The Value of Truth

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The Value of Truth PAUL HORWICH New York University

1 It is generally taken for granted that truth (along with, for example, justice and 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 explain why it is correct, and to examine its epistemological import. But note the ambiguity in my title. It might be taken to mean either ‘‘the value of possessing the concept of truth’’, or ‘‘the intrinsically evaluative character of the concept of truth’’, or ‘‘the value of having beliefs that are true’’. This discussion will be about the third of these matters. Clearly the first and second topics are also important; and they are not entirely disconnected from the third one, as we shall see at the end; but they won’t be our primary concern. Our focus will be on the idea that true beliefs are valuable—or, to be a little more precise, it will be on the assumption that 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 and telling a lie. The issue here is not the value of sincerity, of not lying, of asserting only what one takes to be true. It is the value of taking to be true what is true. However, there is a pretty clear explanatory relationship between these two things. Insofar as true belief is good and false belief bad, then you will benefit someone by giving him a true belief and do some harm by giving him a false one. Therefore, trying to persuade a person to # 2006, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation # 2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

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believe something that you regard as false is an attempt to harm—and for that reason it’s morally objectionable. Thus, if we can understand why truth is valuable, we can thereby explain why lying is wrong. Conversely (by inference to the best explanation), we may invoke the immorality of lying in support of our conviction that truth is valuable. 3 Going back to my initial formulation of that idea, it is evidently a combination of two distinct theses. One thesis urges a concern for believing only what is true—it articulates the value of avoiding falsehoods. The other urges a concern for believing anything that is true—it articulates the value of pursuing truth. Of these two sentiments, the first may look more compelling than the second. For once someone has decided to investigate a certain question— whatever it may be—then his not caring about getting the answer right would surely be subject to criticism. But are we really obliged to investigate all questions—to try to believe every single truth? Intuitively, most facts are too trivial to be worth finding out about or worth remembering. So it would seem that an unqualified ‘pursue truth’ norm is a considerable exaggeration, a mere first approximation, to be rejected in favor of some more hedged alternative. But in fact there is no need to adopt this view of the matter; for there is a neater way of accommodating our reservations. Clearly, valuing true belief does not preclude valuing other things as well. And clearly our various values will occasionally conflict—we won’t always be able to satisfy them all and must on occasion decide that some are to be sacrificed for the sake of others. In such a situation, the sacrificed values continue to matter of course—but they are outweighed by more important considerations. Therefore, we can explain our worry about the ‘pursue truth’ norm as reflecting the recognition that, in many circumstances, the value of finding out the truth, or falsity, of a given proposition will be less than the costs of doing so. Thus no retreat from the ‘pursue truth’ norm is needed after all.2 Moreover, on reflection, the initially less problematic-seeming ‘avoid falsity’ norm can equally well be over-ridden. Suppose, for example, that certain information would be extremely dangerous. We might well feel, not only 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 parts of VT are correct—but construed as articulating just a couple of the many things that an epistemic appraisal should take into account. For any 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 us believing it. However, we must keep in mind that an overall assessment of whether, given some particular personal and social context, a certain matter merits investigation, and of whether we should care about the result being correct, will bring to bear further valid considerations, and will do so without in the slightest impugning the more limited claims made by VT.

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

in, 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 that p; 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 that if y is true then he believes it to degree x. Note that ‘‘val’’ is a unit of desirability, and that the desirability-measure—‘f(x, y) vals’—of accepting any given true proposition, y, increases with increasing degrees of belief in it.3 Some such principle would be more complete than VT. However, given our 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 to be gained from working with the fuller formulation. On the contrary, its additional complexity might obscure the central issues.—So I’ll continue to focus on VT.4

