The Value of Truth

The Value of Truth

PAUL HORWICH

New York University

1

It is generally taken for granted that truth (along with, for example, justiceand beauty) is a good thing, and I have no quarrel with this assumption.The aims of the present paper are to clarify and defend it, to try to explainwhy it is correct, and to examine its epistemological import.

But note the ambiguity in my title. It might be taken to mean either ‘‘thevalue of possessing the concept of truth’’, or ‘‘the intrinsically evaluativecharacter of the concept of truth’’, or ‘‘the value of having beliefs that aretrue’’. This discussion will be about the third of these matters. Clearlythe first and second topics are also important; and they are not entirelydisconnected from the third one, as we shall see at the end; but they won’tbe our primary concern. Our focus will be on the idea that true beliefsare valuable—or, to be a little more precise, it will be on the assumptionthat

VT It is desirable to believe what is true and only what is true.1

2

Another obvious distinction is the one between saying something false andtelling a lie. The issue here is not the value of sincerity, of not lying, ofasserting only what one takes to be true. It is the value of taking to be truewhat is true. However, there is a pretty clear explanatory relationshipbetween these two things. Insofar as true belief is good and false beliefbad, then you will benefit someone by giving him a true belief and do someharm by giving him a false one. Therefore, trying to persuade a person to

# 2006, Copyright the AuthorsJournal compilation # 2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

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believe something that you regard as false is an attempt to harm—and forthat reason it’s morally objectionable. Thus, if we can understand whytruth is valuable, we can thereby explain why lying is wrong. Conversely(by inference to the best explanation), we may invoke the immorality oflying in support of our conviction that truth is valuable.

3

Going back to my initial formulation of that idea, it is evidently a combi-nation of two distinct theses. One thesis urges a concern for believing onlywhat is true—it articulates the value of avoiding falsehoods. The other urgesa concern for believing anything that is true—it articulates the value ofpursuing truth.

Of these two sentiments, the first may look more compelling than thesecond. For once someone has decided to investigate a certain question—whatever it may be—then his not caring about getting the answer rightwould surely be subject to criticism. But are we really obliged to investigateall questions—to try to believe every single truth? Intuitively, most factsare too trivial to be worth finding out about or worth remembering. So itwould seem that an unqualified ‘pursue truth’ norm is a considerableexaggeration, a mere first approximation, to be rejected in favor of somemore hedged alternative.

But in fact there is no need to adopt this view of the matter; for there is aneater way of accommodating our reservations. Clearly, valuing true beliefdoes not preclude valuing other things as well. And clearly our variousvalues will occasionally conflict—we won’t always be able to satisfy themall and must on occasion decide that some are to be sacrificed for the sake ofothers. In such a situation, the sacrificed values continue to matter ofcourse—but they are outweighed by more important considerations.Therefore, we can explain our worry about the ‘pursue truth’ norm asreflecting the recognition that, in many circumstances, the value of findingout the truth, or falsity, of a given proposition will be less than the costsof doing so. Thus no retreat from the ‘pursue truth’ norm is needed afterall.2

Moreover, on reflection, the initially less problematic-seeming ‘avoidfalsity’ norm can equally well be over-ridden. Suppose, for example, thatcertain information would be extremely dangerous. We might well feel, notonly that no investigation, if it has the potential to yield that information,should be mounted, but also that, if one were to be mounted, it might not,on balance, be undesirable for it to issue in the wrong answer.

So I’m going to assume, for the rest of this discussion, that both partsof VT are correct—but construed as articulating just a couple of themany things that an epistemic appraisal should take into account. Forany given proposition, not only is it undesirable for us to believe it and

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it not be true, but it is also desirable for it to be true without usbelieving it. However, we must keep in mind that an overall assessmentof whether, given some particular personal and social context, a certainmatter merits investigation, and of whether we should care about theresult being correct, will bring to bear further valid considerations, andwill do so without in the slightest impugning the more limited claimsmade by VT.

