Abstract
Much of the recent literature on the normativity of belief has focused on undermining or defending narrow scope readings of doxastic norms. Wide scope readings are largely assumed to have been decisively refuted. This paper will oppose this trend by defending a wide scope reading of the norm of belief. We shall argue for the modest claim that if it is plausible to regard belief as constitutively normative (in the minimal sense that false belief is eo ipso defective), then a modified version of the wide scope reading of the norm of belief should be preferred to the narrow scope reading. (This is subject to certain attractive conditions relating to the holism involved in the fixation and confirmation of belief.)
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Notes
So it’s no part of our brief to engage with those who reject the idea that belief is normative or (at the other end of the spectrum) those who argue that all that’s required to establish that belief is normative is the platitude that beliefs have correctness conditions. Those are both important and interesting positions, but they are well beyond the scope of this short paper.
It should be noted, though, that some who defend knowledge norms rather than truth norms opt for wide scope readings. See, e.g., Williamson (2000: pp. 241, 243).
But only apparently: in fact, the falsity of p only implies that it is not the case that S ought to believe that p, not that S ought not to believe that p (Bykvist and Hattiangadi 2007: p. 280). Below, and following Kalantari and Luntley (2013), we suggest an alternative narrow scope formulation (N5) which avoids this problem, even though we ultimately settle for a wide scope reading (N6). Nothing turns on this for our main line of argument (see Sect. 5 and also note 10 below).
Note that holism about belief fixation and confirmation is distinct from—and less controversial than—semantic holism, according to which all of a speaker’s beliefs are relevant to what he means by an expression. As Boghossian rightly points out (1991: p. 89), Fodor, for example, accepts holism about belief fixation, but rejects semantic holism. See, e.g., Fodor (2004: p. 35).
Note also that Philip Pettit takes it to be an uncontroversial fact that “beliefs confront evidence in a network, not one by one” (2018: p. 96 n.8). Note too that although Wright would agree that confirmation is holistic, he argues against Quine’s ultra-pragmatic account of the mechanism that mediates the transition between recalcitrant experience and revision of belief (Wright 1986). For our purposes, all we need is the view that Fodor, Wright, Pettit, and Quine share: any disagreement between them about the extent and nature of the holism is not relevant to our current concerns. (In particular, our argument would go through given even a modest form of holism on which the proper object of confirmation is a substantial but proper subset of the relevant believer’s beliefs.).
Note that Atomistic Operational Impact is a matter of a norm applying to a token belief considered on its own rather than to a system involving a multiplicity of such tokens. (So, since “atomistic” here contrasts with “holistic” (with respect to confirmation) rather than with “molecular” (with respect to logical form), like other contributors to this literature we are simply sidestepping any tricky issues about the nature of atomic propositions and distinction between atomic and complex propositions. These issues are important but beyond the scope of the present paper.).
There is of course a fourth possibility—Indirect and Atomistic Operational Impact—but we needn’t concern ourselves with this possibility here.
Following Kalantari and Luntley (2013), we’ve formulated this in terms of permission rather than obligation, since the latter version only implies that when the evidence available to S suggests that p is not true, it is not the case that S ought to believe that p (see Bykvist and Hattiangadi 2007: p. 280). We ignore any issues that may arise here about whether (N5) does comport with Boghossian’s (N4): we can afford to be generous here as ultimately we want to propose an alternative to (N4) on other grounds.
Strictly speaking, there are two ways she could do this: she could rescind belief that platypuses are mammals or form the belief that they’re not, but this doesn’t affect the substantive point we’re making here.
It may be objected that (N7) and (N5) are implausible insofar as they appear to permit forming the belief that p when there is no evidence whatever for or against p or when the evidence for and against p is equally weighted. In fact, though, (N5) and (N7) do not issue the relevant permission here as they are both simply silent on cases where there is no evidence of falsity. Remember that we are concerned here with a minimal form of the normativity of belief thesis according to which false belief is defective. In order to determine the normative status of beliefs for which there is no evidence of falsity, we need to go beyond anything provided by the concept of belief on its own.
It seems clear that for Bykvist and Hattiangadi operational impact is atomistic, in other words taken to apply to token cases of belief formation: that is, in a case in which p is true the norm has to mandate us to form the belief p and in case in which p is false the norm has to oblige us to avoid forming the belief. Atomism about operational impact, combined with the failure of detachability, generates a problem; but when the relevant kind of atomism is jettisoned, as §4 suggests that it should be, the problem simply lapses.
This consideration undermines the (interesting) suggestion that by applying the holistic methodology to the beliefs that collectively constitute evidence against the belief that platypuses are mammals (the belief that no mammals lay eggs and the belief that this platypus has just laid an egg) while holding on to narrow-scope formulations of the relevant norms we can see how the narrow scope readings are consistent with holism. Our point is that even given the assumption that the latter two beliefs have been delivered by the holistic methodology, there is further scope for holism which is only available given a wide scope reading of the norm governing the belief that platypuses are mammals. We’re grateful here to an anonymous referee.
We’re grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing us on this point.
This is what allows us to capture the idea that false belief is defective even though we reject detachability in Sect. 5 above. Since evidence that a belief is false mandates a change in the relevant belief system, we can assume that even false beliefs for which there is no counterevidence are defective (in the sense that if there had been such counterevidence a revision of the belief system would have been mandated).
To be clear, then, our view is that the objective norm (N6) has indirect and holistic operational impact, while the subjective norms (N7) and (N8) have direct and holistic operational impact.
Like Kalantari and Luntley (2013), then, and as noted above, we focus on the idea that false belief is defective and let go of the idea that belief aims at the truth (see also Whiting (2010, 2013b), and Raleigh (2013)). Whereas Kalantari and Luntley (2013) think that this requires a move to a non-prescriptive norm of belief, our preference is for a wide scope norm along the lines of (N6), which is prescriptive in the sense that “ought” takes wide scope, even though its function is effectively prohibitive.
As far as we are aware, this connection has not hitherto been discussed in the literature on the normativity of belief.
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We are grateful to Zach Swindlehurst, Alan Weir, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.
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Miller, A., Kalantari, S.A. Belief Holism and the Scope of Doxastic Norms. Acta Anal 38, 575–584 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00544-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00544-5