Recall that Shah and Velleman think that the best explanation for EE/T is that when we deliberate we deploy the concept of belief, which has a constitutive standard of correctness such that a belief is correct iff it’s true. How should we interpret the normativity of such a standard? As mentioned in Section 1, Shah thinks this standard can be understood as entailing a corresponding claim about what we ought to believe – we ought to believe p iff p is true. Here are some other takes on the normativity of belief’s standard of correctness:
Gibbard: For belief, correctness is truth. Correct belief is true belief. My belief that snow is white is correct just in case the belief is true, just in case snow is white. Correctness, now, seems normative…The correct belief seems to be the one a subject ought…in this sense, to have. (2005, 338)
McHugh: When we say that someone has an incorrect belief, we do not seem to be merely describing some feature of her, or of her belief – a feature whose presence she could sensibly remain unconcerned by. We are saying that she believes wrongly. (2017, 1452)
Wedgwood: According to the assumption…that “correctness” is a normative concept, if your belief is incorrect, it has a certain sort of
defect – while if your belief is correct, it is wholly free from that defect.
(2013, 218)
Engel: The term “correctness” here is meant to characterize normativity in the broad sense…According to (CT),23 the basic
dimension of evaluation of the correctness of belief is truth…When our beliefs are false, they do not simply lack the property of being true or of being fitted in the proper way to the world: they are incorrect and in need of correction…(CT) not only tells us when a belief is true or false: it tells us that it is right to believe what is true, and that to fail at having true belief is in some sense wrong. (2013, 33)
When Gibbard tells us that the correct beliefs are the ones a subject ought to have, McHugh and Engel tell us that believers who believe falsely believe wrongly in a
sense in which they couldn’t sensibly fail to care about it and Wedgwood tells us that false beliefs are necessarily defective, a strong view about the normative
implications of correctness begins to emerge. This might seem to contrast, though, with other applications of the generic notion of correctness. Consider the
following:
• The correctness or incorrectness of an artistic rendering of a skeleton based on its anatomical features
• The correctness of a photographic representation based on its likeness to its subject
• The correctness of an orchestral score as fixed by a set of notes • The correctness of a map as fixed by the similarity between the map
and the terrain it represents
The properties these standards target at least appear to be descriptive, not normative. We might think that Dretske has a similar idea in mind about belief’s relationship with truth. He writes
Beliefs and judgments must either be true or false, yes, but there is nothing normative about truth and falsity. What makes a judgment false or true is the fact that it fails or succeeds in corresponding to the facts, and failing or succeeding in corresponding to the facts is, as far as I can see, a straightforward factual matter. Nothing normative about it. (2001, 247)
According to Dretske, the fact that a belief can be true or false is a general descriptive principle of belief, but one that carries no normative force –
presumably he thinks that it carries no weight in terms of how a believer should believe. Alternatively, we might acknowledge that on its face belief’s standard of correctness appears to express a norm, but think in the spirit of Dretske’s claim
that this norm carries no normative force. One way to put this is that belief’s standard of correctness is a norm that doesn’t give rise to reasons. How might we articulate such a view?
To start, notice that norms are born easily. I can create a norm that holds that all trips to the bathroom during paper-writing sessions must be completed on one foot. We should think, though, that the mere fact that I’ve decreed such a rule doesn’t yet give anyone any good reason to act in accordance with it.24 Etiquette,
the mafia, hipsterdom, and serial killing all plausibly have associated bodies of norms or standards, yet don’t necessarily give rise to good reasons to follow them. So we can recognize that all norms trivially set standards according to which things are permissible, prohibited, good, bad, and the like and simultaneously acknowledge that these standards do not necessarily give rise to good reasons to act in accordance with them. As Côté-Bouchard puts it,
If a norm N forbids -ing under conditions C, then trivially, -ing under C is forbidden, incorrect, wrong, or bad relative to the standard set by N. However, the descriptive norm-relative question of what is permitted or required according to N is distinct from the normative question of what there is good or genuinely normative reasons to do. (2016, 3182, emphasis his)
On the picture I’m endorsing, reasons come about in accordance with value. 25 So,
24 If we feel that some such norm does exert at least a small pull on us, we should consider a diagnosis
that looks at a kind of derivative force that comes about from the role that norms tend to play in the societies we inhabit. But the important difference is that the normativity at issue in such a case would be merely derivative, not arising from the content of the norm itself.
25 McGuire (2016) gives a comprehensive overview of a value-based theory of reasons and takes the
following claim to be an analysis of what it is to be a reason. I take McGuire’s view to be a substantive view about reasons, but one that I think is independently preferable for reasons I can’t explore in this paper.
