Belief’s Aim and its Justification

Clayton Littlejohn
cmlittlejohn@gmail.com

1 Introduction
All of the orthodox accounts of epistemic justification allow for the possibility
of false, justified beliefs. One likely reason for this is the fallibilist thought
that it is possible to know or justifiably believe p even if it is also possible
that someone could have had the same justification(s) for believing p and been
mistaken in so believing.1 The orthodox accounts do not just say that there can
be a reason for believing a proposition someone does not know is false, it asserts
something stronger than this. It says that false beliefs can be justifiably held
and the reasons had for having these beliefs sufficient even if the belief is false.
These orthodox views thus either say that there is no reason not to form false
beliefs when you have good reason to take the belief to be true or say that the
reasons there are not to form false beliefs do not defeat the justificatory force of
whatever other reasons you happen to have to believe. This is not an unnatural
view for a fallibilist to hold, but it does go beyond the fallibilist thought.
In the internalist camp, the evidentialists say that a belief is justified if it is
supported “on balance” by the evidence and some of the deontologists say that it
is justified if responsibly held.2 It does not follow from the fact that you believe
something false that you are anything less than perfectly responsible in how you
conduct your epistemic affairs. So, some deontologists are happy to say that
there can be false, justified beliefs. If you run a large and fair lottery with one
guaranteed winner where everyone holding a ticket believes their ticket to be a
loser, we do not single out the winner to say that her belief is not supported on
balance by the evidence simply because her belief is false. True or false, these
beliefs are all supported to the same degree by the evidence and all can be said
1 Another reason is that epistemologists often want to accomodate the intuitions that under-

write Cohen’s 1984 new-evil demon objection to reliabilism. There are ways of accommodating
those intuitions without conceding that subjects in the same non-factive mental states have
beliefs that are equally justified. See Bach 1985. I do not address this sort of objection here
because I think Bach’s response was adequate and because we are looking for reasons why
there is general agreement that there can be false, justified beliefs. Not everyone in the or-
thodox camp agrees with Cohen. Reliabilists, for example, think there can be false, justified
beliefs but are not always moved by Cohen’s objection.
2 See Conee and Feldman 2008 for a discussion of evidentialism. See Steup for a discussion

of deontologism. Like Bergmann 2006, I do not think it is obvious that deontologists need to
be internalists.

1
to be supported on balance. When the winner is announced, the new evidence
will defeat whatever justification the winner had for her mistaken belief, but
the evidentialist view says that the fact that her belief was mistaken does not
defeat the justification she had prior to that announcement. Facts that you
are non-culpably ignorant of are not thought to defeat justification and if a
false belief is well supported by the evidence on hand, the fact that the belief
is false is something you will be non-culpably ignorant of. So, our internalist
evidentialists are happy to say that there can be false, justified beliefs.
In the externalist camp, some say that beliefs are justified when the processes
that produce those beliefs are sufficiently reliable.3 A process can be fallible and
still be sufficiently reliable to justify belief. The fallible process that delivers
true and false outputs will, if sufficiently reliable, deliver equally well justified
outputs. Again, the falsity of the belief means that the belief does not amount
to knowledge, but it has nothing to do with its justificatory standing.
Speaking for the orthodoxy, Alston remarks:
If goodness from an epistemic point of view is what we are inter-
ested in, why shouldn’t we identify justification with truth, at least
extensionally? If the name of the game is the maximization of truth
and the minimization of falsity in our beliefs, then plain unvarnished
truth is hard to beat. This consideration, however, has not moved
epistemologists to identify justification with truth ... But why should
this be? It is obvious that a belief might be [deontically justified]
without being true ... but what reason is there for taking [evalua-
tive justification] to be independent of truth? I think the answer to
this has to be in terms of the “internalist” character of justification.
When we ask whether S is justified in believing ... we are ... ask-
ing a question from the standpoint of an aim at truth; but we are
not asking whether things are in fact as S believes. We are getting
at something more “internal” to S’s “perspective on the world” ...
With respect to [evaluative justification] the analogous point is that
although this is goodness vis-a-vis the aim of truth, it consists not
in the beliefs fitting the way the facts actually are, but something
more like the belief’s being true “so far as the subject can tell from
what is available to the subject”.4
Although most epistemologists side with Alston, some now deviate from the
orthodox view.5 I think it might be a good idea to revisit this question about
the connection between justification and truth to see if the orthodox view is the
right one. No one seriously defends the view that truth is sufficient for justified
belief, but it is an interesting question as to whether it might be necessary.
3 See Bach 1985 and Goldman 1986.
4 Alston 1989, pp. 98-99.
5 See Sutton 2005 and Rödl 2007. These authors both identify knowledge and justified belief

taking the truth-condition on knowledge to be redundant. Gettier cases show that their views
are mistaken, but it does not show that they are mistaken in thinking that the truth-condition
is redundant.