4

Actually, our ceteris paribus truth norm is somewhat more complicated thansuggested by VT. For belief is not an all-or-nothing matter. Rather, weexhibit a variety of levels of conviction, including ‘absolute certainty’,‘pretty sure’, ‘no opinion one way or the other’, ‘fairly unlikely’, and soon. Presumably, when we speak loosely (as in VT) of ‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’,we have in mind, respectively, ‘high’ and ‘low’ degrees of belief. Therefore abetter (i.e. more comprehensive) version of the principle would be explicitabout the truth-oriented desirability of each of the various degrees of beliefwe might have in a given proposition.

Perhaps something along the following lines is what we feel:

VT* It is relatively desirable to have relatively high degrees of beliefin, and only in, those propositions that are true

Or, more formally:

(y) {DesirabilityS [y is true ! BelS(y) ¼ x] ¼ f(x, y) vals}

—where ‘‘DesirabilityS (p)’’ refers to the degree to which S should desire thatp; and where ‘‘BelS(y) ¼ x’’ means that S’s degree of belief in proposition, y,is equal to x (—some number between 0 and 1). Therefore, ‘‘DesirabilityS[y is true! BelS(y) ¼ x]’’ refers to the degree to which S ought to desire thatif y is true then he believes it to degree x. Note that ‘‘val’’ is a unit ofdesirability, and that the desirability-measure—‘f(x, y) vals’—of acceptingany given true proposition, y, increases with increasing degrees of beliefin it.3

Some such principle would be more complete than VT. However, givenour concerns in the remainder of this paper—which are to defend, explain,and examine the import of the idea that truth is valuable—I see nothing tobe gained from working with the fuller formulation. On the contrary, itsadditional complexity might obscure the central issues.—So I’ll continue tofocus on VT.4

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5

Let us now turn to the question of why truth is worth bothering with. Anatural first shot at an answer is that true belief is valuable because itpays:—it has evident practical benefits; we are more likely to get what wewant if we base our deliberations and actions on true beliefs than if we basethem on false ones.

This intuition is not hard to justify. Focus, to begin with, on directlyaction-guiding beliefs of the form, ‘If I perform A, then X will occur’. Itwill clearly benefit me if I have many such beliefs and if they are all true.Because when I want a given thing and believe that a certain action willresult in my getting it, then, very often, I will perform that action. And inthat case, if my belief is true, this desire will be satisfied; whereas if it isn’ttrue no such result is ensured. So true beliefs of the directly action-guidingform will indeed tend to benefit me. And the more such true beliefs I havethe broader the spectrum of desires that will be easy for me to satisfy inthis way. Moreover, these special beliefs are the results of inferences thattend to preserve truth; so it will benefit me for the premises of thoseinferences to be true. And there is no proposition that might not somedayserve as such a premise. Therefore it will indeed be good for me—at least,that’s what it’s reasonable for me to suppose—if I believe every trueproposition and if every proposition I believe is true.5

This line of thought vindicates our sense that true beliefs should beexpected to serve us in deliberation better than false ones would. But whatabout those emotional effects of belief-states that do not derive from therole of belief in practical inference? What about the pleasure or distress thata particular belief may directly provoke? Once this phenomenon is takeninto account, then false beliefs may, in certain circumstances, become supe-rior to true ones with respect to expected happiness. For instance, there isthe example of the man whose wellbeing is best promoted by his convincinghimself that his wife is not having an affair. Or we can imagine an arche-ologist whose professional opinions have no practical import, and whoseevidence points in no definite direction, but who needs to think of himself ashaving made fascinating discoveries.

For this reason, we might be tempted to back away from an unqualifiedendorsement of VT. We might feel the need to retreat to the claim that truebeliefs are instrumentally desirable relative to certain purposes—specifically,for use in deliberation—but not necessarily in general.

However, it would be a mistake to regard this observation as any sort ofretreat. For we have already seen (in section 3) that VT cannot be takento offer overall appraisals of given juxtapositions of belief and fact, butmerely to supply one dimension of evaluation—one contribution to theiroverall value. Therefore, just because the sheer pleasure or unpleasantness

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of believing certain things is sometimes so great that an incorrect beliefis to be preferred on balance, that does not indicate any deficiency at allin VT.

6

These considerations might be deployed in support of the idea that the valueof truth is solely self-centered and instrumental:—that the desirability oftrue beliefs consists in the fact that each person should expected them tohelp him, via deliberation, to get what he wants. But, on reflection, this viewof the matter is inadequate.

