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Sosa on the normativity of belief

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Abstract

Sosa takes epistemic normativity to be kind of performance normativity: a belief is correct because a believer sets a positive value to truth as an aim and performs aptly and adroitly. I object to this teleological picture that beliefs are not performances, and that epistemic reasons or beliefs cannot be balanced against practical reasons. Although the picture fits the nature of inquiry, it does not fit the normative nature of believing, which has to be conceived along distinct lines.

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Notes

  1. McHugh (2012) suggests counterexamples to exclusivity with cases of suspension of judgment. But his cases are not cases of belief, but of acceptance. And they do not defeat the normative claims associated to exclusivity. They only put pressure on the psychological fact of exclusivity. But normativists about belief have never claimed that non evidential or non-epistemic reasons cannot occur and play a role in belief formation as a matter of psychological fact or causally. What they object to is with the normative thesis of non-exclusivity. Nobody denies that non evidential reasons are sometimes motivating reasons (in the causal) sense for beliefs. Even McHugh’s claim that such cases are cases of direct belief motivated by non-evidential considerations is dubious: these are cases where you believe that it would be good for you to believe p, i.e. cases of attitude based reasons, not content based reasons. And McHugh’s claim that it cannot be an acceptance is implausible. The cases he describes are indeed cases of acceptance rather than belief!

  2. I take up Thomson’s (2005, pp. 81–82) useful distinction between external correctness and internal correctness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Pascal Engel

  2. EHESS, Paris, France

    Pascal Engel

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  1. Pascal Engel
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Engel, P. Sosa on the normativity of belief. Philos Stud 166, 617–624 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0200-0

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