A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively-linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated – consciously or nonconsciously – by features of the subject’s internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional.
… alief – so-called because alief is associative, action-generating, affect-laden, arational, automatic, agnostic with respect to its content, shared with animals, and developmentally
and conceptually antecedent to other cognitive attitudes[18].
“Alief and Belief” (Gendler 2007) [PDF]