Abstract
According to the knowledge norm of belief (Williamson in Knowledge and its limits, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 47, 2000), one should believe p only if one knows p. However, it can easily seem that the ordinary notion of belief is much weaker than the knowledge norm would have it. It is possible to rationally believe things one knows to be unknown (Hawthorne et al. in Philos Stud 173:1393–1404, 2016; McGlynn in Noûs 47:385–407, 2013, Whiting in Chan (ed) The aim of belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). One response to this observation is to develop a technical notion of ‘outright’ belief. A challenge for this line of response is to find a way of getting a grip on the targeted notion of belief. In order to meet this challenge, I characterize ‘outright’ belief in this paper as the strongest belief state implied by knowledge. I show that outright belief so construed allows this notion to play important theoretical roles in connection with knowledge, assertion and action.
Highlights
Over the last 2 decades, various authors proposed an account of belief in terms of knowledge.1 According to Timothy Williamson, belief aims at knowledge: If believing p is, roughly, treating p as if one knew p, knowing is in that sense central to believing
Outright belief is the strongest belief state implied by knowledge
It is important for this proposal that belief states are what we intuitively take them to be. It would be fatal if true belief or justified belief or even belief constituting knowledge could turn out to be a belief state, because the strongest belief state implied by knowledge would not be the kind of outright belief I take it to be
Summary
Over the last 2 decades, various authors proposed an account of belief in terms of knowledge. According to Timothy Williamson, belief aims at knowledge: If believing p is, roughly, treating p as if one knew p, knowing is in that sense central to believing. Jason Stanley notes that phrases such as ‘I believe’ can be used to hedge one’s assertion: the function of using “I believe” in [“I believe that dogs bark, but I don’t know it”] is to qualify support for the truth of a proposition, rather than endorse it Such uses of “believe” are not cases in which one reports a belief that p at all; they are rather cases in which one reports that one has weak reasons in support of the truth of a proposition What is true is that responding to the worries about the knowledge norm with a technical notion of belief raises important challenges One question about this defense is: how does one get a grip on a theoretical notion of belief if not through one’s understanding of the ordinary notion? These three roles concern the relation between belief on the one hand and knowledge, assertion and action on the other
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