2
 In the passage just quoted, Alston offers two reasons for thinking that there
can be false, justified beliefs. First, he says that truth is not internal enough
to be one of the factors that determines if your beliefs are justified. Two things
should be said in response. First, it is controversial whether the conditions
that determine whether your beliefs are justified need to be internal to your
perspective. Alston himself defended a view that violates this constraint. Even
if Alston’s complaint is warranted, it surely does not explain why it is taken
to be uncontroversially true that truth is not required for justification. Second,
Alston says that your perspective on the world should be understood in terms
of what you know or justifiably believe.6 If you know p or justifiably believe
p, you know or justifiably believe p to be true. Given Alston’s gloss on what
it is for something to be internal to your perspective, facts that you justifiably
believe or know are internal to your perspective, so the fact that p is internal
to your perspective if you justifiably believe p.
The second reason Alston offers is a reason for the deontologists to think
there can be false, justified beliefs. He thinks it is obvious that on the deon-
tological view, there can be false, justified beliefs because he thinks that it is
obvious that you can blamelessly believe a false proposition and he thinks the
deontologists think of justification in terms of blamelessness.7 While it is obvi-
ous that you can blamelessly believe false propositions, it is not at all clear why
the deontologist should say that blamessly held beliefs are always justified. On
the deontological view, your beliefs are justified only if you manage to meet your
epistemic obligations. It seems prima facie plausible that you could fail to meet
your epistemic obligations and be excused for your failures. Once we recognize
that blamelessness does not make for permissibility, it is no longer obvious that
Alston is right about the implications of the deontological theory.
If we want to understand the commitments of the deontological view of justi-
fication, it would help to know what sort of epistemic obligations we are under.
Some say that you have sufficient warrant to assert whatever you justifiably
believe, and this implies that you are obligated not to believe what you do not
have sufficient warrant to assert.8 Arguably, you cannot have sufficient warrant
to assert what you do not know.9 If these points are correct, you cannot have
sufficient justification for believing false propositions because you can only have
sufficient justification to believe what you know. Since it is not obvious that
these two points are mistaken, perhaps we should not declare that it is obvious
6 Alston 1989, pp. 188. Some his remarks suggest that you might justifiably believe p
and p still might not be internal to your perspective because he thinks of your perspective as
consisting of your beliefs rather than what you believe. If, however, you think of normative
reasons and evidence as consisting of what is believed (i.e., propositions), you should probably
not say that truth is not internal enough but what is justifiably believed is internal enough to
have some bearing on justification.
7 Alston 1989, pp. 89.
8 See Kvanvig 2009 and Sutton 2005 for defenses of this view. It should be said that they

have very different conceptions of justification. Sutton identifies justified beliefs with items of
knowledge and Kvanvig accepts a more traditional conception of justification.
9 See Slote 1979, Sutton 2005, and Williamson 2000 for defenses of the knowledge account

of assertion.

3
that the orthodox view is the right one.
In this paper, I shall argue that if we think of justification in deontological
terms, we ought to think of justification in externalist terms. When people
say that justification is a deontological notion, it isn’t entirely clear what they
mean. So as to avoid any possible confusion, here is what I mean when I say that
justification is a deontological notion. First, you should never believe without
justification. Second, any justified belief is permissibly held. What does it take
to permissibly believe something? We might distinguish between your prima
facie epistemic duty and your epistemic duty proper. If it is prima facie wrong
to believe, it might be right to believe p if there is overriding reason to believe.
If, however, it is prima facie wrong to believe and there is no epistemic duty in
light of which there is a reason that requires believing p, it is wrong all things
considered to believe.
In the space of a single paper, it will be difficult to defend every assumption
in an argument against the orthodox view, so I shall aim for something more
modest. I think false beliefs cannot do what beliefs are supposed to do because
beliefs are supposed to provide us with reasons which we might then reason from
in trying to settle questions about what to do or believe. The reason that false
beliefs cannot do what beliefs are supposed to do is, in part, because beliefs are
supposed to provide us with reasons and, in part, because reasons for action and
for belief are facts. If these two points are both correct, the false, justified belief
is a myth. While I cannot provide a full defense of the claim that reasons for
action consist of facts or true propositions, I think I can show that the thesis is
not entirely implausible and so show that it is not the sort of thing that someone
should have to deny in order to defend the orthodox view. So, if I can show
that the justification of a belief depends, inter alia, upon whether that belief
can contribute a reason to practical deliberation, I can show that the orthodox
view of epistemic justification is at odds with a plausible view concerning the
ontology of normative reasons. If I can establish this conditional conclusion,
I will have shown that there is at least a prima facie case for deontologists to
accept the following thesis:
You cannot justifiably believe p unless p is true (Factivity).

2 The Argument
Let’s look at the argument for Factivity:
(P1) The belief that p is true can contribute a normative reason to
practical deliberation only if p is true.
(P2) There is no reason that requires you to include a belief in
practical deliberation if it passes off a non-reason as if it is a genuine
reason.10
10 There are reasons to lie to others and by lying to others, you can get them to reason

from considerations that do not constitute reasons. Might there be reasons to lie to yourself?

