Truth and the Aim of Belief

Abstract

Belief is the paradigm propositional attitude one of whose salient features is the way it is used to regulate our actions and guide us around the world. It functions, in Ramsey’s word, like a map by which we steer. It has a content representing the world as being a certain way, and it is deemed correct or true in case its representational content matches what it is intended to represent. To believe something is to represent it as true. The representationality of belief is, thus, connected with its intentionality. Because a belief is about something, it represents it. Accordingly, what seems to be distinctive of the belief mode (as an attitude) is its constitutive link with the truth of its content. Adopting an attitude of believing toward a proposition seems to carry with it some sort of commitment toward the truth of that proposition. It is this distinctive feature of belief that is generally thought to be responsible for the puzzling situation that ensues following the assertion of a Moorean sentence like “I believe that p, but not-p.”