Technologies are significant in research not only as instruments for gathering data and analyzing information; they also provide a valuable resource for the development of theory—in terms of what has been called the “tools to theory heuristic.” Focusing on the specific example of the fields of educational psychology and instructional technology and design, this paper begins by describing how the workings of the “tools to theory heuristic” are evident in the metaphors and descriptions of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. In each (...) of these psychological paradigms, the mind is understood in terms of a contemporaneous technological innovation: as rudimentary circuitry, as computerized data processing, and finally, in terms of information representation and visualization. The paper then argues that in applied disciplines like educational technology and human–computer interaction, technology plays two important but conflicting roles. It first operates heuristically to explain complex mental phenomena; it is then designed and developed explicitly as a tool for facilitating and developing these same complex mental processes. This paper concludes by arguing that this dual role represents an ethical dilemma—a kind of epistemological and practical “conflict of interest” in instructional technology and in related fields of systems and interface design. (shrink)

This article approaches the relationship of normative argumentation studies and descriptive persuasion effects research by pointing to several empirical findings that raise questions or puzzles about normatively-proper argumentative conduct. These findings indicate some complications in the analysis of normatively desirable argumentative conduct – including some ways in which practical persuasive success may not be entirely compatible with normatively-desirable advocacy practices.

The potential conflicts between morality and self-interest lie at the heart of ethics. These conflicts arise because both moral and prudential considerations apply to our choices. A widespread assumption in philosophical ethics is that by weighing moral and prudential reasons against each other, we can compare their relative weights and determine what we ought to do in the face of such conflicts. While this assumption might seem innocuous and fruitful, a closer examination suggests that it lacks both justification and the (...) necessary content that would allow it to do the normative work it promises. In this book, Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl grapples with these cases of conflict, but argues that there may be no simple answer to the question of what we ought to do all things considered. Sagdahl argues against the assumption of comparability and defends an alternative pluralist theory of normativity where morality and prudence form two separate and incommensurable normative standpoints, much like in Henry Sidgwick's "Dualism of Practical Reason." This type of view has tended to be quickly dismissed by its opponents, but Sagdahl argues that the theory is in fact a well-motivated theory of normativity and that the typical objections that tend to target it are much weaker than they are usually thought to be. (shrink)

This article proposes a formal analysis of a fundamental aspect of legal reasoning: dealing with normative conflicts. Firstly, examples are illustrated concerning the dynamics of legal systems, the application of rules and exceptions, and the semantic indeterminacy of legal sources. Then two approaches to cope with conflicting information are presented: the preferred theories of Brewka, and the belief change functions of Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson. The relations between those approaches are closely examined, and some aspects of a model of reasoning (...) with normative conflicts are outlined. Since this model takes into account an ordering of the involved regulations, criteria to order legal norms are finally specified. (shrink)

Statements containing epistemic modals (e.g., “by spring 2023 most European countries may have the Covid-19 pandemic under control”) are common expressions of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, previous published findings (Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo & Phillips, 2018) on the opposition between Contextualism and Relativism for epistemic modals are re-examined. It is found that these findings contain a substantial degree of individual variation. To investigate whether participants differ in their interpretation of epistemic modals, an experiment with multiple phases and sessions (...) is used to classify participants according to the three semantic theories of Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivism. Through this study, some of the first empirical evidence for the kind of truth-value shifts postulated by semantic Relativism is presented. It is furthermore found that participants’ disagreement judgments match their truth evaluations and that participants are capable of distinguishing between truth and justification. In a second experimental session, it is investigated whether participants thus classified follow the norm of retraction which Relativism uses to account for argumentation with epistemic modals. Here the results are less favorable for Relativism. In a second experiment, these results are replicated and the normative beliefs of participants concerning the norm of retraction are investigated following work on measuring norms by Bicchieri (2017). Again, it is found that on average participants show no strong preferences concerning the norm of retraction for epistemic modals. Yet, it was found that participants who had committed to Objectivism and had training in logics applied the norm of retraction to might-statements. These results present a substantial challenge to the account of argumentation with epistemic modals presented in MacFarlane (2014), as discussed. Keywords: Epistemic Modals, Relativism, Norm Conflicts, Retraction, Semantics, Truth Conditions, Argumentation. (shrink)

The analytical tension between legal norms, moral values, and national interests seems no uncharted territory in political science, but has found very little interest in legal academia. For lawyers, moral values and national interests are largely “unknowns,” dealt with by other disciplines. Looking a bit deeper, the picture becomes more nuanced, however. As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay argues that norms, values, and interests are not different universes (...) of legal normativity, morality, and specific interests, but are interrelated concepts. Values clearly influence norms and often underpin them, while seemingly concrete norms (rules) are themselves often fragile constructs trying to balance competing interests. Value systems are quite diverse within societies, and this is even truer for interests; each society is a dynamic system of social interaction where conflicting interests are constantly playing out. In a way, underlying conflicts of values and interests are constantly being renegotiated in the legal system, with the norms enshrined in the text of statutes and treaties serving to constitute transitory reference points. (shrink)

This article proposes a general strategy to overcome normative conflicts, namely, paradoxes represented in Standard Deontic Logic. This solution is based on preference relations between norms that circumvent situations of conflict. Pragmatic justifications of the proposed method are also given.

