Belief and Normativity 051007

It seems to be a platitude that belief is governed by a norm of truth. Isn’t the point of belief to believe truths ? Isn’t it a requirement of believing that we should not believe falsehoods? A number of philosophers, however, deny this. Although they recognise that there is an intimate connection between belief and truth, they reject the idea that this connection is normative. Indeed, they tell us, beliefs aim at truth in the sense that to believe that P is to believe that P is true, or in the sense that it is the “direction of fit” for beliefs that they should adapt to the world, but there is no more in this than a trivial fact about belief as a propositional attitude. To elevate this trivial fact to the status of a “norm” is to transform an innocent platitude into a pompous falsehood. For there is nothing normative about believing: neither we believe with an eye fixed on the horizon of an ideal of truth nor we obey any prescription to believe the truth. On the contrary, we believe all sorts of things, some rational, some irrational, some justified, some unjustified, some true, some false, and there is no particular norm that we follow, no particular prescription that we obey and no particular sanction that we incur when we go off track. Believing is just a natural mental state, which has certain causes and certain effects, and which answers no particular rational or normative essence. These reactions to the thesis that belief is governed by a norm of truth seem to bear the seal of common sense.