Online research in philosophy

The contributors to this volume engage with issues of normativity within naturalised philosophy. The issues are critical to naturalism as most traditional notions in philosophy, such as knowledge, justification or representation, are said to involve normativity. Some of the contributors pursue the question of the correct place of normativity within a naturalised ontology, with emergentist and eliminativist answers offered on neighbouring pages. Others seek to justify particular norms within a naturalised framework, the more surprising ones including naturalist takes on the a priori and intuitions. Finally, yet others examine concrete examples of the application of norms within particular epistemic endeavours, such as psychopathology and design. The overall picture is that of an intimate engagement with issues of normativity on the part of naturalist philosophers – questioning some of the fundamentals at the same time as they try to work out many of the details.

What is one who takes normativity seriously to do if normativity can neither be discovered lurking out there in the world independently of us nor can it be sufficiently grasped from a merely explanatory perspective? One option is to accept that the normative challenge cannot be met and to retreat to some form of moral skepticism. Another possibility has recently been proposed by Christine Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity where she aims to develop an account of normativity which is grounded in autonomy. Furthermore, she argues that on her account reasons are "essentially public" and that this captures how it is that we can obligate one another. In this paper I argue that there is a serious tension between her account of normativity and the publicity of reasons-namely, that if reasons are essentially public, then it is not possible for individuals to legislate laws for themselves. However, I then argue that if we revise her conception of normativity such that it is understood to involve collective rather than individual legislation that it may then be possible to account for interpersonal reasons.

In the legal judgement reason demands that it extend itself beyond the mere subjective limits of the self in order that it might fashion a judgement that speaks for the other. This is the universal necessity of the judgement. No claim of truth or the moral law can guarantee that others will agree with this judgement: thus disputation is the risk which reason takes in order to judge at all. The author examines this audacity of judgement by reference to Kant's autonomy of reason, which risks itself in the thought that thinks.

lt is widely held that entertaining a belief or forming a judgement involves the exercise of conceptual capacities; and to this extent the representational content of a belief or judgement is said to be "con— ceptual". According to Gareth Evans (1980), not all psychological states have conceptual content in this sense. In particular, perceptual states have non—conceptual content; it is not until one forms a judgement on the basis of a perceptual experience that one touches the realm of conceptual content.

This paper defends the claim that there are — at least — two kinds of normativity in technological practice. The first concerns what engineers ought to do and the second concerns normative statements about artifacts. The claim is controversial, since the standard approach to normativity, namely normative realism, actually denies artifacts any kind of normativity; according to the normative realist, normativity applies exclusively to human agents. In other words, normative realists hold that only “human agent normativity” is a genuine form of normativity.I will argue that normative realism is mistaken on this point. I will mainly draw on material of Daniel Dennett and Philip Pettit to show that it makes sense to talk about artifactual normativity. We claim that this approach can also make sense of human agent normativity — or more specifically “engineer normativity”. Moreover, it avoids some of the problems formulated by opponents of normative realism. Thus I will develop a strategy which: (i) makes sense of artifactual normativity; and (ii) makes sense of “human agent normativity”, specifically “engineer normativity”.

Understanding the nature of social normativity is important for contemporary analytical legal philosophy. For one, such an account may help articulate the form of the social conventions that are said to be at the foundations of the rule of recognition. This paper argues that accounts of the nature of social normativity ought not to be based on the idea that social life is governed or regulated by norms. Rather, accounts of social normativity ought to be centred on the notion of how persons learn (and unlearn) what they come to anticipate. The first part of the paper offers some illustrations of such an account. The second part of the paper shows how social normativity so conceived can avoid some of the problems that bedevil the currently dominant view (or assumption) that social life is regulated or governed by norms. These problems include, first, difficulties associated with how much deliberative reflection and awareness to demand from participants in social life (accounts of social normativity are often said to be unrealistic or hyper-committal for demanding too much of both, which is not a criticism that can be made of the account offered here); and second, difficulties caused by assuming or positing that there can be a fact of the matter, unmediated by the evaluation or judgement of persons, as to whether or not some action is correct or incorrect on the basis that it merely conforms (or not, as the case may be) to some norm or set of norms (which is not an assumption made or a position endorsed by the account offered here). The paper does not aim to provide a comprehensive statement of the alternative view of social normativity. Rather, it seeks merely to introduce it and to suggest some of the ways in which it improves on the currently dominant view.

Norms are apt for reasoning because they have propositional structure and content; they are practical because they aim to guide action, rather than to describe aspects of the world. These two features hold equally of norms construed sociologically as the norms of specific social groups, and of norms conceived abstractly as principles of action. On either view, norms are indeterminate while acts are particular and determinate. Consequently norms cannot fully specify which particular act is to be done. Are they then not genuinely action-guiding unless supplemented by practical judgment? Yet accounts of practical judgement are often thin, sometimes seeing it as blind, unreasoned `picking' of one rather than another enactment of a norm. However, on another view practical judgement carries the substantive task of seeking ways of acting that satisfy a plurality of norms, which can be both reasoned and practical. Key Words: direction of fit • judgement • moral conflict • norms • practical principles • remainders.

It is widely assumed that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses problems for naturalism. Thus John McDowell urges that 'The structure of the space of reasons stubbornly resists being appropriated within a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law' (1994, p 73). Similar sentiments have been expressed by many other writers, for example Robert Brandom (1994, p xiii) and Paul Boghossian (1989, p 548).

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] 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.