A practice-based account of the truth norm of belief
Abstract
It is a platitude that belief is subject to a standard of correctness: a belief is correct if and only if it is true. But not all standards of correctness are authoritative or binding. Some standards of correctness may be arbitrary, unjustified or outrightly wrong. Given this, one challenge to proponents of the truth norm of belief, is to answer what Korsgaard (1996) calls ‘the normative question’. Is the truth norm of belief authoritative or binding regarding what one ought to or may believe? If so, what grounds its authority? The aim of this paper is to offer a novel answer to the grounding challenge on a reason-based normative framework. I develop and defend a practice-based account of the truth norm, according to which, the authority of the truth norm of belief is grounded in what I call the T-practice, a justified social practice that functions to facilitate knowledge production, maintenance, and social cooperation.
Citation
Wei , X 2022 , ' A practice-based account of the truth norm of belief ' , Episteme , vol. First View , pp. 1-21 . https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2022.26
Publication
Episteme
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1742-3600Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Description
This work was supported by the 2021-2022 Analysis Trust Studentship, Royal Institute of Philosophy 2020-2021 Jacobsen Studentship, the Aristotelian Society 2020-2021 Student Bursary, and the John Templeton Foundation PhD Studentship under Grant 58450.Collections
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