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Reviews a number of interconnected arguments concerned with the question whether the third person stance of the radical interpreter is conceptually basic in understanding language. These include Davidson’s argument for the necessity of possessing the concepts of belief, truth, and error for possessing propositional attitudes, the argument from the necessity of language for possessing the concept of error, and the argument from triangulation for the necessity of communication with others to fix what thoughts are about. Argues that the crucial arguments for the necessity of communication for the concept of error and the argument from triangulation fail, and that this undercuts the last hope for an a priori grounding for the assumption that radical interpretation is possible.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of the book by discussing, first, the nature of belief, different concepts of belief, and how all-or-nothing belief and numerical degrees of belief may relate to each other metaphysically, in particular, whether belief may reduce to degrees of belief. The chapter continues by explaining some of the norms for rational belief and degrees of belief that one can find in the existing literature. Finally, the aim and structure of the book are explained, and its chapters and appendices are summarized.

In this chapter we compare and contrast three conceptions of commonsense-psychological explanations of intentional actions: theory theory, simulation theory, and teleology. We elaborate, and make a case for, a teleological account, and argue that it can help to shed light on a number of central issues in current theory of mind research, including the nature of belief understanding and the dissociation between young children’s performance of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ false-belief tasks. Central to our argument are two distinctions. First, we distinguish between a more simple-minded and a more sophisticated conception of intentional actions: ‘pure teleology’ takes actions to be explained by the (typically non-psychological) facts that provide agents with reasons for action; ‘teleology-in-perspective’ makes sense of intentional actions in terms of the agent’s propositional attitudes (i.e. her perspective on her reasons). Second, we contrast two forms of action understanding: explicit and implicit. The dissociation between different measures of belief understanding, we argue, is best explained by the hypothesis that young children’s explicit understanding of intentional action is a matter of ‘pure teleology’, and that their success on ‘indirect’ tests reflects an implicit non-teleological theory of behaviour.

It is sometimes claimed that ‘belief aims at truth’ in a sense that explains the existence and nature of epistemic norms. Furthermore it is sometimes claimed that there is no analogous explanation of moral norms. In this chapter it is asked whether these claims represent an alternative means of rejecting the parity premise to the basic rationale—comparing epistemic judgements to normative or evaluative judgements within ‘institutions’—offered in chapters 3 and 5. It is argued that they do not. Three different readings of ‘belief aims at truth’ are identified. None are found to be plausible as an alternative route to rejection of the parity premise.

It has been argued that the epistemic error theory is incompatible with the ‘essentially normative’ nature of belief itself. Two versions of this objection to the epistemic error theory are presented. Neither is found to be plausible. The most plausible is based on the view that the concept of belief is essentially normative. It is claimed that this view is under-motivated and would, in any case, be unlikely to cause the problems for epistemic error theorists that it is sometimes claimed to. Some alternative objections to the epistemic error theory based on the nature of thought and deliberation are briefly considered.