In the first place, there is widespread sentiment to the effect that certainitems of knowledge are desirable regardless of any practical use to whichsomeone might decide to put them. Knowledge is valuable, as we often say,‘‘for its own sake’’.

In the second place, without some such assumption, it would be hard tojustify our pursuit of truth in fields of inquiry such as ancient history,metaphysics, and esoteric areas of mathematics—fields that may not beexpected to have any pragmatic payoff.

And in the third place, it is surely no less important to pursue truth andavoid falsehood in normative domains, such as ethics and epistemology. Yetnormative beliefs do not enter into our deliberations in the characteristicway that our empirical beliefs do. Instead, a person’s conviction that heought to do a given thing directly inclines him to do it. Thus the truth ofsuch beliefs does not facilitate the satisfaction of desires.6

For these reasons I think we should acknowledge that true belief has anon-instrumental value—a value for its own sake. In this respect, truth is adesideratum regardless of which proposition is in question—whereas it isinstrumentally desirable only in certain cases. However, although the valueof truth for its own sake is distinct from the instrumental value of truebelief, there is nonetheless an important relationship between these qualities.It is presumably because most truths are useful in practical inference—andnot merely to those individuals who discover those truths, but also to all therest of us to whom they are communicated—that our society, simplifyingfor the sake of effectiveness, inculcates a general concern for truth for itsown sake. Of course, this causal/explanatory conjecture does not purportto explain the fact that truth is valuable for its own sake, but merelyour tendency to believe that there is such a fact. The normative fact itselfmay well be epistemologically and explanatorily fundamental. But at leastone can understand what has brought about our commitment to itsexistence.

So what kind of desirability is attributed by the unrestricted non-instrumental form of VT? What do we mean when we say that truth is‘‘valuable for its own sake’’?


A plausible answer is that we have in mind a moral value.—We think thatsomeone who seeks knowledge and understanding for their own sake dis-plays a moral virtue.7 And this answer is bolstered by the nature of thejust-mentioned explanatory relationship between truth’s instrumental utilityand our commitment to its having, in addition, a certain value for its ownsake. For that very sort of relationship obtains in the case of values that areuncontroversially moral. For example, it is presumably because of thebeneficial self-centered effects of living within a community in which mostpeople are considerate of others and abhor the infliction of pain, that werespect and inculcate moral norms that dictate such sentiments.8

7

The norms that we deploy in the appraisal of beliefs include more than VT.We feel, in addition, that one ought to reason in accord with induction(finding simple hypotheses that extrapolate from our data more crediblethan complex ones), that one ought to accept instances of ‘p or not p’, thatone ought not have obviously contradictory beliefs, that one should acceptinferences from ‘‘p’’ to ‘‘It is true that p’’, that one should be led by certainvisual experiences to believe that something red is present, etc. But althoughsuch norms of justification (warrant, entitlement, etc.) are distinct from VT,they are intuitively related to it. It is natural to think that we deploy themfor the sake of VT—i.e. that our end is to have beliefs that are true, and thatour means to that end is to follow certain rules for when beliefs of variouskinds are to be acquired and retained.

If so, one might expect it to be possible, indeed obligatory, to explain thecorrectness of these norms of justification, and to rationalize our commit-ment to them, by reference to this end. For, in general, a goal-orientedpolicy may be shown to be reasonable only by establishing that the goal isworthwhile and that the policy is likely to achieve it. So, in this particularcase, our epistemic rules would need to be rationalized by establishing thattrue belief is desirable and that following these rules should be expected toresult in true belief.9

But, as initially compelling as this view of the matter might be, it cannotbe right. To see this, focus for example on the rule of scientific induction,and the difficulty of providing any such account of it.