The exchange of goods and services between individuals is often formalised by a contract in which the parties establish norms to define what is expected of each one. Norms use deontic statements of obligation, prohibition, and permission, which may be in conflict. The task of manually detecting norm conflicts can be time–consuming and error-prone since contracts can be vast and complex. To automate such tasks, we develop an approach to identify potential conflicts between norms. We show (...) the effectiveness of our approach and its individual components empirically using two publicly available corpora, and contribute with a new annotated test corpus for norm conflict identification. (shrink)

The challenges that normative redundancies and normative conflicts pose to legal theory have been traditionally addressed by either altering the rules that trigger them, or by including preference rules that deactivate them. As an alternative to these routes, this paper argues that the problems with both redundancies and conflicts only arise as a consequence of a mistaken understanding of legal reasoning that ignores the material relations between the rules at issue. By resorting to inferential semantics, this material dimension is taken (...) into account and the challenges met without having to introduce new rules nor altering the original ones. (shrink)

The people of Myanmar were struck by three major human rights disasters during the country's period of democratization from 2003 to 2012: the 2007 Saffron Revolution, the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and the 2012 Rakhine riots, which would evolve into the ongoing Rohingya crisis. These events saw Myanmar's government categorically labeled as an offender of human rights, and three powerful Southeast Asian member states-Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia-responded to the violations in very different ways. In each case, their responses (...) to the crises were explicitly shaped by norm conflict, which may be understood as a tension between international and domestic norms. Their reactions were compelled by a need to address conflicting domestic and international expectations for norm compliance regarding human rights protection and non-interference in internal affairs. In Norms in Conflict: Southeast Asia's Response to Human Rights Violations in Myanmar, Anchalee Rüland makes sense of state action that occurs when a governing body is faced with a circumstance that is at once in line with and contrary to its own governing policies. She defines five different types of response strategies to situations of norm conflict and examines the enabling factors that lead to each strategy. Domestic norms are known to evolve as a country's values change over time yet Rüland argues that the old and new norms may also coexist; knowledge of the underlying political context is crucial for those seeking a solid understanding of state behavior. Norms in Conflict challenges the conventional understanding of the logic of consequences in determining state behavior, advancing constructivist theory and establishing a provocative new conversation in international relations discourse. (shrink)

Imperatives occur ubiquitously in natural languages. They produce forces which change the addressee’s cognitive state and regulate her actions accordingly. In real life we often receive conflicting orders, typically, issued by various authorities with different ranks. A new update semantics is proposed in this paper to formalize this idea. The general properties of this semantics, as well as its background ideas are discussed extensively. In addition, we compare our framework with other approaches of deontic logics in the context of normative (...) conflicts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While UNESCO's Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights highlights appropriate ethical values, its principles are stated in absolute terms and conflict with one another. The Draft Declaration fails to sufficiently address the possibility of conflict between principles, and it provides no real guidance on how to strike a balance between them in cases where conflict occurs. The document's inadequate treatment of conflicting values is revealed by examination of cases where principles aimed at the promotion (...) of autonomy and liberty conflict with those aimed at benefit maximization and harm minimization. I argue that liberty (and autonomy) may be less important in the context of health care than in other contexts, and I conclude by suggesting specific ways in which some of UNESCO's principles should be revised in order to better address the reality of conflicting values. (shrink)

Kulicki and Trypuz (2016) introduced three systems of multivalued deontic action logic to handle normative conflicts. The first system suggests a pessimistic view on normative conflicts, according to which any conflicting option represents something forbidden; the second system suggests an optimistic view, according to which any conflicting option represents something obligatory; finally, the third system suggests a neutral view, according to which any conflicting option represents something that is neither obligatory nor forbidden. The aim of the present paper is to (...) propose a fourth system in this family, which comes with a realistic view on normative conflicts: a normative conflict remains unsolved unless it is generated by two or more normative sources that can be compared. In accordance with this, we will provide a more refined formal framework for the family of systems at issue, which allows for explicit reference to sources of norms. Conflict resolution is thus a consequence of a codified hierarchy of normative sources. (shrink)

Suppose that two competing norms, N1 and N2, can be identified such that a given person’s response can be interpreted as correct according to N1 but incorrect according to N2. Which of these two norms, if any, should one use to interpret such a response? In this paper we seek to address this fundamental problem by studying individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their case judgments and reflective attitudes. (...) To investigate the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task. As a case study, we identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals (N1) versus Inferentialism (N2) and investigate to what extent internally consistent competence models can be reconstructed for the participants on this basis. After extensive empirical investigations, an apparent reasoning error with and-to-if inferences was found in one of these two groups. The implications of this case study for debates on the proper role of normative considerations in psychology are discussed. (shrink)

