Is epistemology normative?

There are facts about what you ought to do. You ought to not torture small children to appease the tedium of a Sunday afternoon.

Are there facts about what you ought to believe?

I take the answer to this to be yes. You ought to believe that grass is green (because grass really is green). In general you have an obligation to believe things in proportion to the evidence that warrants them, or something similar.

Some people deny this. There are various reasons why you might do so, but the most prominent is this. Scepticism about normativity seems vaguely plausible for statements like "You ought to help other people if you can". You might think that the universe is devoid of value; that there is nothing that you ought to do. But such people almost always want to hang onto the claim that there are some things that you ought to believe. You ought to believe their nihilistic/scientistic worldview, for instance. Truth matters, even if people don't.

But I don't think such a position is tenable. The normativity surrounding belief is the very same normativity that surrounds action.

The best position in this area that I can foresee is something like: "truth is the proper aim of belief; you don't count as believing at all unless you are aiming to believe things that are true".

But, first, this is normative because it refers to the correct application of the concept "belief". Talking of correctness of concept application is to say that you ought to apply concepts in this way rather than that. This position lets in the normativity it tries to deny.

But, second, even if this problem is avoidable, the position still requires normativity in a second way. How is the nihilist going to justify the claim that you ought to believe anything at all? Not only might you withold belief in general, but you also might be a quasi-believer, where a quasi-believer is one who hold attitudes identical to beliefs in every respect except that they don't aim at truth. Even if the proper aim of belief is truth, we still need normativity to get to the claim that we ought to be believers and not quasi-believers.

Some actions are right. Some beliefs are right. You can't easily reject the former claim but accept the latter. That puts nihilism on very weak ground; there can be no reason to believe that it's true.