In the first place, there is a circularity problem. The conclusion (namely,that it is rational to follow that rule) would have to be already presupposedin one leg of the argument in favor of it. For, unless we deploy that veryrule, and take for granted that it is rational to deploy it, we cannot hope tomake it plausible that reasoning inductively will, as it has in the past, havethe desired consequence—namely, of being ‘truth-promoting’, i.e. of engen-dering beliefs that are more often true (and closer to the truth) than thebeliefs that would be dictated by alternative non-deductive rules.10

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And in the second place, it would seem that the value-of-truth premise isnot really needed. For our conclusion—the reasonability of inductive infer-ence—appears to follow from the other premise all by itself:—namely, fromthe reasonability of believing that induction is truth-promoting (in theabove sense). Given the equivalence of ‘‘p’’ and ‘‘The proposition that p istrue’’, it is hard to see any significant space between the rationality of ourfollowing a certain rule for acquiring beliefs and the rationality of ourthinking that the beliefs we would acquire in following it will tend to betrue. In particular, if we are justified in thinking that our following the ruleof induction, ‘Believe that nature is uniform’, will yield the truth, then—andquite independently of whether or not true belief is valued—we must bejustified in following that rule.11

Thus we have something of a paradox. On the one hand it seems obviousthat we deploy induction because we want our beliefs to be true and wethink that this concern is likely to be accommodated by our following thatrule. And it seems equally obvious that our justification for following it restson the justification for those motivating states—the desire and the belief.But on the other hand we encounter two considerations—circularity andredundancy—which seem to show that our epistemic policy and ourepistemic goal cannot be related in the normal means-ends manner.

Note that this paradox is not simply the traditional Humean problem.For that is the problem of there being no argument that can justify ourfollowing induction. And it is plausible that we can solve that problem(or dissolve it) by coming to appreciate that a commitment might well befully legitimate—indeed obligatory—despite the absence of any supportingconsiderations, any justifying argument for it. But such a treatment ofthe traditional problem still leaves us with the present paradox. For itremains counter-intuitive to suppose that the desirability of truth hasnothing to do with the rationality of induction. It remains to explainwhat is wrong with the strong intuition that we follow induction for thesake of truth.

Here is the resolution that I would suggest. We must take it that the ruleof induction is non-instrumentally rational—i.e. that we ought to follow itregardless of what values we attach to the consequences of doing so,whether they be practical, moral, or epistemic. More specifically (andassuming, as argued above, that the rationality of an epistemic rule isequivalent to the rationality of regarding it as truth-promoting), we mustacknowledge that this rule is best for reaching the truth—irrespective ofwhether our reaching the truth is, or is not, a good thing. But then, in lightof that basic normative conviction, and given our independent appreciationthat reaching the truth is a good thing, we are in a position to recognize thatthere are two additional kinds of reason to follow the rule of induction—namely the practical and moral benefits that should be expected to accruefrom doing so.12


8

How do we manifest our concern for truth, our commitment to VT?Regarding the ‘accuracy’ or ‘avoid falsity’ aspect of it, one might be temptedto think that this is shown by our refusing to believe any proposition that weidentify as false. But it takes little reflection to see that such an answer won’tdo. For there is no substantial difference between identifying a propositionas false and disbelieving it. So, refusing to believe what we take to be false isjust refusing to believe what we disbelieve. But VT is not the principle ofnon-contradiction. Its point is not to tell us what else to believe or refrainfrom believing given that we have certain beliefs already. Its point, rather, isto tell us the relation we should want our beliefs to have to what is true.

Moreover, the principle of non-contradiction is just one amongst manynorms of justification to which we subscribe in our effort to minimize falsebelief. Thus, a more plausible answer to the present manifestation questionis that our desire for accuracy is revealed by our careful adherence to allnorms of justification—norms (including the principle of non-contradiction,induction, etc.) that specify the level of confidence we ought to have in anyhypothesis as a function of our current evidence. But here also there areproblems—and these call for a couple of qualifications.

In the first place, one might well wonder how it is possible for ouradherence to (say) the rule of induction to manifest our concern for truth,given (as we argued in the previous section) that we are obliged, independ-ently of whether we have that concern, to follow this rule. For, in that case,couldn’t a person’s deployment of induction derive solely from his commit-ment to that norm, and therefore manifest no acknowledgement at all oftruth’s instrumental and ‘for-its-own-sake’ (moral?) value? This objectionstrikes me as correct; it shows that our concern for truth is not demon-strated merely in the following of rules of justification. Instead, what reallydisplays that concern is a heightened scrupulousness in certain specialcircumstances. For example, if someone is even more careful than usualin applying the rules when the resulting beliefs are expected to have animportant practical application, this will show that he is aware of thepragmatic value of truth. And if someone is especially careful whenthe resulting beliefs are merely theoretically important, this suggests hisawareness of truth’s value for its own sake.

