Rules of Belief and the Normativity of Intentional Content (original) (raw)
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The normativity of mental content thesis has been very influential in contemporary philosophy of mind and action. Paul Boghossian (2003, 2005) has developed an argument for the normativity of mental content on the basis of two premises-the normativity of the notion of belief and the priority of the notion of belief to the notion of desire. In his article Alexander Miller (2008) has criticised Boghossian's argument for the normativity of mental content. He has argued that the second premise of Boghossian's argument is false to the effect that belief and desire are conceptually interdependent. In this paper, along with proposing a new argument for the normativity of content thesis, I will clarify that the thesis survives Miller's attack.
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Epistemic Constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness, and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the face of this objection. I do so in two steps. First, I dispute a crucial assumption underlying the case against EC: that constitutive standards of correctness in general are "reason-giving" only if and because there is also a prior reason to comply with them. Second, I outline a strategy of how EC can meet the challenge of explaining what's special about the activity of believing such that, unlike other standard-governed activities, it is capable of generating normative reasons.