Anti-Normativism Evaluated

Philosophical Approaches to Language and Communication (eds. P. Stalmaszczyk & M. Hilton), 2022

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to contribute to the debate about the normativity of meaning not by means of providing and defending new arguments, but by analysing and reflecting on some of the presuppositions and seemingly irresolvable dialectical points of disagreement. Second, it seeks to achieve the first aim by critically engaging with some of the objections raised against semantic normativity by anti-normativists like Kathrin Glüer, Anandi Hattiangadi and Åsa Wikforss as well as discussing some of the ideas defended by normativists like Hans-Johann Glock, Severin Schroeder and Daniel Whiting. The upshot of the discussion is meant to provide a clearer representation of some of the arguments and concepts that guide the debate, though the proposed analysis, if correct, should also add some support for the normativist’s case.

Mind, 2009

normativity of belief ultimately fail. CD normativism, in turn, falls prey to the 'dilemma of regress and idleness': the appeal to rules either leads to some form of regress of rules, or the notion of rule following is reduced to an idle label. We conclude by suggesting that our arguments do not support naturalism: It is a mistake to assume that normativism and naturalism are our only options. Not long ago, 'meaning is normative' was the battle cry of the day. This was largely the result of the enthusiastic reception of Saul Kripke's book on Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. There, Kripke argued that meaning is normative in the sense that it essentially involves certain 'oughts'. A candidate for what constitutes the state of my meaning something by a sign, Kripke argued, has to be such that "whatever in fact I (am disposed to) do, there is a unique thing that I should do." 1 This claim struck many people not only as true but also as teaching us something profoundly important about the nature of linguistic meaning. It was suggested that theories of meaning that do not allow for any genuine

1999

This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau’s attempt to locate norms of judgement ‘outside’ content, grounded in an individual’s desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a ‘world that conceives nature as the realm of law’. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms ‘inside’ content will not be forthcoming—at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states.

Dialogue, 2011

Normativity, one of the central themes of philosophy in the last decade, 1 represents a vast and fertile terrain of questions. The normative domain is frequently conceived in opposition to the descriptive, so that saying what ought to be or ought to be done is considered fundamentally different from saying what is. Ought is thus often considered the paradigmatic normative concept. 2 However, in general, it is admitted that the concepts of rule, value and virtue, but also reason, whether about the reason to act or to think, are normative in kind. Among these concepts, it is common to distinguish between, on the one hand, evaluative concepts (such as good and bad, but also admirable and contemptible, just and unjust, benevolent and malevolent, etc.) and, on the other, deontic concepts (such as obligatory, permissible and forbidden). 3 We should

2007

‘Elusive Normativity’ deals with the nature of normativity in general and the normativity and the nature of law in particular. The first part of the paper contains a review of Stefano Bertea’s book The Normative Claim of Law. In this book Bertea aims to do two things. First he defends the view that the law makes a normative claim on us. And second he aims to found this normative claim. The main conclusion about this book is that Bertea either made it too hard on himself by arguing what would be obvious given one interpretation of his starting point, or made it too easy by devoting little attention to arguing one of his assumptions given another interpretation of his starting point. One of the main assumptions of Bertea’s book is that the normativity which the law according to Bertea claims to have cannot be reduced to matters of fact, such as the psychology of the law users. The second part of this paper is mainly devoted to a scrutiny of this assumption. Whether, and in what manner, such a ‘reduction’ is possible are the questions which guide this second part. The conclusion is that such a reduction is possible if one takes a constructivist approach to normative justification.

Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2023

Ruth Chang argues against three dogmas of normativity. Her argument, as least about the first two, is defensible, and defensible on a naturalistic account of normativity of a distinct kind from her own account.

Philosophical Explorations

Most people who have discussed the question whether attributions of intentional attitudes or contents are normative have assumed that this question boils down to the question whether such judgements have normative force "by themselves", or as it is often put, to the question whether they are "intrinsically" or "non-hypothetically" normative. I take issue with this and argue that a judgement can be normative, in the sense of essentially involving a normative concept, even if its normative force is "extrinsic", and even if it lacks normative force altogether. The result is that most attempts to show that attributions of attitudes or contents lack normative force, even if successful, could not count as refutations of intentional normativism.

