Abstract

According to doxastic normativism, belief is essentially governed by a norm of correctness, which states, ‘Your belief that is correct if and only if is true’. The normativist further holds that this condition of correctness has normative import, meaning that it entails claims about what one ought to believe. Bykvist and Hattiangadi argue that at least one of these two claims made by the normativist is false; that is to say, having truth as its condition of correctness is either not constitutive of belief, or does not have normative import. They argue that ‘correct’ is not an essentially normative term, and that the purported norm of truth fails to distinguish belief from other propositional attitudes. Moreover, no version of normativism can avoid the unacceptable implication that we ought to believe blindspot propositions, which are true but nevertheless could not be truly believed.