Belief

Abstract

As we saw in the opening chapter, there are (at least) two ways to develop a knowledge first view of the relationship between knowledge and belief. According to one, knowledge rather than belief is taken to be the most important mental state with mind-to-world fit. We will discuss this view in detail in the final chapter. Our present concern is with the suggestion that belief can somehow be understood in terms of knowledge. There are a number of proposals of this form in the literature, some which directly characterize the mental state of belief in terms of knowledge. More common, however, is to find belief being characterized indirectly, by suggesting that in some sense knowledge provides a normative or teleological standard for belief and insisting that this relationship with knowledge is constitutive of what it is to be a belief. I won’t have much to say about what it is for a norm or aim to be a constitutive one here. Almost all of the relevant discussion has happened in relation to Williamson’s thesis that there’s a constitutive norm of assertion, and so we will discuss this a little more in Chapter 5.