Individual beliefs, intentions, doubts and desires owe their identities in part to their position in a large network of further attitudes: the character of a given belief depends on endless other beliefs; beliefs have the role they do because of their relations to desires and intentions and perceptions. These relations between the attitudes are essentially logical: the content of an attitude cannot be divorced from what it entails and what is entailed by it. This places a normative constraint on the correct attribution of attitudes: since an attitude is in part identified by its logical relations, the pattern of attitudes in an individual must exhibit a large degree of coherence. This does not mean that people may not be irrational. But the possibility of irrationality depends on a background of rationality; to imagine a totally irrational animal is to imagine an animal without thoughts.

We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither a visible target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the ‘pursuit of truth’ is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. […] But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think that they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.