Truth and the Aim of Belief

It is often said that ‘belief aims at truth’. This is presented sometimes as a truism, sometimes as capturing an essential and constitutive feature of belief and of inquiry. It is a truism that to believe something is to believe that it is true, and that in this sense beliefs are directed towards truth. It is also a truism that we aim at having true beliefs rather than false ones, and that in this sense truth is our goal when we form beliefs. But it is false if it is supposed to apply literally to beliefs rather than to believers: obviously beliefs do not ‘aim’ at anything by themselves, they do not contain little archers trying to hit the target of truth with their arrows. In this sense the claim must be metaphorical. It is more appropriate, if there is an aim at all, to ascribe it to persons and not to beliefs. But in this sense too it is false: sometimes we do not aim at having true beliefs, but at having pleasurable or comforting ones. Or perhaps what the claim says is that we should aim at having true beliefs. So what does it mean to say that beliefs aim at truth? And is it true? There are least three reasons to be interested in clarifying what, to use a generic term, the truth-directedness of belief1 means. The first is that it promises to tell us what belief is, as a mental state, and what distinguishes it from other kinds of mental states. In particular it is held that truth-directedness is the feature which differentiates belief as a cognitive mental state from motivational states, such as desires and wants. Indeed it is also said to be what prevents belief from being subject to the control of the will. The second reason is that the truth-directedness of belief seems to have something to do with another feature of belief, its ‘normative’ character. Beliefs are correct or incorrect, rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. And the fact that beliefs aim at truth, in the sense that truth is the fundamental dimension of assessment of beliefs seems to be related to this normative dimension. So this normative sense should shed light on the nature of our epistemic norms and principles. The third reason has to do with the nature of truth as a goal or as the main theoretical value. This too is often presented as a truism: truth is the ultimate