On Truth in Politics by Michael Patrick Lynch

Author:Michael Patrick Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2025-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Correctness here is correctness qua attitude. Correctness of this sort isn’t the only norm operative on belief or assertion. Beliefs can also be epistemically correct by being justified, and assertions can be morally incorrect by being hurtful. This means that both norms are talking about correctness pro tanto: it is always incorrect, other things being equal, to assert or believe what is false but not always correct, all things considered. This hardly makes correctness qua attitude unusual. Keeping one’s promises is always pro tanto right, or right when considered in and of itself, but it is not always right all things considered. Sometimes a pro tanto value is outweighed by other values, and so it is when we are talking about the value of a belief qua belief having a true content or the value of not asserting what is false.8

The analogy with promising also suggests that when we talk about truth being the norm of belief, what we are saying is something more like: truth—that is, the truth of the content—is the right, not the good, of belief. The proposition’s being true makes it correct to have the attitude of belief toward that proposition; it provides, as it were, a definitive reason to believe it. As Shah has argued, this is because the belief that p is indirectly responsive to <p>’s truth. In the typical conscious, deliberative case, it is so by via being directly responsive to evidence for <p>.9 And this suggests, in turn, that truth is not just a norm of belief, it is the more basic norm qua belief (a more basic form of correctness qua attitude) than justification or warrant. It is correct to believe what is based on evidence because beliefs based on evidence are likely to be true, and thus the value of truth in this sense is more basic than the value of believing what is based on evidence.

For our purposes, NORM is important for two reasons. First, NORM helps to explain the difference between political beliefs and political commitments. A belief is always a belief that such and such is the case; one believes that one person won the election or that the other candidate lost. Commitments, in contrast, are directed toward propositional content—one is committed to the proposition that Biden won the election. Yet the bigger contrast between belief and commitment concerns the norms that operate on them. Like beliefs, commitments can be true or false—a belief is true when the proposition believed is true; a commitment is true when the proposition committed to is true. But commitments are not governed by NORM. What makes a belief a belief is that beliefs are in good standing qua belief just when they are true. Commitments, in contrast, are in good standing as commitments when one is ready to follow through on them—stand up for them, act on them in some way, and so on. If this line of reasoning is correct, then, contra deflationism, truth does explanatory work: it is needed to explain the distinction between belief and commitment.

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