In the second place, it might well be objected that individuals (or com-munities) that do not respect our principles of reason (including induction),and that deploy different ones, might nonetheless want their beliefs to betrue.13 Again this objection seems right. Although the following of our ownrules will indeed reveal a concern for truth (as long as this is done withselective scrupulousness, as we have just seen), that concern will be presentto an equal degree, and will be equally well revealed, by those who followrules of evidence that are highly irrational from our point of view.14

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What about the second part of VT—the desirability of believing whateveris true? Again, it is absurd to think that our commitment to this ideal mightbe expressed by our first appreciating that something is true and thendeciding, on that account, to believe it. Rather, we display our attachmentto this ideal by our curiosity, by mounting investigations by bothering toacquire further evidence, by acting to increase the range and certainty of ourbeliefs.

Thus, respect for the joint principle, VT—for the value of believing thewhole truth and nothing but the truth—is expressed in the frequent andselectively scrupulous deployment of norms of justification.

9

So should we conclude that it is best to forget about truth and to focusexclusively on those norms of justification—not regarding them as orientedtowards anything in particular? Is it simply a confusion (deriving, saysRichard Rorty,15 from a pernicious ‘metaphysical realism’) to think oftruth as the goal of inquiry, and to think of our norms of justification asspecifying the right way of trying to reach it?

Donald Davidson has expressed some sympathy with this conclusion:

We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know forcertain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible asa target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a

goal. Truth is not a value, so the ‘‘pursuit of truth’’ is an empty enterprise unlessit means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in ourbeliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations.16

But the line of thought that I have been developing here suggests that thisis incorrect. In the first place, there is no particular difficulty in articulatingthe idea that truth is our target.—VT does a reasonable job of it. In thesecond place, we very often are able to recognize when this target has beenhit. For whenever we can believe anything with certainty—and that surelyhappens quite a lot—we can be equally certain that our belief is true. And,in the third place, it is a mistake to suppose that our concern for truth ismerely implicit in our commitment to more immediately implementableepistemological procedures. Rather, since truth and justification—despitetheir intimate relations to one another—are quite different qualities, thedesire for a belief to possess one of them must be separated from the desirefor it to possess the other. More specifically, I have argued that our rules ofjustification possess a measure of rationality that is independent of themoral and instrumental values of truth, but which is supplemented bythose values. Thus Rorty and Davidson are wrong to suggest that VT isunimportant, or somehow misleading. On the contrary, our endorsement of


it has some distinctive and illuminating features:—it explains why our rulesof justification are followed more carefully in some circumstances than inothers; it explains why we are inclined to increase our evidence, it explainswhy we frown on lying and other forms of deceit; and it is itself explained bythe practical benefits that can be expected to derive from true belief.17

10

And, despite Rorty’s suspicions, there was absolutely no hint of metaphysicalrealism (or of a correspondence notion of truth) in the lines of argument that Ideployed to show these things. Nor do they give us any reason to think (withMichael Dummett, Crispin Wright, Bob Brandom, Hilary Putnam, and manyothers) that our concept of truth is constitutionally normative—i.e. that it canbe defined or explained only in explicitly normative terms (e.g. as ‘what oneought to believe’).18 On the contrary, the principle VT is pretty obviously oneof those cases (of the sort emphasized by deflationists) where the concept oftruth serves merely as a device of generalization.

What we endorse, fundamentally, are particular norms like

It is desirable that: one believe the proposition that e ¼ mc2 just in casee ¼ mc2

which cannot immediately be generalized in the usual way (that is, by repla-cing a singular term with a variable for universal quantification). So, in orderto solve this small technical problem, we deploy the a priori equivalence

The proposition that e ¼ mc2 is true $ e ¼ mc2

enabling our original normative commitment to be roughly recast as

It is desirable that: one believe the proposition that e ¼ mc2 just in casethe proposition that e ¼ mc2 is true

which can be generalized in the usual way.—Replacing the singular term,‘‘the proposition that e ¼ mc2’’, with a variable over which we can univer-sally quantify, we get to VT—i.e.

