibilities incompatible with Daddy's being a doctor: As her knowledge grows, so does her sense of the excluded possibilities.
"I believed in the players and in the first half, that belief was justified".
Whether it was a solid bit or a half honest belief, Fagan kept up the story of the leprechaun, Dennis O'Toole, in his self-proclaimed park for years.
Whether it was a solid bit or a half honest belief, Fagan kept up the story of the leprechaun whose name has been reported as both Patrick and Dennis O'Toole in his self-proclaimed park for years.
In class, she is singled out as someone who will intuitively understand the plight of African Americans because of some half-formed belief in a nebulous, shared "black" consciousness.
For the Republicans in the suite, resignation had taken root weeks, if not months, earlier, and had grown into a kind of worldly indifference, grounded in the half-sincere belief that our new President, be it Obama or McCain, would be no match for the havoc in the financial markets and the spiralling economic mess.
