Introduction: Aiming at Truth

Abstract

"It is not a contingent fact that I cannot bring it about, just like that, that I believe something . . . Why is this? One reason is connected with the characteristic of beliefs that they aim at the truth." (Williams 1973: 148) So wrote Bernard Williams in ‘Deciding to Believe’, coining the dictum ‘beliefs aim at truth’. Since then ‘the aim of belief ’ has come to be the rubric for a family of philosophical issues concerning the nature of belief and its relationship to truth. Th is volume brings together ten new essays on these questions, questions that are not only central to philosophy of mind and epistemology, but also significant for philosophy of language, meta-ethics, and philosophy of action. In this introduction I first outline the major questions that are addressed by the authors, locating their contributions in the context of current debates. In the second section a synopsis of each of the chapters is provided. What does it mean to say that beliefs aim at truth? Williams’s explication in his article is brief, amounting to little more than two paragraphs (1973: 136–7). This is because belief aiming at truth is in Williams’s paper anexplanans, with the explanandum being the impossibility of believing at will. Before introducing aiming at truth as the first among several basic characteristics of belief, Williams warns ‘it will be necessary to mention things which may seem problematic or completely platitudinous’ (1973: 136). ‘Beliefs aim at truth’ proves to be both at the same time. Just about all authors can agree on its being a platitude, when understood insome sense or other, but that is as far as any universal agreement goes. There are important and fertile ongoing debates about how this idea is to be fleshed out, what explains it and what its implications are, including but going far beyond whether Williams is right to claim that it implies belief cannot be formed at will. We shall look at the most central among these in a moment. [...] This is a chapter from the book The Aim of Belief. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press © 2013