On Shackel’s Criticisms against the Normativity of Belief: a New Evidence for Truth and Knowledge Norms of Belief

On the basis of the normativity of belief thesis in epistemology, belief is a normative mental state. There are various versions of the thesis in the literature, two of the most well-known versions of which will be considered in this paper. The first version concerns the so-called “truth norm” which holds that “one ought to believe that p if p is true” (Shah 2003, 2009). On the basis of the other one, known as “knowledge norm”, “one ought to believe that p if one knows that p” (Williamson 2000, Brown 2010). A complete consideration of the theses is typically extraneous to the purpose of this short paper. Our focus in this paper concerns Shackel’s criticisms, according to which, there are self-referential sentences which make the norms contradictory. In this paper we will consider and defuse the criticisms.