The Norm of Belief
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10697838 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrew Hazlett (0000-0003-4611-1139, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author), Allan Hazlett |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 124 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 272-275 |
| Publication date | 2015-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00318108-2845802 |
| OpenAlex | W2770114608 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
This is a difficult book on a difficult subject. Gibbons's ostensive topic is the apparent incompatibility of three plausible ideas: that belief aims at truth, that you ought always to believe what it is reasonable for you to believe, and that there are cases of reasonable false belief. Gibbons articulates his puzzle (chapter 1) as a clash between two intuitive principles:(T) You ought to believe that p only if it is true that p.(J ) You ought to believe that p if and only if you are justified in believing that p.Suppose you have strong, undefeated, and misleading evidence that p. What ought you to believe? (T) says that it is not the case that you ought to believe that p, but ( J) says that you ought to believe that p, so one of either (T) or ( J) must be rejected. In his book, Gibbons argues for rejecting (T) in favor of ( J)—that justification is the “norm of belief.”As Gibbons suggests (8–9), this puzzle has nothing essentially to do with belief. Suppose you're driving to your friends' dinner party and have come to a fork in the road. You've got good reason to think that their house is down the fork on the right, but their house is really down the fork on the left. What ought you to do? For Gibbons, this question is just as difficult as our question, above, about cases of misleading evidence.1 So, in this connection, the subject of Gibbons's book is broader (which made the focus on belief curious).There's something right about the following answer to the present question: it depends on what you mean by “ought.” Having realized that you turned down the wrong fork, a natural thought is that you ought to have turned left. However, given that you had no good reason to turn left, another natural thought is that you ought not to have turned left. Gibbons argues (chapters 2 and 3) that this “ambiguity theory”—which might be bolstered by appealing to sophisticated recent work in the philosophy of normative language2—is irrelevant to the solution of his puzzle. The reason is that his puzzle concerns “genuine normative requirements”—but only one of these “ought” claims can express a “genuine normative requirement.” However, whether this objection is effective depends on what this expression means, and on this issue Gibbons has too little to say.3 We're told that some rules don't have “genuine normative force” (35 and passim), that only “motivating reasons” can generate genuine requirements (133), that there is a distinction between the normative and the evaluative (128 and passim), and that genuine normative requirements must be able to “get a grip on us” (127 and passim). But a clear articulation of the notion of a “genuine normative requirement” is not given. (In this respect, however, Gibbons has done no worse than most who appeal to this notion.)Some kind of “ambiguity theory” is also attractive when it comes to (T) and ( J)—we just have to find the right formulations of the ideas behind (T) and ( J) to see that they are compatible. Indeed, it seems to me that this is exactly what Gibbons does. After arguing that knowledge, rather than truth, is the objective standard for belief (chapter 8), Gibbons articulates this thought (chapter 9) by saying that “believing that p commits you to knowing that p because believing that p is taking a stand on how things are” (224). For this reason, false beliefs are wrong, mistaken, and count as failures (as do true beliefs that fall short of knowledge). This is an articulation of the intuitive thought that belief aims at truth, and one that, unlike (T), is compatible with (J ) and with cases of reasonable false belief. So it seems that the puzzle is straightforwardly solved, by articulating the idea that belief aims at truth without talking about what you ought to believe, which is what several contemporary philosophers have done.4However, there's a related puzzle, which Gibbons focuses on for the most part. Does the aim of belief explain the requirements of theoretical rationality? Or do the requirements of rationality explain the aim of belief? Is it that you ought to believe reasonable things because belief aims at truth, for example, or is it that belief aims at truth because you ought to believe reasonable things? Gibbons opts for a version of the latter view: knowledge is belief's own standard because of the requirements of rationality. In defense of this, Gibbons argues against explanations of the requirements of rationality in terms of the aim of belief (chapters 4 and 5) and proposes a novel account of Moore's Paradox that is designed to show how the requirements of rationality explain the aim of belief (chapters 9 and 10). I wasn't able to make full sense of the latter argument, but the former, I think, targeted a “straw man,” on which the truth of (T) explains the truth of (J ). However, given Gibbons's assumption that (T) and (J ) are incompatible (chapter 1), this putative explanation is doomed from the start. It would have made sense to consider a formulation of the aim of belief that is compatible with (J ), such as Gibbons's own, and then see whether the truth of (J ) might be explained by appeal to the aim of belief.I said that this is a difficult book. Gibbons's prose is at once dense and casual. There is minimal signposting; many readers will struggle to follow the plot. Expertise and familiarity with the literature (for example, on objective and subjective “oughts”) and jargon (for example, “the Kratzer semantics”) is assumed. (The book is aimed at professional specialists in epistemology and ethics, not at students or nonspecialist professionals.) More importantly, it seems to me that Gibbons does not provide an adequate theoretical explanation of some crucial notions to which he appeals—I mentioned above the notion of a “genuine normative requirement,” but this thought applies also to the notions of a “commitment” and of “taking a stand,” which play a big role in the later chapters. The existing literature on normativity in ethics and epistemology is full of difficult and opaque ideas, and Gibbons's book presupposes many of them—but without making them any easier or clearer. However, Gibbons's approach—which cuts across the standard division between ethics and epistemology—is fresh and admirable, and The Norm of Belief may reward the committed reader who is moved by the puzzle described at the outset.For valuable discussions of this material, thanks to Matthew Chrisman, Cameron Boult, Jie Gao, Matthew McGrath, and Kevin Wallbridge
Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Mathematical economics · Norm (philosophy) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Mathematics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |