Some philosophers have argued that a standard of correctness is constitutive of the concept or the essence of belief. By this claim they mean, roughly, that a mental state is a belief partially in virtue of being correct if and only if its content is true. In this paper I provide a new argument in support of the constitutivity of the correctness standard for belief. I first argue that the standard expresses a conceptual necessity. Then I argue that, since conceptual necessities are such in virtue of some concept, the standard must also be necessary in virtue of some concept. Finally, I provide an argument by exclusion to the effect that the standard is necessary in virtue of the concept of belief.

With the claim that “belief aims at truth,” philosophers designate a specific feature of belief according to which believing a proposition carries with it some sort of commitment or teleological directedness toward the truth of the believed proposition. The hypothesis that beliefs involve an aim at truth has been used by philosophers to explain a number of features specific to this type of mental state, such as the impossibility of believing at will, the absurdity of asserting Moorean sentences (e.g., “I believe that it is raining, but it is not raining”), and the normative dimension of evidential considerations in the processes of belief-formation. Many consider aiming at truth constitutive of belief, individuating belief as that type of mental state and distinguishing beliefs from other mental attitudes. In the contemporary debate there is disagreement over how to interpret the claim that belief aims at truth. Different accounts of the aim have been suggested in normative, teleological, and minimalist terms. Some philosophers even deny that beliefs involve an aim in any interesting sense. A view that has recently gained popularity is that beliefs do not aim at mere truth, but at knowledge. Although the two issues may be related, questions about the aim of belief must be distinguished from questions concerning whether having true beliefs is valuable, and whether truth is the ultimate goal of inquiry.

What is knowledge? What should knowledge be like? Call an epistemological project that sets out to answer the first question 'descriptive' and a project that sets out to answer the second question 'normative'. If the answers to these two questions don't coincide -if what knowledge should be like differs from what knowledge is like -there is room for a third project we call 'revisionary'. A revisionary project starts by arguing that what knowledge should be differs from what knowledge is. It then proposes that we revise our account of knowledge accordingly. Our aim in this paper is to develop a methodology for revisionary projects in epistemology. Put roughly, the thought is that we start by looking at the various things that we expect knowledge to do for us. Once we have a list of the various things we expect knowledge to do for us we have a 'job description'; a list of tasks we need done, and that we expect knowledge to perform. With the job description in hand, we can ask what knowledge would have to be like in order to perform these tasks. Along the way we give some reasons for embarking on a revisionary project in epistemology, and we outline what the upshot might be.

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