Abstract
That it can explain the phenomenon of transparency, namely the fact that if you resolve whether p, you have thereby resolved whether to believe that p, was originally put forward as a great virtue of normativist conceptions of belief. However, non-normativists have convincingly shown that the permissive version of the truth norm of belief, which is one of the most plausible and promising versions of it, cannot in fact accommodate this phenomenon. Alarmed by this situation, in this paper I re-assess the transparency phenomenon and its relation to different versions of the truth norm of belief. I argue that, contrary to how it appears, it is not even clear that the most tenable injunctive versions of the truth norm explain this phenomenon. I then argue that the transparency phenomenon consists of two distinct aspects which should be, but have not been, distinguished. What I call the ‘question-shifting’ aspect is explained by the truth norm, irrespective of how it is formulated, while what I call the ‘answer-shifting’ aspect is explanatorily empty and does not require any explanation, be it normative or otherwise. Therefore, understood properly, explaining transparency does remain a strength of normativist accounts of belief, and has no implications for which particular formulation of the truth norm we may adopt.
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Notes
Although the permissive version of the truth norm fares better compared with the injunctive norm in the case of blindspots, it is not totally without its problems. This is so because believing blindpots is also an option that is permitted by this version of the truth norm, but as soon as you believe a blindspot it becomes false, and now you are not allowed to believe it. What is initially permitted by the truth norm is therefore immediately forbidden (Whiting, 2010, p. 218). However, we should admit unlike the injunctive norms, the permissive norms are not stuck in a loop, because you can also meet this norm by not believing a blindspot.
Of course, this is how Shah and Velleman understand the issue and one can claim that correctness in itself is neither injunctive nor permissive as it is a normative concept with a different logic. I remain non-committal about this. Moreover, unfortunately some remarks by Shah and Velleman (2005) imply that they have sometimes inattentively switched between the injunctive and the permissive versions of the truth norm (cf. p. 520). We have no choice but to read these remarks charitably so to make them consistent with their explicit statement that they adopt the permissive version of the truth norm.
We can also understand this distinction by noting that the injunctive versions of the truth norm are objective in the sense that whether or not the subject is complying with them is not transparent to her. But when we speak about considering something as true, it involves affirming the truth of something by the subject, and, therefore this would be transparent to the subject.
Note that the problem is not that the immediate and unavoidable character of the transition leaves no room for the modifications because they require sophisticated reflective capacities. Rather, the problem is that by settling whether p, you are immediately led to settle whether to believe that p, without taking into account any proviso. For example, if you settle whether a blindspot is true, you have thereby settled whether to believe the blindspot in question. But the believed proposition is false and is disallowed by the truth norm of belief. Put differently, although one can be sensitive to defeaters without sophisticated reflective capacities, the transparency phenomenon links truth to belief in a way that does not allow for such modifications.
Note that neither Shah and Velleman (2005) nor Sullivan-Bissett and Noordhof (2020) accept this claim of explanatory emptiness. This is so because all of them want to show that there is something substantive about transparency. For Shah and Velleman this substantive link should be explained through the conceptual norm governing belief, while for Sullivan-Bissett and Noordhof this substantive link should be explained non-normatively.
One may object that if one settles whether p, then the question of whether to guess that p would lose its meaning because guessing is meaningful and possible only when we don't have a firm opinion about something. I am not sure about this. Suppose that you are asked to guess something and while you are deliberating whether to guess that p (in contrast to q) you, somehow, settle that p is the case. As I see the matter, here it is thereby settled for you to guess that p, not that you cannot guess. Nevertheless, if one does not find this convincing and believes that guessing is not possible when we have settled that something is the case, then we can maintain the asymmetry between the question-shifting and the answer-shifting aspects in a different way: while the answer-shifting aspect is blocked in the case of guessing, the question-shifting aspect is still possible, even if it is not immediate and unavoidable.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Synthese for their perceptive comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Kazemi, A. Transparency and the truth norm of belief. Synthese 200, 255 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03724-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03724-9