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5 Let us now turn to the question of why truth is worth bothering with. A natural first shot at an answer is that true belief is valuable because it pays:—it has evident practical benefits; we are more likely to get what we want if we base our deliberations and actions on true beliefs than if we base them on false ones. This intuition is not hard to justify. Focus, to begin with, on directly action-guiding beliefs of the form, ‘If I perform A, then X will occur’. It will 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 will result in my getting it, then, very often, I will perform that action. And in that case, if my belief is true, this desire will be satisfied; whereas if it isn’t true no such result is ensured. So true beliefs of the directly action-guiding form will indeed tend to benefit me. And the more such true beliefs I have the broader the spectrum of desires that will be easy for me to satisfy in this way. Moreover, these special beliefs are the results of inferences that tend to preserve truth; so it will benefit me for the premises of those inferences to be true. And there is no proposition that might not someday serve 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 true proposition and if every proposition I believe is true.5 This line of thought vindicates our sense that true beliefs should be expected to serve us in deliberation better than false ones would. But what about those emotional effects of belief-states that do not derive from the role of belief in practical inference? What about the pleasure or distress that a particular belief may directly provoke? Once this phenomenon is taken into account, then false beliefs may, in certain circumstances, become superior to true ones with respect to expected happiness. For instance, there is the example of the man whose wellbeing is best promoted by his convincing himself that his wife is not having an affair. Or we can imagine an archeologist whose professional opinions have no practical import, and whose evidence points in no definite direction, but who needs to think of himself as having made fascinating discoveries. For this reason, we might be tempted to back away from an unqualified endorsement of VT. We might feel the need to retreat to the claim that true beliefs 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 of retreat. For we have already seen (in section 3) that VT cannot be taken to offer overall appraisals of given juxtapositions of belief and fact, but merely to supply one dimension of evaluation—one contribution to their overall value. Therefore, just because the sheer pleasure or unpleasantness

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of believing certain things is sometimes so great that an incorrect belief is to be preferred on balance, that does not indicate any deficiency at all in VT. 6 These considerations might be deployed in support of the idea that the value of truth is solely self-centered and instrumental:—that the desirability of true beliefs consists in the fact that each person should expected them to help him, via deliberation, to get what he wants. But, on reflection, this view of the matter is inadequate. In the first place, there is widespread sentiment to the effect that certain items of knowledge are desirable regardless of any practical use to which someone 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 to justify our pursuit of truth in fields of inquiry such as ancient history, metaphysics, and esoteric areas of mathematics—fields that may not be expected to have any pragmatic payoff. And in the third place, it is surely no less important to pursue truth and avoid falsehood in normative domains, such as ethics and epistemology. Yet normative beliefs do not enter into our deliberations in the characteristic way that our empirical beliefs do. Instead, a person’s conviction that he ought to do a given thing directly inclines him to do it. Thus the truth of such beliefs does not facilitate the satisfaction of desires.6 For these reasons I think we should acknowledge that true belief has a non-instrumental value—a value for its own sake. In this respect, truth is a desideratum regardless of which proposition is in question—whereas it is instrumentally desirable only in certain cases. However, although the value of truth for its own sake is distinct from the instrumental value of true belief, there is nonetheless an important relationship between these qualities. It is presumably because most truths are useful in practical inference—and not merely to those individuals who discover those truths, but also to all the rest of us to whom they are communicated—that our society, simplifying for the sake of effectiveness, inculcates a general concern for truth for its own sake. Of course, this causal/explanatory conjecture does not purport to explain the fact that truth is valuable for its own sake, but merely our tendency to believe that there is such a fact. The normative fact itself may well be epistemologically and explanatorily fundamental. But at least one can understand what has brought about our commitment to its existence. So what kind of desirability is attributed by the unrestricted noninstrumental form of VT? What do we mean when we say that truth is ‘‘valuable for its own sake’’?

