Truth, Belief, and Action

Belief aims at the truth and so beliefs that do not fit the facts are defective. In what sense are they defective? The orthodox view seems to be that these beliefs are defective because they don't constitute knowledge. Those who accept this view tend to deny that the fact that a belief doesn't fit the facts is a fact that doesn't have any real normative significance. This view is puzzling, I argue, for while it is tempting to say that justification is all you need to properly believe something and treat it as a reason for belief, you need knowledge to properly treat something as a reason for action. In much of the recent literature on epistemic norms, people seem to think that justification rather than knowledge is the norm for practical reason. This is motivated, in part, by an internalist conception of responsibility according to which the rational and the reasonable is the mark of the permissible. I shall argue that this view makes a muddle of our conception of responsibility. Better, I argue, to accept both the knowledge and the justification norm. Knowledge is the norm that governs practical and theoretical deliberation because justification is the norm that governs deliberation. We should reject the orthodox view that denies that knowledge has normative significance by insisting that the justification of a belief does not depend upon whether it constitutes knowledge.