4
 (P3) There is, however, a reason to exclude a belief from practical
deliberation if that belief passes of a non-reason as if it is a genuine
reason.
(P4) Actions and attitudes cannot be justified if there is an unde-
feated reason not to have them or perform them.
(C1) Thus, only true beliefs can be justifiably included in practical
deliberation.
(P5) A belief is justified only if it can be justifiably included in some
process of practical deliberation.
(C2) Thus, a belief is justified only if it is true.

The gist of the argument is this. Normative reasons consist of facts or true
propositions. The justification of a belief depends, inter alia, upon whether it
can be counted on to contribute normative reasons to deliberation which you
can then reason from to a conclusion about what to do. So, the justification
of a belief depends upon whether it fits the facts. False beliefs do not, so they
cannot be justified.
There are three possible lines of response that we should consider. First,
someone might deny the first premise on the grounds that they deny that reasons
consist of facts or true propositions.11 While my aim is primarily to argue for
the conditional claim that all justified beliefs are true if reasons for action consist
of facts, I shall say something in support of (P1) below. Second, someone might
object to (P3) and (P5) on the grounds that the reasons that determine whether
something can properly figure in practical deliberation are reasons that have
nothing to do with a belief’s justificatory standing. Third, some will object to
the argument on the grounds that the reasons to exclude a belief from practical
deliberation can only bear on that belief’s justificatory standing when they are
accessible to the believer. I shall address these responses below.
There might be. If you could get yourself to believe a false proposition, you might be better
off for it. Even if it would be desirable for some reason to get yourself to reason from a false
belief, there is an interesting question as to whether it could be the right kind of reason to
bear on the justificatory standing of the belief in question. If it were a practical reason, that
reason might bear on whether to manipulate yourself into believing, but would be the wrong
kind of reason to justify the belief. Theoretical or epistemic reasons might be the right kind
of reason to bear on the normative standing of belief, but as I shall explain below, there seem
to be no theoretical or epistemic reasons that require you to reason from any belief at all for
the purposes of practical deliberation. As such, there seem to be no theoretical or epistemic
reasons that require you to reason from false beliefs for the purposes of practical deliberation.
11 In a recent paper, Turri 2009 defended the view that reasons consisted of beliefs rather

than what you believe or the facts that determine if your beliefs are correct. It is not clear
whether Turri intends to defend a view about the ontology of motivating or normative reasons.
If the latter, then he would deny (P1). Some authors insist that normative reasons are
propositional in form and say that they are sympathetic to the view that false propositions
can justify. See Fantl and McGrath 2009, pp. 100. They remain officially agnostic as to
whether falsehoods can justify.

5
3 Reasons and Facts
One of the crucial assumptions in the argument for Factivity is that reasons for
action consist of facts or true propositions, not propositional attitudes or the
contents of those attitudes regardless of whether or not they happen to be true.
Why think that this is the right ontology for reasons? Normative reasons for
action are, by their very nature, relational beasts. It is hard to imagine there
could be reasons that are not reasons for an agent and not reasons to perform
or refrain from performing an action. How does something become a reason for
an agent to do or avoid such and such a thing in such and such circumstances?
There might be many paths to reasonhood, but the most obvious way something
gets to be a reason is by counting in favor or counting against. While some
reasons might not count in favor of anything at all, most of the reasons I can
think of are reasons precisely because they count in favor of doing something or
count against the doing of it.12 From here, it is a short step to the rejection of
the rival view that treats normative reasons as psychological states of the agent.
Unless we all harbor systematic and massive confusions about what counts in
favor of an action, the things that count in favor of, say, lending a hand, are
facts having to do with who needs help and how they can be helped.
This is the implausible error argument. It would be implausible to charge
ordinary agents with making the mistake of thinking that facts count in favor
of an action when in fact what counts in favor of doing something are attitudes
towards the facts. While the implausible error argument might make quick work
of the view that identifies normative reasons with an agent’s attitudes, it only
shows that reasons are facts if it also shows that reasons cannot consist of false
propositions. Someone could say that false propositions constitute normative
reasons when such propositions are the contents of certain attitudes (e.g., beliefs
supported by the evidence or experiences indistinguishable from veridical expe-
riences). The argument assumes that reasons get to be reasons in the typical
case because they are favorers (i.e., things that count in favor). The thought
is that if there is a reason to, say, drink the stuff I just poured into the glass,
it is only because something counts in favor of drinking and the reason is that
which counts in favor or explains why drinking is favorable. Is it the proposition
that there is gin in the glass that counts in favor or is it the fact that there is
gin in the glass that counts in favor? Why would anyone think that the false
proposition justifies drinking or believing you should drink and not the fact?
Suppose someone rationally believes that the stuff in the glass is gin when in
reality it is petrol. If you are convinced that the belief that the stuff is gin can
be justified and this means that the drinking of the stuff is justified as well,
there must be reasons in light of which these actions are justified. The only
plausible candidates seem to be the false propositions the agent believes.13
12 See Dancy 2000 and Scanlon 1999. According to Star and Kearns, reasons should be

understood as pieces of evidence, evidence that you ought to do or believe. Even if this
view is the correct one, reasons still should be understood as facts or true propositions. For
arguments that only true propositions constitute evidence, see Williamson 2000.
13 See Fantl and McGrath 2009, pp. 100.