(x) (It is desirable that: one believe x just in case x is true)19

Thus, far from being an objection to deflationism, the desirability of truthprovides a persuasive illustration of it.

This is how our main topic—the value of having true beliefs—interactswith the other issues that may be read into my title: namely, ‘whether truthis an evaluative concept’ and ‘why it is valuable to have that concept’.

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A good explanation of the notion’s utility (as a device of generalization),together with a recognition of the implication that truth is not itself anormative concept, are vital if we are not to misunderstand the nature andimport of VT.20

Notes

1 The intended logical form of VT is as follows:

(x) [One should desire that (one believe x $ x is true)].

Certain alternative principles might seem tempting:—e.g.

S ought to believe x $ x is true

S ought to want to believe x $ x is true

S’s believing x is objectively right $ x is true

But it seems to me that the first and second of these alternatives—even merely the ‘only if’

component of them—are simply wrong, since what we ought to believe (and ought to want to

believe) depends on our evidence rather than on what is true. Moreover, the third principle, if

correct, is trivially correct by virtue of our simply defining an ‘‘objectively right’’ belief as one that

is true. For a different account of the third principle, see Allan Gibbard’s ‘‘Truth and Correct

Belief’’, Philosophical Issues, 15 (Normativity) edited by E. Sosa and E. Villanueva, 2005.2 This accords with our inclination to think that a ‘perfect being’ would be omniscient.3 Arguably, a specific formula, f(x, y), for assigning levels of desirability will be adequate

only if, given that someone has a certain degree of belief in a proposition, he cannot calculate

on the basis of this formula that his expected desirability would be improved by simply (i.e. for

no evidential reason) switching to a different degree of belief. For further discussion, see Allan

Gibbard’s ‘‘Rational Credence and the Value of Truth’’ (unpublished manuscript).4 VT* enables us to explain why it is—as noted in section 3—that the ‘pursue truth’ norm

seems weaker that the ‘avoid falsity’ norm, why a violation of the former seems less serious than

a violation of the latter. The answer suggested by VT* is that the ideal degree of belief to have

in a true proposition is 1; that failure to investigate the truth value of a given proposition will

leave us with a middling degree of belief in it (e.g. around 1/2), which is a fairly undesirable

distance from 1; but that a false belief—i.e. a very low degree of belief in a true proposition—is

even further from the ideal.5 A more rigorous version of this argument can be given, which takes into account the fact

that beliefs come in degrees, and which deploys the principle of maximization of expected utility

instead of the crude assumption—the practical syllogism—that a person tends to do what he

believes will satisfy his desires. For an indication of how this more accurate version would go,

see my Truth, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 45–46. See also Barry Loewer’s ‘‘The Value of

Truth’’, in E. Villanueva (ed.) Philosophical Issues 4, Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing

Company, 1993. A rigorous treatment is given by Mark Schervish in his ‘‘A General Method

for Comparing Probability Assessors’’, Annals of Statistics 17:4, 1856–79, 1989. Its philosophi-

cal import is discussed in Gibbard’s ‘‘Rational Credence and Its Value of Truth’’.6 It may be thought that normative beliefs sometimes do enter into deliberation in the

standard way, so that we have a standard instrumental motive for wanting them to be true.

Consider, for example, the following reasoning:—

(1) Lying is wrong

(2) If I act wrongly, I will be distrusted and disliked

(3) Therefore, if I lie I will be distrusted and disliked

(4) I don’t want to be distrusted and disliked

(5) Therefore, I won’t lie


I would suggest, however, that this sort of argument is defective. For premise (2), which (in

the intended sense) attributes causal consequences to an act’s being wrong, is false. Granted,

something in the vicinity of this reasoning is fine—namely, an argument to the effect that, since

people who are thought to act wrongly are disliked, and since lying is regarded as wrong, then

liars will be disliked. So it is desirable to believe these premises just in case they are true. But

they are not normative.7 The idea that a degree of concern for truth is a moral virtue is also advocated and

defended by Bernard Williams in his Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton University Press, 2002.

