Belief Normativism and the Motivation Problem

ABSTRACT Belief normativists claim that certain mental phenomena are best explained by holding that belief is constituted by a truth norm. These phenomena include deliberative transparency, according to which the deliberative question whether to believe that p is necessarily and immediately settled by answering the question whether p , and Moore's paradox, which concerns the impossibility or sheer absurdity of believing that p while judging that not‐ p . Critics of normativism have argued that the normative explanation of such phenomena fails because it presupposes an implausibly strong motivation through adherence to norms. I call this the motivation problem for the normative explanation of deliberative transparency and Moore's paradox. The motivation problem can be easily extended to the normative explanation of all psychological phenomena involving belief that inevitably happen or fail to happen. Therefore, this problem can greatly diminish the explanatory promise of belief normativism. In this paper, building on a specific version of belief normativism called normative dispositionalism, I provide a solution to the motivation problem. The upshot is that properly understood, belief normativism need not worry about the motivation problem in claiming to be the best explanation of deliberative transparency and Moore's paradox.