6
 To see why this view is problematic, consider a reason ascription all parties
can agree is correct when it concerns the “good case”, the case where the agent’s
attitudes are correct and there is gin for him to drink:
(1) That there is gin in the glass is a reason for him to drink.
Some writers think that the truth of this ascription does not depend upon
whether the proposition that there is gin in the glass is true. They say (1) could
have been true even if the agent had been in the “bad case”, the case where there
is no gin to be had but it seems just the same to the agent as it did in the good
case. The problem they face is that (1) seems to be true only if it is also true
that:
(2) The conditions for drinking are favorable because there is gin in
the glass.
Since “because” statements are factive, (1) is true only if there truly is gin in the
glass. If there is petrol mistakenly taken to be gin, the conditions for drinking
are not favorable, there is nothing that counts in favor of drinking, and whatever
reason there is to drink, it has nothing to do with the presence of gin. While
there are probably ways for something to become a reason besides counting in
favor, it seems unlikely that something can become a reason without standing
in some explanatory relation to the prospective courses of action the reason is
thought to be a reason for or a reason against. If reasons are reasons only if
they explain some normative feature, only truths can constitute reasons because
only truths can explain.14

4 Practical Reason and Epistemic Norms

One worry about the general argumentative strategy is that the argument for
Factivity trades on a confusion, treating practical reasons as reasons that have
epistemic significance. Epistemic justification depends exclusively on epistemic
reasons, so even if there are reasons to keep certain types of beliefs out of
practical deliberation, they tell us nothing about the justification of belief if
these are practical reasons.15
14 Those who want to resist this argument have two options. They can say that (1) can be

true even if (2) is false or they can deny that “because” is factive. One way to test entailments
is to consult semantic intuitions about certain conjunctions such as (1) and (∼2), and these
provide some defeasible evidence for the hypothesis that (1) is true only if (2) is true for such
conjunctions seem to be contradictory. Of course, this evidence is defeasible and someone
can say that they want to explain why it sounds bad to assert (1) while denying (2) in terms
of something other than entailment (e.g., in terms of pragmatic implicature). The problem
here is that you can reinforce pragmatically imparted information but it seems you cannot
reinforce entailments without generating redundant conjunctions that seem infelicitous. This
is precisely what you find when you try to reinforce (1) with (2). Similar tests provide
confirmation for the hypothesis that “because” is factive. You cannot say without apparent
contradiction, “The conditions are favorable because there is gin in the glass, but there is no
gin in the glass”. You cannot reinforce (2) by adding, “Not only that, there is gin in the glass”.
I owe these points to Sadock 1974 and Stanley 2008.
15 An anonymous referee raised this concern.

7
 In response to this objection, let me say two things. First, we should allow
that it is possible for a reason to be both an epistemic and a practical reason and
so we cannot say that if some reason is a practical reason it is for that reason not
one of epistemic significance. There is nothing wrong with saying, for example,
that I ought to drink the stuff in the glass for the very same reason she has to
believe I ought to drink the stuff in the glass (i.e., that it is gin). If my doctor
prescribed gin or I simply happen to like to drink gin, that the stuff is gin can do
double duty as something that counts in favor of my drinking and her believing.
Second, it does seem that when we evaluate an action and the reasoning that
led the agent to act, we evaluate the action in light of practical norms and the
reasons there are to conform to them and we evaluate the reasoning that led
to the action (in part) by evaluating the epistemic standing of the beliefs that
figured in deliberation.
To see this, suppose someone reasoned as follows:
(1) [Believed] This ticket is a loser.
(2) [Believed] If I keep it, I will get nothing.
(3) [Believed] If I sell the ticket, I will get a penny.
(C) [Believed] I ought to sell the ticket.16
Suppose the agent sells the ticket and this maximizes both expected and actual
utility. While there seems to be nothing wrong with the action, there seems
to be something wrong with the reasoning that led the agent to judge that she
should act this way. The problem with the reasoning seems to be that the agent
reasoned from something she should have known that she did not know (i.e.,
that the ticket was a loser). Insofar as it seems we are critical of the reasoning
not on the grounds that we think there was something wrong with the action
that it led to but simply because of the epistemic credentials of the belief that
figured in reasoning, it does seem prima facie plausible that we evaluate practical
reasoning as if there are epistemic norms that govern it just in the way that we
evaluate theoretical reasoning as if there are epistemic norms that govern it.
Hawthorne said that the bit of reasoning just sketched above is practical
reasoning and that in treating something as a reason for action, the action we
perform can be evaluated in light of the reasons that bear on whether to act
and the reasoning that led to it can be evaluated in terms of the reasons that
bear on whether to treat certain considerations as if they were reasons. I do
have one quibble about the example, and that is that it is not clear to me that
this reasoning is practical reasoning. It seems to be theoretical reasoning with a
practical subject matter because the reasoning terminates with a belief, albeit a
belief about what should be done.17 No matter. Many of us engage in theoretical
reasoning to settle questions about what to believe as a way of settling questions
about what to do and it is tempting to think that the theoretical reasoning that
16 Hawthorne 2004, pp. 30.
17 Assuming Dancy ms. is right that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action rather
than, say, a belief with a practical subject matter or an intention.

