Abstract

The problem of how we can be both animals living in a causal world and agents acting through norms, principles, and rules in that same world persists. Many have understood this as a clash between science and our ordinary ways of talking. For many, this clash has been resolved in favour of the scientific image, either by reducing the intentional and normative to the causal laws of behaviourism or by eliminating our 'folk psychology' altogether in favour of a syntactic or computational model of mind. Drawing on Wittgenstein, I argue that this mislocates the problem and so misunderstands what is required for its resolution. Our sophisticated language games are grounded in a bedrock of normative similarity judgments. The role these play in our language games can be seen most clearly in the initiate learning situation, that of the child just learning language or the pupil receiving first instruction in arithmetic. It is here that we can look for an accommodation of causality and normativity by understanding the relation between the novice and the master of the practice