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A plausible answer is that we have in mind a moral value.—We think that someone who seeks knowledge and understanding for their own sake displays a moral virtue.7 And this answer is bolstered by the nature of the just-mentioned explanatory relationship between truth’s instrumental utility and our commitment to its having, in addition, a certain value for its own sake. For that very sort of relationship obtains in the case of values that are uncontroversially moral. For example, it is presumably because of the beneficial self-centered effects of living within a community in which most people are considerate of others and abhor the infliction of pain, that we respect 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 credible than complex ones), that one ought to accept instances of ‘p or not p’, that one ought not have obviously contradictory beliefs, that one should accept inferences from ‘‘p’’ to ‘‘It is true that p’’, that one should be led by certain visual experiences to believe that something red is present, etc. But although such norms of justification (warrant, entitlement, etc.) are distinct from VT, they are intuitively related to it. It is natural to think that we deploy them for the sake of VT—i.e. that our end is to have beliefs that are true, and that our means to that end is to follow certain rules for when beliefs of various kinds are to be acquired and retained. If so, one might expect it to be possible, indeed obligatory, to explain the correctness of these norms of justification, and to rationalize our commitment to them, by reference to this end. For, in general, a goal-oriented policy may be shown to be reasonable only by establishing that the goal is worthwhile and that the policy is likely to achieve it. So, in this particular case, our epistemic rules would need to be rationalized by establishing that true belief is desirable and that following these rules should be expected to result in true belief.9 But, as initially compelling as this view of the matter might be, it cannot be 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 presupposed in one leg of the argument in favor of it. For, unless we deploy that very rule, and take for granted that it is rational to deploy it, we cannot hope to make it plausible that reasoning inductively will, as it has in the past, have the desired consequence—namely, of being ‘truth-promoting’, i.e. of engendering beliefs that are more often true (and closer to the truth) than the beliefs 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 is not really needed. For our conclusion—the reasonability of inductive inference—appears to follow from the other premise all by itself:—namely, from the reasonability of believing that induction is truth-promoting (in the above sense). Given the equivalence of ‘‘p’’ and ‘‘The proposition that p is true’’, it is hard to see any significant space between the rationality of our following a certain rule for acquiring beliefs and the rationality of our thinking that the beliefs we would acquire in following it will tend to be true. In particular, if we are justified in thinking that our following the rule of induction, ‘Believe that nature is uniform’, will yield the truth, then—and quite independently of whether or not true belief is valued—we must be justified in following that rule.11 Thus we have something of a paradox. On the one hand it seems obvious that we deploy induction because we want our beliefs to be true and we think that this concern is likely to be accommodated by our following that rule. And it seems equally obvious that our justification for following it rests on the justification for those motivating states—the desire and the belief. But on the other hand we encounter two considerations—circularity and redundancy—which seem to show that our epistemic policy and our epistemic 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 our following induction. And it is plausible that we can solve that problem (or dissolve it) by coming to appreciate that a commitment might well be fully legitimate—indeed obligatory—despite the absence of any supporting considerations, any justifying argument for it. But such a treatment of the traditional problem still leaves us with the present paradox. For it remains counter-intuitive to suppose that the desirability of truth has nothing to do with the rationality of induction. It remains to explain what is wrong with the strong intuition that we follow induction for the sake of truth. Here is the resolution that I would suggest. We must take it that the rule of induction is non-instrumentally rational—i.e. that we ought to follow it regardless of what values we attach to the consequences of doing so, whether they be practical, moral, or epistemic. More specifically (and assuming, as argued above, that the rationality of an epistemic rule is equivalent to the rationality of regarding it as truth-promoting), we must acknowledge that this rule is best for reaching the truth—irrespective of whether our reaching the truth is, or is not, a good thing. But then, in light of that basic normative conviction, and given our independent appreciation that reaching the truth is a good thing, we are in a position to recognize that there are two additional kinds of reason to follow the rule of induction— namely the practical and moral benefits that should be expected to accrue from doing so.12