See also my ‘‘Norms of Truth and Meaning’’ in Richard Schantz (ed.) What Is Truth, de

Gruyter: Berlin and New York, 2001.8 According to some philosophers, belief is constitutionally truth-oriented—i.e. any state of

belief, properly so-called, must incorporate a desire that it be true.

See Peter Railton, ‘‘On the Hypothetical and non-Hypothetical in Reasoning About Belief and

Action’’ in Cullity and Gaut (eds.) Ethics and Practical Reason, Oxford, Oxford University Press,

1997; David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000;

and Paul Boghossian, ‘‘The Normativity of Content’’, Philosophical Issues 13:1, 2003, 33–45; and

Nishi Shah, ‘‘HowTruthGovernsBeliefs’’,Philosophical Review, 112:3, 2003, 447–82.And if this view

is right, thenVTmight be explained, quite trivially, in terms of the value of our desires being satisfied.

However, it is not denied by these philosophers (and could not plausibly be denied) that

there is a conceivable state of mind that consists merely in relying on a proposition in

theoretical inference and practical deliberations, but without any accompanying desire that

the proposition be true. Their thesis is not that no such attitude could exist, but that it would

fall short of genuine belief.

Now one might well object that there could be no term more appropriate than ‘‘belief’’

itself for the simpler attitude of propositional reliance. However, a more important point is

that, even if this objection is mistaken and belief, properly so-called, is constitutionally truth-

oriented, the issues under discussion in this paper are not side-stepped or trivialized. For they

re-emerge as substantive questions about whether and why it is valuable to ‘rely’ on just those

propositions that are true. Moreover, if we are able to explain, along the lines just sketched,

why it is that we take true ‘belief’ (in the weak, non-normative sense) to be desirable, we thereby

motivate the conclusion that our actual concept of belief is nothing beyond this weak one, For

there would be no reason to suppose that VT is one of our explanatory fundamental (hence,

concept constituting) convictions about belief.9 This sort of stance is suggested by Peter Railton in ‘‘Truth, Reason and the Regulation of

Belief’’ (Philosophical Issues 5, 71–93, 1994), by David Papineau in ‘‘Normativity and

Judgement’’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society Supplementary Volume LXXIII, 17–43,

1999), and by Richard Foley in ‘‘The Foundational Role of Epistemology in General Theory of

Rationality’’ (Fairweather and Zagzebski (eds.), Virtue Epistemology, Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 2001).10 Roughly this point is made by Alvin Goldman in ‘‘The Internalist Conception of

Justification’’ (French, Uehling, and Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy V,

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1980), and by David John Owens in ‘‘Does Belief

Have an Aim?’’ (Philosophical Studies 115, 283–305, 2003).

Granted, the circularity involved here is not paradigmatic. For it isn’t a matter of assum-

ing, as a premise, the very thing to be established. It is rather a matter of following the very rule

of inference whose rationality is to be established. But, in a context in which the rationality of

that rule is in dispute, an argument that is designed to settle the issue, but that deploys the rule

in question, seems just as objectionable as the paradigms of circular reasoning.11 For if it is reasonable to believe that following the rule, ‘Believe that T’, will yield the

truth, then it is reasonable to believe that the belief that T is true; but then (given the trivial truth

schema) it is reasonable to believe that T; so it is reasonable to follow the rule that simply

dictates having that belief.

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Similarly, if it is reasonable to believe that some rule of deductive inference, R*, preserves

truth, then it is reasonable to believe the conditional

<R*(prem1)> is true ! <R*(con1)> is true

where ‘‘R*(prem1)’’ is an instance of R*’s premises-schema and where ‘‘R*(con1)’’ is the

conclusion dictated by R*. But then (given the truth schema) it is reasonable to believe

R*(prem1) ! R*(con1)

So it is reasonable to infer ‘‘R*(con1)’’ from ‘‘R*(prem1)’’. Therefore, given the availability of

parallel considerations for any other instance of R*, it is reasonable to follow R*. Again, the

crucial point is that no assumption regarding the value of truth was needed to reach this

conclusion.