8
led our agent to believe that she ought to sell the ticket was just part of what was
involved in the reasoning that led her to sell the ticket. If this is right, it is worth
asking how the standards that determine when it is proper to treat something
as a reason for the purposes of theoretical reason relate to the standards that
determine when it is proper to treat something as a reason for the purposes of
practical reason.
Some say that knowledge is the norm of practical reason:
When your choice is p-dependent, it is epistemically proper for you
to treat p as a reason for some p-dependent choice iff you know
p (KPR).18

On this view, there is an epistemic obligation to refrain from treating p as a

reason in reasoning about what to do even if you know that the thing to do will
depend upon whether p is true. What is it to treat p as a reason? Treating p as
a reason involves believing p and including that belief in a certain deliberative
process. Suppose you know that you ought to give Audrey the drink if it is a
gin and tonic, you know ought not give her the drink if it is petrol and tonic,
and you believe that the stuff is a gin and tonic. Suppose, however, that it is
a “Bernie” (i.e., a petrol and tonic). According to KPR, you ought not reason
from the premise that the stuff is gin if the purpose of that reasoning is to settle
a question about what to do with the glass of stuff or what to do in order to
get her the glass of stuff. Suppose, however, that the reasoning is reasoning to
settle a question about whether it is true that you ought to give her the stuff.
Or, suppose that you know that you promised to get her a gin and tonic and
are reasoning about whether it is true that you would fulfill your promise if you
gave her the stuff. That is, suppose that you are treating it is a reason in the
course of theoretical reasoning, reasoning to a belief. It seems strange to think
that it would be proper for you to treat something as a reason for forming one of
these beliefs when it is improper for you to treat this as a reason for action if all
you are doing is bringing practical reason to a close by acting on your properly
formed beliefs about what you ought to do. So, it is tempting to say that the
standards governing practical and theoretical reason display a sort of harmony:
It is epistemically proper for you to treat p as a reason for some
p-dependent choice if it is proper for you to treat p as a reason
for believing that something is the thing to do given your options
(Harmony).
At the party, you promise Audrey a gin and tonic and you know that the gin
supplies are getting low. Hawthorne intercepts you on the way to the bar to
check to see if everything is going okay. You assure him that it is. You say,
“The gin supplies are getting low and I promised Audrey that I would get her
a gin and tonic. So, I should give one of these”, pointing to a glass that you
and Hawthorne both know you have excellent evidence to believe is a gin and
18 Hawthorne and Stanley 2008, pp. 578. Your choice is p-dependent iff the option most

preferable conditional on p is not the option most preferable conditional on ∼p.

9
tonic. Hawthorne assures you that there is nothing wrong with your views or
your reasons for your views. You grab the drink believing on exceptionally good
evidence that it is a gin and tonic, you act on the belief that you ought to give
it to Audrey, and you nearly kill her because you served her a Bernie (i.e., a
petrol and tonic with limes). Stanley confronts you and says, “Look, if you did
not know that the stuff was gin, you should not have acted on the belief that it
was gin.” You know that what happened was horrible, but you think that you
did nothing wrong and did not treat anything as a reason for action that you
should not have. You call for help from Hawthorne. He tells you that he cannot
help you. Sure, he says, when it came to treating what you did as reasons for
belief, everything was fine, but he never said that it would be proper to treat
those things as reasons to act on the belief that you ought to act that way.
That, he says, crossed a line. Stanley agrees. They have agreed not to disagree
and to confine their criticism to the appropriate spheres. Frustrated, you think
there is just no pleasing these sorts of people. How were you supposed to treat
the very same thing as a reason for belief and not for action when the belief
rationalized the action?
In the story, Hawthorne and Stanley are completely unreasonable because
they talk and reason as if they reject Harmony. They evaluate you in such a
way that treating p as a reason for believing you must φ is perfectly proper or
permissible, epistemically, but then it is epistemically impermissible to treat p as
a reason for φ-ing. In the story, you are far from perfect, but you can complain
about the kinds of complaints that are being leveled against you by those who
think there is nothing wrong with the way you reason to your beliefs. In reality,
are they reasonable? It is tough to say because it is hard to say whether they
accept Harmony. On its face, it seems that KPR and Harmony commit them
to the Factivity because it seems that KPR and Harmony commit them to the
view that you cannot justifiably believe p unless you know p. This is because it
seems that if it is epistemically impermissible to treat p as a reason for forming
beliefs where this includes beliefs in propositions you know are true if p, you
cannot justifiably believe p. (Just imagine how unreasonable they would seem
if they said that while there is nothing wrong with believing that the stuff was
not gin, you ought not infer that it is not non-gin because there was nothing
that entailed that that you are permitted to treat as a reason for forming that
belief.) The evidence I have collected indicates that Hawthorne and Stanley
are indeed reasonable people, so the evidence suggests that they would accept
Harmony and would likely agree that justified belief requires knowledge because
justified belief is all you need to properly treat something as a reason for action.
Those who want to block the argument for Factivity on the grounds that
they reject (P3) and (P5) should either say that epistemic norms do not govern
practical reasoning, reject Harmony and the idea that the norms that determine
whether it is proper to treat something as a reason will wait to see whether the
belief provides reasons for reasoning to conclusions about what to do or only
what to believe, or reject views on which the epistemic norms that govern practi-
cal reasoning enjoin us not to treat false propositions as reasons for action. The
problem with the first option is that it denies what seems intuitively obvious,