Jurisprudence, 2021

In this paper, I present a possible solution to the puzzle unveiled by Kornblith (2012) about the sources and the possibility of knowledge of epistemic norms. The puzzle is: if such norms cannot be discovered solely by reflection (“looking inwards”, thinking about first-order thoughts), and if there are correct ways of thinking and inferring, then such norms can only be discovered by investigating the world (“looking outwards”) —a counterintuitive conclusion. To avoid skepticism about normativity, I argue that we create normative correctness and discover normative demands by investigating the world and reflecting about our epistemic practices. This is done by an exposition of the method known as reflective equilibrium, which is defended against Kornblith’s thesis that the appeal to reflective equilibrium is doomed to failure because it implies reflection. Keywords: Reflection; normativity; paradox; reflective equilibrium.

O ne of the most heated debates in contemporary analytical philosophy pertains to the problem of the normativity of meaning. It revolves around the question of what is the status of the criteria for the application of words: are they descriptive or prescriptive? In this essay, I would like to shed some light on this issue. I begin by outlining the normativity of meaning debate and identifying its key problems, conclusions and controversial theses. Then, I present two views of language: the formal and the embedded, and show that they imply different conceptions of the normativity of language. As a result, I offer my own conception of the normativity of meaning, and argue that contemporary solutions to the problem are essentially flawed.

The Normative and the Natural, 2016

Unfortunately, many philosophers who embrace naturalist themes take naturalism to be incompatible with a robust account of the normative; some even think that if naturalism is true, there can be no such thing as normativity, as normativity cannot be made to fit within a scientific view of the world. In chapter two we lay the foundation for a new view of normativity that is consistent, even interwoven, with a scientific world-view. The normative is an ineliminable part of our lives—our lives are governed by moral oughts, by oughts of prudence. Even science itself is governed by various oughts, regarding what questions are important, what scientific methods are sound (or unsound), and so on. Even to say that science offers the best account of how the world is, is to make a normative claim. The challenge the lies before us is to provide an account of the normative that is robust and truth-apt, but consistent with our commitment to naturalism.

2020

This paper offers critical metaethical groundwork for Normativity Assessment (NA). We present NA as a practice that, faced with a target expression, (i) determines whether it is normative, (ii) characterizes its form of normativity and its role in normative argument, and (iii) clarifies its potential relevance for applied ethics and other fields where the target expression is regularly used. Having thus defined NA, we appraise how dominant metaethical doctrines fare in terms of their potential contribution to NA. First, we examine the similarities and divergences between non-cognitivism and realism (the main cognitivist doctrine). Then we focus on two debates these doctrines approach differently: the unity and structure of normativity, and the status of thick terms. Here, we find that non-cognitivism's narrower concept of normativity yields a stricter view on demarcation, which limits its ability to reconcile the various aims of NA. Generally, however, standard metaethical views (including realism) are shown to leave out key dimensions and varieties of normativity, as well as the crucial issue of directionality: who/what sets norms for whom/what to follow. This critical work raises the need for developing a broader concept of normativity where those neglected issues are made amenable to NA.

Analytic Philosophy, 2019

Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of content, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a dilemma, alleging that Normativism either entails a vicious regress or falls prey to a charge of idleness. In this paper, I respond to this argument. I argue that Normativism can avoid the commitments that generate the regress and does not propose the sort of explanation required to charge that its explanation has been shown to be problematically idle. The regress-generating commitment to be avoided is, roughly, that tokened, contentful mental states are the product of rule-following. The explanatory task Normativists should disavow is that of explaining how it is that beliefs and other contentful mental states are produced. I argue that Normativism, properly understood as a theory of content, does not provide this kind of psychological explanation, and therefore does not entail that such explanations are to be given in terms of rule-following. If this is correct, Normativism is not the proper target of the dilemma offered by Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss. Understanding why one might construe Normativism in the way Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss must, and how, properly understood, it avoids their dilemma, can help us to appreciate the attractiveness of a genuinely normative theory of content and the importance of paying careful attention to the sort of normativity involved in norm-based theories of content.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018

What is normativity? It is argued here that normativity is best understood as a property of certain concepts: normative thoughts are those involving these normative concepts; normative statements are statements that express normative thoughts; and normative facts are the facts (if such there be) that make such normative thoughts true. Many philosophers propose that there is a single basic normative concept—perhaps the concept of a reason for an action or attitude—in terms of which all other normative concepts can be defined. It is argued here that this proposal faces grave difficulties. According to a better proposal, what these normative concepts have in common is that they have a distinctive sort of conceptual role—a reasoning-guiding conceptual role. This proposal is illustrated by a number of examples: different normative concepts differ from each other in virtue of their having different conceptual roles of this reasoning-guiding kind.