constitutive

That falsity is a defect in belief can be captured with a prohibitive norm holding that truth is the necessary condition for permissibility of belief. Furthermore, such a formulation avoids the difficulties encountered in earlier literature that offered prescriptive norms. The normativity of belief thesis is widely discussed in the literature. I criticise bi-conditional formulation of the norm of the normativity of belief thesis which holds that truth is both the necessary and sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation. I argue that the part which holds that truth is the sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation is redundant. The argument follows from clarifying the key ideas at stake in the normativity of belief thesis, namely, that false belief is a defect and that the normativity thesis is supposed to distinguish the concept of belief from other cognitive attitudes and the slogan that belief aims at truth.

It seems obvious that the mere acknowledgment of a norm cannot explain the agent’s undertaking what the norm prescribes; Steglich-Petersen makes the point as there is <em>no</em> strong relation between normative judgments and motivation from such judgments. To explain why someone does what a norm prescribes, according to Steglich-Petersen, we need to know not only that they acknowledge the norm, but that they are motivated to follow it. I will argue that this apparent truism is false in the case of constitutive norms. In a constitutive norm, the action specified in the correctness condition is constitutive of what is governed by the norm. I will focus on the constitutive norm of belief to argue that the mere acknowledgment of the norm suffices to explain the transparency of belief. That is to say, I explain why a subject who deliberates whether to believe that p thereby, in virtue of acknowledgment of the belief norm, deliberates whether p.