In light of such examples, the general thesis—that for any epistemic rule, R, the rationality

of believing that R is truth-promoting entails the (defeasible) rationality of following R—strikes

me as a plausible conjecture; but further work would be needed to prove it.12 The particular norm of justification on which I have focused here is induction. But

similar things can be said about abductive reasoning (which takes us from observational

premises to theoretical conclusions) and about the other epistemic norms that I listed, which

relate to deductive inference, observation, and other matters. For further discussion of these

issues see my Reflections on Meaning, Oxford University Press, 2005, chapter 6 (‘‘Meaning

Constitution and Epistemic Rationality’’).13 David Velleman makes this observation in The Possibility of Practical Reason; see

p. 113.14 In addition, of course, one can verbalize the desire for true belief—one can assert that

error is to be avoided.—But the only way to demonstrate that interest is to be especially

responsive to evidence in circumstances where the resulting beliefs are felt to be important.15 See for example Rorty’s paper, ‘‘Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Davidson vs Wright’’, The

Philosophical Quarterly 45 (180) 1995, 281–300.16 From page 67 of Davidson’s ‘‘Truth Rehabilitated’’, in Rorty and His Critics, edited by

R. Brandon, Blackwell, 2000.17 Owens (in his ‘‘Does Belief Have an Aim?’’) argues that nothing would be explained by

answering his question in the affirmative. But he does not take into account the just-mentioned

phenomena.

One might speculate that it is mainly the unorthodox and hence paradoxical-seeming

relationship (that we noted in section 7) between the goal of truth and our means of realizing

it that has induced Rorty, Davidson, Owens, and others to suppose that there is no such goal.

But a better response, I have argued, is to identify and demystify the idiosyncratic character of

that relationship and thereby remove the sense of paradox surrounding it.18 Dummett argued, in his famous essay, ‘‘Truth’’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

n.s. 59, pp. 141–162, 1958), that the redundancy theory gives an inadequate account of our

concept of truth, because it fails to say that we aim for true belief. Something like this position

has also been urged by Wright in his book, Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press,

Cambridge, Mass., 1992). He maintains that deflationism is wrong on the grounds that truth is

a goal, hence a genuine property, not merely a device of generalization. See the Postscript of my

Truth (2nd edition) for further discussion of Wright’s argument. Brandom repeats and endorses

Dummett’s line of thought in his Making It Explicit (Harvard University Press, Cambridge,

Mass., 1994, p.17). Surprisingly, he goes on (in Chapter 5) to advocate a form of deflationism—

namely, the pro-sentential theory of truth. For similar ideas see Putnam’s ‘‘Does The

Disquotational Theory of Truth Solve All Philosophical Problems?’’ and ‘‘On Truth’’, both

reprinted in his Words and Life, edited by J. Conant, Harvard University Press, 1995.19 Davidson has argued (e.g. in the paper cited above) that truth is not merely a device of

generalization, as deflationists contend, but is a vital explanatory concept in a theory of


linguistic behavior. To that end, he has argued that biconditionals like ‘‘The proposition

that e ¼ mc2 is true $ e ¼ mc2’’—if they were to be deployed as deflationists want (and as I

illustrate above)—would be unintelligible since, given that the words in the sentence on the right

hand side have their normal referents, and that the words in the identical embedded sentence on

the left hand side do not, the sentence would have to be regarded as ambiguous, yet ‘‘we have

no idea how to accommodate this ambiguity in a serious semantics’’. This is not the right

occasion for a full response to Davidson’s critique of deflationism. But I would like to note (a)

that the difficulty to which he is alluding boils down to that of treating ‘that’-clauses as singular

terms within his own truth conditional semantic framework; and (b) that this difficulty should,

it seems to me, be regarded as evidence against that framework, rather than as evidence against

the natural view of ‘that’-clauses as singular terms. For further discussion see my ‘‘Davidson on

Deflationism’’ (in Discussions with Donald Davidson: On Truth, Meaning, and Knowledge, edited

by U. Zeglen, London, Routledge, 1999); ‘‘A Defense of Minimalism’’ (in The Nature of Truth,

edited by M. Lynch, MIT Press, 2001); and ‘‘Deflating Compositionality’’ (chapter 8 of

Reflections on Meaning).20 I have greatly benefitted from Allan Gibbard’s illuminating discussions of the present

topic. I would also like to thank him—together with Ned Block and Barry Loewer—for their

helpful comments on an early draft of this paper.

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The Value of Truth