The Right Thing to Believe

Abstract

1. The “aim” of belief Many philosophers have claimed that “belief aims at the truth”. Indeed, this claim is often taken to express a necessary truth, which forms part of the essence of belief itself. As it is sometimes said, truth is the “constitutive aim” of belief. According to this view, the way in which belief “aims at the truth” is one of the distinguishing marks of belief. Thus, for example, some philosophers have suggested that one of the essential features that distinguish beliefs from intentions is that beliefs aim at being true of the world, while intentions aim at making the world true of them. However, this claim is hardly true in the everyday sense of ‘aim’: beliefs are not little archers armed with bows and arrows; they do not literally “aim” at anything. At best, it is believers that aim at this or that. But it is far from clear that believers have any aim at all concerning most of their beliefs. Some beliefs may be held as a result of a deliberate quest for the truth. But many beliefs (including most of our perceptual beliefs about our immediate environment, and our introspective beliefs, like my belief that I am currently in pain) seem to arise in us unbidden, without any aiming on our part at all. In what sense then is it true to claim that beliefs essentially aim at the truth? What insight might philosophers be gesturing at when they make this claim? In some of my earlier work (Wedgwood 2002), I have defended a normative interpretation of this claim. According to this interpretation, the claim expresses a normative principle about belief: in effect, it is the