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Notes -
It's not pedantry. Beliefs are a central example of an action. They are a thing you actively do. People are not computers, and human cognition is not deterministic. If they were, if beliefs were not subject to the will, arguments between humans would work very, very differently than they do.
I understand that this runs counter to what a great many people have often said, but you can literally observe the effect at both small and large scales, all around you every day. It is not subtle. We weigh evidence, and that weighing is fundamentally subjective, and the biases, priors and axioms of that subjectivity are derived from discrete acts of will, either from ourselves or from those around us. We choose what to question, how to question, whether an answer satisfies us, where to look for more information, when to move on, what to listen to. Any question of substance leads to a web of further questions, infinite in branchings, and we choose a finite set of those questions to explore before drawing conclusions. People observably draw different conclusions based on similar evidence every day, even when examining the same evidence in good faith! You can follow the branchings to any conclusion you wish, if you want to. When you stop at any particular conclusion, you stop because you want to, not because the evidence forced you to. How could it be otherwise, when there are always more questions available?
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