10
which is that even if everything is fine from the practical point of view with an
action and the practical reasoning that preceded it, we can find fault with the
reasoning on the grounds that the beliefs that figured in reasoning were not up
to snuff, epistemically. The problem with the second is that only unreasonable
people evaluate reasoning in ways that indicate that they reject Harmony.
What of the third option? Remember that we are assuming that what we
treat as a reason for action can only be a reason if it is a fact. So, anyone
who wishes to exercise the third option has to concede that reasons are facts
while insisting that the norms that govern what we can properly treat as a
reason do not tell us that the right to treat something as a reason depends
upon whether the thing we treat as a reason is a reason. Now, if there were no
reason not to treat non-reasons as if they were reasons, doing so would be all the
reason you needed to do so properly. But, then it is not at all clear why there
would be any sort of norm that governed this sort of thing. All that should
matter is whether your choices are for the best, not whether the reasoning that
led to them involved treating things as reasons only when it is proper to do
so. If, however, there is some reason not to treat non-reasons as reasons, it
is permissible to treat non-reasons as reasons only in light of further reasons
that require treating the non-reasons as reasons and are at least as strong as
the reasons against. This is an implausible position for the simple reason that
the norms of theoretical reason would not be the sorts of things that require
you to treat things as reasons for practical reasoning. If it is not epistemically
wrong not to try to reason to a conclusion about what to do, why would it be
epistemically wrong not to treat things as reasons for the purposes of this kind
of deliberation?
For the record, the view that Hawthorne and Stanley defend concerning
the epistemic norms that govern practical reason delivers the wrong verdict in
some cases. The most striking problem that arises for the knowledge account of
justified belief is that it classifies beliefs in cases everyone thought were genuine
Gettier cases as cases of unjustified belief or as cases of knowledge. If Gettier
cases are possible, it should be possible to justifiably believe something without
having knowledge. If this is right and we accept Harmony, we should revise KPR
accordingly. We do not need to know p to properly treat p as a reason because
if your belief is Gettiered, it does not seem to follow that it is impermissible
to treat p as a reason for action. However, it does seem right to say that you
ought not treat p as a reason if it is not a reason and not reasonable to take it
to be a reason. Given that reasons consist of facts, we should not treat p as a
reason unless p and p is reasonably believed. So, given Harmony, you cannot
justifiably believe p unless p is true and reasonably taken to be true. This is
enough to establish that Factivity is true.

5 Reasons and Justification

Suppose we think of justification in deontological terms. On this view, your
belief is justified if you violate none of your epistemic obligations in holding it

