Normativity Workshop: Papineau

In his paper, "The Normativity of Judgement" (background reading for which is here) David Papineau argued that the normativity of judgement can be reduced to the normativity of morality and prudence and so pose no extra problem for naturalists. His main line of attack is to point out that in those cases where truth is morally or prudentially valued, it will be true that, "X ought to judge that P only if P". But a non-naturalist may want to say more than this. Specifically, they may want to say that it is constitutive of belief that it be governed by certain sui generis norms. Papineau broke this down into two questions: Is the attitude of belief constitutively normative? Are the contents of belief constitutively normative?

His answer to both questions is, of course, negative. With respect to the first, he argued that a naturalist can perfectly easily explain why it is that belief aims at the truth, belief has a distinctive direction of fit, and belief is non-voluntary without having to postulate sui generis norms. But since these are the most likely reasons for believing in such norms we should not be convinced that the attitude of belief are so governed. With respect to the second, he argued that the only views that would genuinely support the idea that content is irreducibly normative are those of, say, the classical verificationists, Dummett and, perhaps, Davidson who place norms within the content itself. But, says Papineau, these views face difficulties in accounting, for example, for the intuitive view that babies and animals have contentful beliefs. Thus there is nothing uncontroversial here to show that the naturalists position is untenable.

One objection to this that was suggested that that the naturalist will have difficulty in accounting for the normativity that arrives not with the notion of belief per se but with the notion of a belief that is warranted. But, of course, this just pushes the question back to whether the naturalist has an acceptable account of warrant.

Another objection was that we have the intuition that if someone continues claim to believe P in the face of overwhelming evidence that not-P, then that person is no longer 'playing the belief game'. This intuition can be explained if we take belief to be constitutively sensitive to evidence, and so take the norm "X ought to judge that P only if P" to be an exceptionless rule rather than, as Papineau treats it, something that is true in a great many cases. This thought hits Papineau's specific proposal in particular if we consider a case where all moral and prudential factors suggest that one should believe P - yet we still think that the person ought to believe not-P.

Might there not be a middle ground that the naturalist could occupy, by maintaining that "X ought to judge that P only if P" is in fact exceptionless because there is always some prudential reason for believing the truth? This could be maintained if we allow that the norm does not represent an all-things-considered ought. Thus, there is always some sense in which one ought to believe the truth (it will always help you in some way), but this norm can be overridden the cases of the above type.