system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[The X-Files] Despite seeing all she's seen, why does Scully continually not believe Mulder about alien life, the paranormal, etc?
gpt
After a while, she is convinced but she's choosing to play Devil's Advocate (deliberately being argumentative in order to force Fox to make a more concrete argument for his own beliefs). In doing so, she'll force him to logically think through his argument and hopefully make a breakthrough himself.

Think about it like this. A man in a rural farming community is killed and based on the stab wounds, it's known that he was stabbed in the torso with a pitchfork. Everyone in town owns a pitchfork but Alice, who lives in the town, believes that out of all the farmers, Bob is the only one to have killed the victim.

Charlie, her friend, also believes that Bob did it but he thinks that Alice is jumping to conclusions so he deliberately pokes holes in her theory as all the farmers don't have alibis and equally disliked the victim. He then asks her what makes Bob the most suspicious and what's different about him compared to the other farmers.

That is when Alice realises that yes, Bob *did* kill the man - everyone in town exclusively uses pitchforks to either move hay or to dig up vegetables, but there were flies buzzing around Bob's pitchfork... because they're attracted to the victim's blood which wasn't properly washed off by the killer.

By deliberately poking holes in Mulder's argument, Scully is making him make a better argument with proof and logic.

Keep in mind, in later seasons >!when Mulder is on the run!<, Scully ends up taking his role as the conspiracy theorist while her new partner is the skeptic.