For any fact x that holds that some action would promote some state of affairs S, x is a reason to iff, and due to the facts that, would promote S and S is valuable.
This gives a nice explanation of why not all norms necessarily give rise to reasons to follow them. Presumably we think norms of serial killing set standards about what is encouraged or discouraged relative to those norms, but that those norms don’t give rise to reasons because serial killing is not valuable (/is positively disvaluable).
To help us think further about the normativity that undergirds belief’s standard of correctness, I want to combine our value-based picture of reasons with a related distinction between two kinds of normativity. A number of normativity theorists have made use of a breed of the distinction I’m targeting. Schroeder (2003), for one, distinguishes two senses of norms. In the first sense there are norms of categorization or classification schemes that divide actions or events into distinct types, or that act as general principles of description. In a second sense, are norms as what he calls force-makers. Norms in this second sense act as prescriptions or governance principles that guide our actions or give us aims to follow (2003, 3).
Parfit makes use of a similar distinction between norms that he calls rule-
implying and norms that he calls reason-implying. For Parfit, “facts are normative
in the rule-implying sense when these facts are about what is correct or incorrect, or allowed or disallowed, by some rule or requirement in some practice or
institution” (2011, 309). He takes as examples of facts that are normative in the rule-implying sense that certain acts are illegal, that some act would be bad etiquette, or the wrong use of a word, or an impermissible move in chess or some other game. He goes on to say that “we can describe in non-normative terms what is involved when such social rules and practices are established…and when certain acts break these rules, that’s what it is for these acts to be disallowed or incorrect in these ways.” Parfit thinks we can’t make similar claims about what it is for there
to be a norm that gives us a reason. The reason-implying sense, in contrast, tells us what we “should or ought to do” (Ibid.). Parfit’s rule-implying sense of norms maps nicely onto Schroeder’s first sense of norms, and his reason-implying sense of norms maps nicely onto Schroeder’s second sense of norms as force-makers.
We have in place, then, a distinction between norms that are individuated by the existence of a rule or practice that don’t necessarily give rise to reasons to follow them, and norms that necessarily give us some reason to follow them. Call the first kind the “weak sense” and the second kind the “strong sense”. Of course norms of the two types often overlap. Good examples are many legal norms and moral norms that both give us good reasons to act and involve or depend on moral rules or requirements. We might even hold a meta-normative view on which all norms in the strong sense entail normativity in the weak sense. But the important thing to note for our present purposes is that there can exist norms in the weak sense that don’t necessarily give rise to normativity in the strong sense.
What, then, is the sense of normativity at stake in (SC)? The above
distinction gives us a way to think about the notion of correctness in play in belief’s standard of correctness more clearly. The theorists quoted at the beginning of the section (Gibbard, McHugh, Wedgwood, Engel and in addition, Shah and Velleman) all endorse breeds of force-making, action-directing, reason-implying normativity of the strong sense. But although Shah and these other normativists take (SC) to apply to belief necessarily, I think when we combine our understanding of norms as force-makers and reason-givers only when they promote states of affairs with value, then we can see our way towards an argument that correctness can’t in fact pick out the strong sense of normativity. For the considerations about doxastic processes from the second part of Section 2 give us good reason to think that the states of affairs that have most value are often ones in which we do not believe truly. Since the value in -ing explains what reasons we have to , and in some cases it appears as if believing truly does not give rise to a valuable state of affairs, then it can’t be the case that the correctness in play in (SC) is normative in the strong sense that necessarily gives rise to reasons to follow it.
One might think that this this way of putting things commits the strong sense normativists about correctness to too much. Plausibly they take themselves to be committed merely to the claim that (SC) necessarily bestows some action- guiding force, or some reason to believe p iff p is true. Surely we shouldn’t commit them to the view that they take (SC) to necessarily give rise to an all-things-
considered ought or to overriding reason to believe p iff is true. But what they are
committed to is that (SC) necessarily gives rise to pro tanto normative force or a reason to follow it. I think this view is also implausible. It would require that we take true beliefs to have necessary value. Since we have already seen how it’s doubtful that they always have instrumental value, we would have to think that that every true belief is necessarily finally valuable. Though it’s hard to dissuade staunch fans, I argue elsewhere that this position has little to recommend it. Here I’ll say just that the view looks extremely implausible when we consider beliefs about propositions concerning the number of grains of sand in a particular square acre of Namibian desert.
I’ve argued that we shouldn’t think that belief’s standard of correctness is normative in the strong sense. In the next section I want to turn to uncovering what an interpretation of the normativity of correctness in the weaker sense might look like.