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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 tempted to think that this is shown by our refusing to believe any proposition that we identify as false. But it takes little reflection to see that such an answer won’t do. For there is no substantial difference between identifying a proposition as false and disbelieving it. So, refusing to believe what we take to be false is just refusing to believe what we disbelieve. But VT is not the principle of non-contradiction. Its point is not to tell us what else to believe or refrain from believing given that we have certain beliefs already. Its point, rather, is to 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 many norms of justification to which we subscribe in our effort to minimize false belief. Thus, a more plausible answer to the present manifestation question is that our desire for accuracy is revealed by our careful adherence to all norms of justification—norms (including the principle of non-contradiction, induction, etc.) that specify the level of confidence we ought to have in any hypothesis as a function of our current evidence. But here also there are problems—and these call for a couple of qualifications. In the first place, one might well wonder how it is possible for our adherence to (say) the rule of induction to manifest our concern for truth, given (as we argued in the previous section) that we are obliged, independently 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 commitment to that norm, and therefore manifest no acknowledgement at all of truth’s instrumental and ‘for-its-own-sake’ (moral?) value? This objection strikes me as correct; it shows that our concern for truth is not demonstrated merely in the following of rules of justification. Instead, what really displays that concern is a heightened scrupulousness in certain special circumstances. For example, if someone is even more careful than usual in applying the rules when the resulting beliefs are expected to have an important practical application, this will show that he is aware of the pragmatic value of truth. And if someone is especially careful when the resulting beliefs are merely theoretically important, this suggests his awareness of truth’s value for its own sake. In the second place, it might well be objected that individuals (or communities) that do not respect our principles of reason (including induction), and that deploy different ones, might nonetheless want their beliefs to be true.13 Again this objection seems right. Although the following of our own rules will indeed reveal a concern for truth (as long as this is done with selective scrupulousness, as we have just seen), that concern will be present to an equal degree, and will be equally well revealed, by those who follow rules 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 whatever is true? Again, it is absurd to think that our commitment to this ideal might be expressed by our first appreciating that something is true and then deciding, on that account, to believe it. Rather, we display our attachment to this ideal by our curiosity, by mounting investigations by bothering to acquire further evidence, by acting to increase the range and certainty of our beliefs. Thus, respect for the joint principle, VT—for the value of believing the whole truth and nothing but the truth—is expressed in the frequent and selectively scrupulous deployment of norms of justification.

9 So should we conclude that it is best to forget about truth and to focus exclusively on those norms of justification—not regarding them as oriented towards anything in particular? Is it simply a confusion (deriving, says Richard Rorty,15 from a pernicious ‘metaphysical realism’) to think of truth as the goal of inquiry, and to think of our norms of justification as specifying 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 for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a 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 unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations.16

But the line of thought that I have been developing here suggests that this is incorrect. In the first place, there is no particular difficulty in articulating the idea that truth is our target.—VT does a reasonable job of it. In the second place, we very often are able to recognize when this target has been hit. For whenever we can believe anything with certainty—and that surely happens 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 is merely implicit in our commitment to more immediately implementable epistemological procedures. Rather, since truth and justification—despite their intimate relations to one another—are quite different qualities, the desire for a belief to possess one of them must be separated from the desire for it to possess the other. More specifically, I have argued that our rules of justification possess a measure of rationality that is independent of the moral and instrumental values of truth, but which is supplemented by those values. Thus Rorty and Davidson are wrong to suggest that VT is unimportant, or somehow misleading. On the contrary, our endorsement of

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it has some distinctive and illuminating features:—it explains why our rules of justification are followed more carefully in some circumstances than in others; it explains why we are inclined to increase our evidence, it explains why we frown on lying and other forms of deceit; and it is itself explained by the practical benefits that can be expected to derive from true belief.17 10 And, despite Rorty’s suspicions, there was absolutely no hint of metaphysical realism (or of a correspondence notion of truth) in the lines of argument that I deployed to show these things. Nor do they give us any reason to think (with Michael Dummett, Crispin Wright, Bob Brandom, Hilary Putnam, and many others) that our concept of truth is constitutionally normative—i.e. that it can be defined or explained only in explicitly normative terms (e.g. as ‘what one ought to believe’).18 On the contrary, the principle VT is pretty obviously one of those cases (of the sort emphasized by deflationists) where the concept of truth 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 case e ¼ mc2 which cannot immediately be generalized in the usual way (that is, by replacing a singular term with a variable for universal quantification). So, in order to 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 case the 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 universally 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 truth provides a persuasive illustration of it. This is how our main topic—the value of having true beliefs—interacts with the other issues that may be read into my title: namely, ‘whether truth is 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 a normative concept, are vital if we are not to misunderstand the nature and import 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 philosophical 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) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Lying is wrong If I act wrongly, I will be distrusted and disliked Therefore, if I lie I will be distrusted and disliked I don’t want to be distrusted and disliked Therefore, I won’t lie

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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, ‘‘How Truth Governs Beliefs’’, Philosophical Review, 112:3, 2003, 447–82. And if this view is right, then VT might 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 truthoriented, 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 assuming, 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.

The Value of Truth 359 Similarly, if it is reasonable to believe that some rule of deductive inference, R*, preserves truth, then it is reasonable to believe the conditional is true ! 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

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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.