The Human Person as Believer

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human.

—G. K. Chesterton¹

What does it mean to be a human person? One sliver of the answer to this immense question, suggested by this quotation of G. K. Chesterton, is that to be a human person is to be a believer.² If this is so, then a complete understanding of the human person must incorporate an understanding of belief. In turn, such an understanding must, if it is to be complete, account not only for the nature of belief, but also for the norms governing belief. That is, we must be able not only to say of some person S, that she believes that p, but also be able to say whether S is right to hold her belief that p. Thus, if Chesterton's suggestion is correct, to understand what it means to be a human person is also, in part, to understand the norms of belief.

But it is inadequate to consider the norms of belief in isolation from the subject of belief, namely the believing human person. For norms are always norms for some entity or other. To understand the norms of belief, then, requires reference to that entity for whom they are norms. In other words, while any understanding of the human person will require an understanding of the norms of belief, it is equally true that any understanding of the norms of belief will require an understanding of the human person.³ Now this goes against the grain of how one tradition of philosophy, the analytic tradition, has approached the questions of personhood and belief. The contemporary literature of this tradition has (by and large) separated the questions, attempting to give accounts of human personhood that prescind from accounts of the norms of belief, and attempting to give accounts of the norms of belief that prescind from accounts of human personhood. Appealing to a distinction made by Gabriel Marcel, we can say that such a method instantiates primary reflection—a reflection that "tends to dissolve the unity of experience"—about personhood and belief.⁴ While such reflection has a role to play in thought, what is missing is an attempt at secondary reflection on the unity of personhood and norms of belief. Such reflection is, as Marcel says, "recuperative," allowing us to reconquer the unity that is dissolved under primary reflection.⁵ Making sense of Chesterton's suggestion of the person as believer requires embarking upon a secondary reflection of the unity of person, belief, and the norms of belief. It is the beginnings of such a recuperative reflection that I set out to provide in what follows.

Belief and Truth

To focus the discussion, I propose to consider truth as a norm of belief, that is, that we ought to believe a proposition p, only if it is true that p.⁶ We must first consider, then, the relationship between belief and truth. The dominant analysis of this relation is that belief aims at truth.⁷ I will refer to this as the "aimedness thesis" about the relationship between belief and truth. The interpretations of this claim in the contemporary literature fall into two broad categories. On the one hand, there is the view that beliefs aim at truth in the sense that believers form beliefs as a means to satisfy their desire for truth (or, alternately, in the sense that sub-personal processes of belief-formation act as if their goal was to satisfy such a desire).⁸ This is known in the literature as the teleological account. On the other hand, there are those who interpret the aimedness thesis as a constitutive feature of belief. These thinkers claim that a "mental-state" just does not count as a belief unless it is a state to which one applies truth as a norm when one is considering whether to...