Engel on doxastic correctness

In this paper I discuss Pascal Engel’s recent work on doxastic correctness. I raise worries about two elements of his view—the role played in it by the distinction between i -correctness and e -correctness, and the construal of doxastic correctness as an ideal of reason. I propose an alternative approach

The Normativity of Doxastic Correctness

It is widely maintained that doxastic norms that govern how people should believe can be explained by the truism that belief is governed by the correctness norm: believing p is correct if and only if p. This approach fails because it confuses two kinds of correctness norm: (1) It is correct for S to believe p if and only p; and (2) believing p is correct qua belief if and only if p. Only can (2) be said to be a truism about belief, but it cannot ground doxastic norms

Should I believe the truth?

Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi’s criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections parallel to those Bykvist and Hattiangadi advance, although it might initially appear to be. In closing, I consider what bearing the preceding discussion has on important questions concerning the natures of believing and of truth

The normativity of belief

This is a survey of recent debates concerning the normativity of belief. We explain what the thesis that belief is normative involves, consider arguments for and against that thesis, and explore its bearing on debates in metaethics

Is the Norm on Belief Evaluative? A Response to McHugh

We respond to Conor McHugh's claim that an evaluative account of the normative relation between belief and truth is preferable to a prescriptive account. We claim that his arguments fail to establish this. We then draw a more general sceptical conclusion: we take our arguments to put pressure on any attempt to show that an evaluative account will fare better than a prescriptive account. We briefly express scepticism about whether McHugh's more recent ‘fitting attitude’ account fares better

Fictional Persuasion and the Nature of Belief

Psychological studies on fictional persuasion demonstrate that being engaged with fiction systematically affects our beliefs about the real world, in ways that seem insensitive to the truth. This threatens to undermine the widely accepted view that beliefs are essentially regulated in ways that tend to ensure their truth, and may tempt various non-doxastic interpretations of the belief-seeming attitudes we form as a result of engaging with fiction. I evaluate this threat, and argue that it is benign. Even if the relevant attitudes are best seen as genuine beliefs, as I think they often are, their lack of appropriate sensitivity to the truth does not undermine the essential tie between belief and truth. To this end, I shall consider what I take to be the three most plausible models of the cognitive mechanisms underlying fictional persuasion, and argue that on none of these models does fictional persuasion undermine the essential truth-tie

On Behalf of a Bi-Level Account of Trust

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals

Is there an 'ought' in belief?

[spa] De acuerdo con el denominado punto de vista teleológico de la creencia, la idea de que las creencias tienen como objetivo la verdad se considera que significa literalmente que el sujeto, al creer que p, tiene un cierto objetivo: el objetivo de aceptar p sólo si p es verdadera. Por el contrario, de acuerdo con el denominado punto de vista normativo, la afirmación de que las creencias tienen como objetivo la verdad se considera que es equivalente a la tesis de que existe una norma constitutiva de corrección que gobierna la creencia. El normativista argumenta que el punto de vista teleológico no puede dar cuenta a la vez de dos rasgos estándar de la creencia: por una parte, las creencias están a menudo causalmente influenciadas por consideraciones no aléticas; por otra, nosotros sentimos que es exclusivamente la verdad la que nos guía cuando deliberamos sobre si creer algo. En este artículo muestro, en primer lugar, que el argumento normativista no logra establecer conclusivamente que la creencia está gobernada por una norma constitutiva de corrección. En segundo lugar, y de manera más positiva, ofrezco una respuesta teleológica a cada una de las objeciones normativistas. Con ello, bosquejo una nueva estrategia teleo- lógica que nos permite explicar los rasgos de la creencia antes mencionados.[eng] According to the so-called teleological view of belief, the idea that beliefs aim at truth is taken to mean literally that the subject, in believing that p, has a certain goal: the goal of accepting p only if p is true. In contrast, according to the so-called normative view, the claim that beliefs aim at truth is considered to be tantamount to the thesis that there is a constitutive norm of correctness governing belief. The normativist argues that the teleological view cannot jointly account for two standard features of belief: beliefs are often causally influenced by non-alethic considerations, yet we always feel we are moved exclusively by truth when deliberating whether to believe. In this paper, I first show that the normativist argument falls short of establishing that belief is norm-governed. Second, and more positively, I offer a teleological reply to each of the normativist objections, thereby outlining a novel teleological strategy that allows us to explain the aforesaid standard features of belief

The Aim of Belief and Suspended Belief

In this paper, I discuss whether different interpretations of the ‘aim’ of belief—both the teleological and normative interpretations—have the resources to explain certain descriptive and normative features of suspended belief (suspension). I argue that, despite the recent efforts of theorists to extend these theories to account for suspension, they ultimately fail. The implication is that we must either develop alternative theories of belief that can account for suspension, or we must abandon the assumption that these theories ought to be able to account for suspension. To close, I briefly consider some of the reasons we have in favour of pursing each of these options, and I suggest that it is worth exploring the possibility that suspension is best understood as its own attitude, independently of theories of belief’s ‘aim’