Abstract
Recently some philosophers have defended the thesis that naturalness, or joint-carvingness, is an aim of belief. This paper argues that there is an important class of counterexamples to this thesis. In particular, it is argued that naturalness is not an aim of our beliefs concerning what is joint carving and what is not.
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Notes
Both Sider (2011) and Dasgupta (2018) use all three concepts, not clearly distinguishing between the various different formulations. McDaniel (2017) more explicitly chooses to formulate the thesis in terms of obligation, but notes that he is not wedded to that notion, and that other concepts may work equally well in formulating the theory.
Normative interpretations of the claim that belief aims at truth are widespread, with some preferring to interpret it in terms of correctness and others in terms of obligation. For a partial list of authors discussing this see Boghossian (2003), Brandom (1994), Engel (2007), Humberstone (1992), Wedgewood (2002) and Williamson (2000).
See Dorr (2019) for further motivations for adopting the higher-order approach.
See Sider (2020).
An anonymous reviewer suggested one possible response here. One might insist that the various standards of correctness cannot be added together in order to obtain one overall standard of correctness on belief. All we can say is that the belief that red is not perfectly natural does better with respect to naturalness than the belief that bred is not perfectly natural. I do think that this is a possible line of response, but I’m not exactly sure how the details are supposed to go. It is certainly true that the former belief does better with respect to naturalness than the latter. What is needed, however, is a way of spelling out the normative upshot of this claim. If the normative upshot is not that it is more correct, some other account is needed to say what it is. Simply saying that it is less correct according to the rule that more natural beliefs are more correct won’t do because it is not to make a normative judgment at all.
This is not to deny that the distinction between natural and nonnatural properties is an objective one. My view is that it is an objective matter whether a property is natural or not and that our interest in this distinction derives, in large part, from our prior interest in similarity, laws of nature, reference and so on. There is of course a lot more to be said here concerning Dasgupta’s argument, my main point is to deny the premise that the upshot of naturalness depends on its value theoretic upshot, and instead insist that its upshot derives from the role it plays in other phenomena of interest.
See, for instance, Leinster (2014).
I would like to thank two anonymous referees at Erkenntnis for very helpful feedback. I would also like to thank Jeff Speaks and Ross Jensen for reading and providing helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
References
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Hall, G. Naturalness is Not an Aim of Belief. Erkenn 88, 2277–2290 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00452-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00452-3