11
unless there is overriding (epistemic) reason that requires you to do so. I have
argued that there is a prima facie duty not to believe p if you ought to exclude
that belief from practical deliberation concerning a p-dependent choice. If part
of what is required to meet this obligation is to exclude from deliberation beliefs
that pass off non-reasons as if they were reasons, there is a prima facie epistemic
duty not to believe false propositions if reasons are facts. The argument rests
on some assumptions about justification and reasons that are relatively uncon-
troversial. For example, the argument assumes that to justify an action or belief
in light of reasons against acting or believing, you have to find equally strong
reasons that require acting or believing. Such reasons would, presumably, make
it prima facie wrong not to act or believe. While we ought to distinguish be-
tween prima facie epistemic duty and all things considered epistemic duty, there
seems to be no plausible candidates for reasons that would require having beliefs
that ought to be excluded from deliberation on purely epistemic grounds, so if
the argument for the prima facie duty not to believe falsehoods is sound, the
argument for Factivity is complete.
We should consider one last line of resistance. The reasons that (allegedly)
oblige us not to believe falsehoods are reasons that rational agents can be non-
culpably ignorant of. If reasons must be accessible or can only bear on whether
to act or believe if accessible, someone could concede that there are “out there”
reasons of the sort I have suggested while still insisting that they have nothing
to do with the justification of belief.
Such a view will have a difficult time accounting for our intuitions in a
theoretically satisfying way. Consider cases of imperfect self-defense.19 In such
cases, a subject reasonably, but mistakenly, believes herself to be in a situation
in which she could justly use violence to defend herself. To make this somewhat
concrete, we imagine a case in which Plum reasonably, but mistakenly, identifies
Mustard as a mugger when in fact he is a jogger. Plum sprays Mustard with
mace. She acted on the (non-culpably) mistaken belief that doing so is necessary
for her self-defense. Unless we say that the fact that Mustard was harmless was
not only a reason for her to refrain from making him but also a reason that
bore on whether her particular actions were right or wrong, it is most unclear
how we could classify such a case as excusable wrongdoing. The excuse depends
crucially upon her non-culpable ignorance. It depends upon whether she could
have reasonably thought that she would avoid engaging in wrongdoing. That
there is wrongdoing to excuse requires us to recognize that there is a reason to
which she does not have the right sort of access. That we ought to classify this
as wrongdoing is supported by the following observations. First, Plum has lost
the right to non-interference but would not have lost it had the man been a
mugger rather than a jogger. Second, in the wake of her action, Plum ought to
apologize and seek forgiveness. This would not be the case if Mustard had been
a mugger rather than a jogger. This would not be the case if this fact were not
itself a reason that went towards determining whether her action was wrongful.
Third, in the wake of her action if she were to help Mustard, that action would
19 The expression is taken from Moore 1997 as is the jogger-mistaken-for-a-mugger example.

12
not be merely beneficent. If she were to help him, that action would be a way of
discharging a duty of reparation. Such duties arise in the wake of wrongdoing.
Had Plum done no wrong, her action would be merely beneficent as she would
have no more responsibility for taking care of Mustard’s injuries than you or I
would. The upshot is this. To classify cases of imperfect self-defense as cases
of excusable wrongdoing, a reason must be able to constitute a wrong that
threatens the justificatory status of an action even if the subject is unaware of
it. It might be that only reasons of which the subject is aware can go towards
justifying her conduct, but that is a different matter.
The example involves reasons that bear on whether to act, not whether to
believe. Still, it is suggestive. The intuitions that support Harmony suggest that
someone is unreasonable if they say that someone ought not have treated p as a
reason to do something (e.g., giving Audrey the drink) when they concede that
it was perfectly proper to have treated p as a reason for believing something
that would rationalize the action (e.g., believing that he must give Audrey
the drink). Similar intuitions suggest that only an unreasonable person would
say that there was nothing wrong with believing that you must give Audrey
the drink only then to say that you ought not have given her that drink. So,
perhaps anyone who accepts Harmony and thinks of reasons as facts ought to
think that the facts that bear on whether to act bear on whether to believe that
you ought to act.
If this much can be established, then we can probably extend the argument
to include a greater range of beliefs. Back at the cocktail party, you reasoned to
the belief that you ought to give Audrey the stuff from a number of premises.
You thought that you promised to give her gin, that the stuff was gin, that you
could only give her gin if you gave her one of the few remaining glasses, and that
there was no reason not to give her gin. Suppose you ought not believe that
you ought to give her the glass. If so, that belief is not justified. Intuitively, if
you justifiably believe p knowing that q would be true if p, you have sufficient
justification to believe q if you have sufficient justification to believe p. Given
that you lack sufficient justification for believing the conclusion, you must not
have had sufficient justification for believing all of the premises. You knew each
of the premises apart from the premise that stated that the stuff in the glass
was gin. That seems like a weak link. Perhaps that is the belief that is not
justifiably held. Someone could say that the belief is only not justifiably held
because you tried to reason from it to a further belief about what to do that is
false, but that seems like a desperate way to try to avoid classifying the mistaken
belief as unjustified. Why would the epistemic norms care about whether that
belief led you to a false conclusion about what ought to be done if the epistemic
standards do not generally classify the false belief as unjustified?
There is a more theoretical approach to this, which is to say that anyone
who wants to accommodate intuitions about the cases of imperfect self-defense
will say that normative reasons do not have to be accessible to do their work.
Reasons not to act seem like they can do their work even if you do not take notice
of them. While this does not entail that the same is true for the reasons that
bear on whether to believe, it does entail that if it is not true for reasons that

13
bear on whether to believe, there is a surprising difference between theoretical
and practical reasons. Could it be a brute fact that these reasons differ in this
way, that reasons that bear on whether to believe cannot do their work when we
are non-culpably ignorant of them but reasons that bear on whether to act can?
Surely there must be an explanation.20 The most salient difference between the
reasons that bear on whether to believe and the reasons that bear on whether
to act is that one kind of reason is concerned with our relation to the true and
the other with our relation to the good. There is nothing there that would
explain the alleged difference between the reasons that bear on whether to act
or whether to believe, and that seems to be the only place we could look to find
the explanation. So, if it not a brute fact that they differ, perhaps it is because
it is not a fact that they differ. Perhaps they are the same in this respect. Both
do an equally good job doing their jobs whether accessible to us or not. Given
some reason to think practical reasons not to act can make an action wrongful
even if we are non-culpably ignorant of them, we have some reason to think the
same is true for epistemic reasons. So, if you want to resist the argument of
this paper, you probably should not agree that there is a prima facie epistemic
duty that requires you not to believe falsehoods but then say that there is no
interesting sort of reason not to. And, if there are good reasons not to believe
falsehoods, what could then justify believing them?

