On the Aim of Belief

The phenomenon to be explained in this case is that the attribution of propositional content to a thought seems to yield normative consequences, on purely conceptual grounds. To say of a thought that it has the content that snow is white, for example, seems to imply that one ought to have the thought only if snow is white; and this normative consequence seems to follow immediately from the very concept of a thought’s possessing such a content. The normative force inherent in content attributions has struck some philosophers as evidence against their being analyzable in naturalistic terms or assimilable into the natural sciences.[3]