Aiming at rationality : an alternative account of the truth-belief relationship.

Abstract

One of the hot topics in doxastic epistemology at the moment is how to characterise the relationship between beliefs and truth. The extant literature is dominated by two views; a teleological understanding of the relationship – championed by people such as Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen – and a normative understanding of the relationship – championed by among others Nishi Shah. I argue that neither view does an adequate job of capturing the relationship between beliefs and truth. I argue that these two views should be abandoned in favour of a third model that sees beliefs as part of a doxastic system that aims at rationality.