Abstract

I attempt to explain the core of epistemic normativity, which is the prescriptive force that truth has for belief. By treating the concept of belief as akin to a thick ethical concept, I endeavor to reconcile epistemic normativity with a view of ourselves as beings that are describable in a vocabulary amenable to the natural sciences. ;According to my account, which is in the non-cognitivist tradition, to ascribe a belief is to express an acceptance of truth as the standard of correctness for governing a particular descriptively characterized cognitive state. This analysis therefore answers to both the causal-explanatory and normative demands put on the concept of belief; first, by requiring reference to a causal-explanatory cognitive state in any belief attribution; and, second, by requiring that sincere belief-ascription involve an acceptance by the ascriber of a norm that the cognitive state to which belief is ascribed be governed by alethic considerations. ;In the first chapter, I argue that there is an historical precedent for my view in William James "The Will to Believe". In Chapter 2, I argue that by getting clear about the nature of reasons and the character of theoretical deliberation, we can see that only alethic considerations can be reasons to believe. In Chapter 3, I argue that, contrary to received opinion fueled in part by a famous argument by Bernard Williams, we can rightly view ourselves as epistemic agents who are responsible for our beliefs. In Chapter 4, I argue that the best explanation of the phenomena is that truth is a constitutive, internal standard of correctness for belief. I then argue that neither normative accounts of epistemic concepts such as justification or warrant, nor descriptive accounts of belief, can explain the way that truth is prescriptive for belief. My diagnosis of why these accounts cannot capture the heart of epistemic normativity is that they have failed to appreciate that belief itself is a normative concept, akin to thick ethical concepts that have both descriptive and normative criteria of application. In Chapters 5 and 6, I go on to sketch such a normative account of the concept of belief that combines the insights of descriptive accounts of cognition and non-cognitivist accounts of normativity