6 Conclusion
In the opening, I suggested that one of the reasons people reject Factivity is that
they embrace the sort of fallibilist view that says that it is possible to justifiably
believe when your reasons for believing do not entail that your belief is true. It
is possible for two subjects to have the very same justifications or reasons for
believing p to have beliefs that differ in truth-value and for one of these subjects
to justifiably believe p. Suppose both subjects do believe p and believe for the
same reasons. Should we say on these grounds that both subjects justifiably
believe p? I think not. It is possible for two subjects to have the very same
reasons for acting and for only one subject to act permissibly. The difference
between them might be due to the fact that there were different reasons for them
not to act, and the reasons that sufficed in one case did not suffice in the other.
So, to argue from the fallibilist thought to the denial of Factivity, we would have
to assume that the justifications our subjects had would be sufficient whether
or not the belief in question were true. Above, I argued that there are reasons
not to believe that apply to subjects that harbor false beliefs that do not apply
to subjects who harbor true beliefs. So, there is at least a gap in the argument
from fallibilism to Factivity. While there are various ways of trying to close
that gap, I have also argued that the reasons not to believe false propositions
are not defeated by whatever reasons someone might have to believe and that
the reason we have not to believe falsehoods needs to be defeated if we are to
20 As Gibbons 2010, pp. 335 notes, the similarities between practical and theoretical reasons

do not call for explanation because in both cases we are dealing with reasons.

14
justifiably believe what we do. Assuming that justification is a deontological
notion, the argument was supposed to show that we cannot meet all of our
epistemic obligations when we believe falsehoods even if we succeed in meeting
most of them. Among our epistemic obligations is the obligation to exclude
beliefs from deliberation that do not contribute genuine reasons. If reasons
consist of facts or true propositions, we are epistemically obliged to exclude
false beliefs from deliberation. If the epistemic reasons that apply to a belief
and a believer do so whether they happen to rely on that belief for the purposes
of practical reasoning or only for the purpose representing how the world is, the
argument extends from those beliefs that provide us the premises from which
we reason to all beliefs which purport to be bits of actionable intelligence.
The argument, if sound, shows that if reasons are facts, justification as-
criptions are factive. One worry is that the argument just sketched calls into
question both parts of the orthodox view.21 The orthodox view denies that
justification requires truth and denies that truth is enough to justify a belief. If
we assimilate the justified belief to the belief that can properly figure in delib-
eration, will we collapse the distinction between the justified belief and the true
belief? The argument offered was supposed to show that you cannot live up to
your epistemic obligations if your beliefs cannot be counted on for the purposes
of practical deliberation. One way to show that there can be true, unjustified
beliefs is to show that there are true beliefs that cannot be counted on for the
purposes of practical deliberation. Another is to identify additional epistemic
obligations to show that there are additional conditions beyond truth that a
belief must have in order to be justified.
Imagine you were in the business of providing intelligence, considerations
that others could use for the purposes of deliberating about what to do. You
sold little slips of paper you called “premises” to your customers with the promise
that each premise was for the purposes of their practical deliberation and each
premise was true. If you sold someone a bit of intelligence that was false and
things turned out badly for your customer, your customer might reasonably
complain. Apologies and explanations would be in order, possibly compensa-
tion or reparation. Yes, this is controversial, but this is territory we have already
covered. Now the question is whether anyone could reasonably complain that
you failed to do what you ought to do in your station if the intelligence provided
always happened to be true. In order to cut costs, you fire everyone working
in research and development. You replaced them with monkeys who bang on
typewriters and a handful of copy-editors to screen the results for grammati-
cality. If someone discovered that this is where the premises came from, they
could reasonably resent you for having sold them what you did and you cannot
address the complaint that you failed to do what you ought to do by pointing
out that the premises you happened to sell to them were true. The way that
the process showed insufficient concern for the truth seems to be enough on its
own to have made it wrong to provide the premise even if by some fluke that
premise happened to be true. Perhaps the relation between you and yourself is
21 This worry was raised by an anonymous referee.

15
different from the relation between you and your customer. It is easy to resent
others for their negligence, harder to resent yourself. The grounds for resent-
ment, however, which made the resentment reasonable and made the customer’s
complaints correct seem to be just the sort of thing that should convince you
that there is more to a good premise than truth. So, if you like to assimilate the
justified belief and the premise you can count on, you surely should not identify
the justified belief with the true belief.

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