We address how to ethically evaluate workplace practices when workplace behavioral norms conflict with employees’ attitudes toward those norms, which, according to research on psychological contract violations, regularly occurs. Drawing on Scanlonian contractualism, we introduce the intersubjective reflection process (IR process). The IR process ethically evaluates workplace practices according to whether parties to a workplace practice have intersubjectively valid grounds to veto the practice. We present normative and empirical justification for this process and apply the IR process (...) to accounts of workplace moral dilemmas. We end by identifying future directions for research related to the IR process. (shrink)

In this paper I want to present the guiding lines of a research programme into the economics of scientific knowledge, a programme whose ultimate goal is to develop what I would like to call a contractarian epistemology. The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section I will comment on two conflicting approaches to the topic of rationality in science: the view of the rationality of scientific knowledge as deriving from the employment of sound methodological norms, (...) and the view of scientists as rational agents pursuing the optimisation of their own personal and professional interests. In section 2 I will try to make both approaches mutually consistent by showing that a competition among rational "recognition-seekers" is only possible if they agree in accepting some system of methodological norms. Section 3 will be devoted to analyse the main kinds and properties of these norms. Finally, in section 4 I will discuss a question which is far from being easy and innocent: why are scientific norms obeyed by researchers, once they have been established in a scientific discipline? (shrink)

A large and impressive literature has arisen over the past fifteen years concerning the emergence, transfer, and sustenance of political norms in international life. The presumption of this literature has been, for the most part, that the winds of normative change blow in a progressive direction, toward greater or more stringent normative control of individual or state behavior. Constructivist accounts detail a spiral of mutual normative reinforcement as actors and institutions discover the advantages of normative self- and other evaluation. (...) There is also now much interesting research focused on the question of how to predict the emergence of future norms.I focus, however, on a different issue here: the death of norms that had once seemed well internalized and institutionalized. The issue arises in relation to one of the most dramatic features in the defense policy of the United States since 2001: the crumbling of highly restrictive normative regimes prohibiting interrogatory torture and assassination as part of the “global war on terror.” My aim here is to sketch what I take to be the central features of cases in which even norms that are clearly defined and apparently well internalized in a democracy nonetheless lose their grip on policy. The ultimate lesson, however, is an unappealing irony: While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. In particular, I suggest that force-constraining norms are most effectively internalized by coherent and relatively insulated professional cadres who see themselves as needing to act consistently over time. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.The model I will describe may be of predictive use in helping us to see the special vulnerability of normative orders in democracies. But my hope is that it is also constructive in showing us how states and institutions committed to maintaining a certain normative order, especially democratic states, might best try to entrench those norms. While my argument is conceptual and philosophical, it draws on this recent history. I also add two qualifications to this article's title. First, I am not addressingallnorms, but specific norms concerning the state use of force in national security policy. I therefore do not make claims about the generalizability of the conflict I describe to other norms, for example, norms of racial, sexual, or religious orthodoxy or hierarchy, or norms of reciprocal interaction. Second, reports of a norm's death are frequently exaggerated, since norms can be latent, then resurrected. Arguably, the anti-torture norm was resuscitated by President Obama in 2009 when, as one of his first official acts as chief executive, he moved to prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. I write here about the path of decay, whether or not that path is unidirectional, and why previously salient norms no longer seem to govern policy choice among political decision-makers. (shrink)

This article argues for the view that statements about normative reasons are context-sensitive. Specifically, they are sensitive to a contextual parameter specifying a relevant person's or group's body of information. The argument for normative reasons contextualism starts from the context-sensitivity of the normative “ought” and the further premise that reasons must be aligned with oughts. It is incoherent, I maintain, to suppose that someone normatively ought to φ but has most reason not to φ. So given that oughts depend on (...) context, a parallel view about normative reasons is needed. It is shown that the resulting view solves notorious puzzles involving apparently conflicting but equally plausible claims about reasons. These puzzles arise especially in cases where agents have limited information or false beliefs. In these cases, we feel torn between reasons claims that take into account the limitations of the agent's perspective and apparently conflicting claims that are made from a more objective point of view. The contextualist account developed here accommodates both objectivist and subjectivist intuitions. It shows that all of the claims in question can be true, provided that they are relativized to different values of the relevant information parameter. Also, contextualism yields a fruitful approach to the debate about having reasons and the alleged failure of the so-called “factoring account”. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that normative judgements do not aim to represent the world. In this paper, I argue that this view is incompatible with the thought that when two people make conflicting normative judgements, at most one of these judgements is correct. I argue that this shows that normative judgements do aim to represent the world.

Drawing on a rich pragmatist tradition, this book offers an account of the different kinds of ‘oughts’, or varieties of normativity, that we are subject to contends that there is no conflict between normativity and the world as science describes it. The authors argue that normative claims aim to evaluate, to urge us to do or not do something, and to tell us how a state of affairs ought to be. These claims articulate forms of action-guidance that are different (...) in kind from descriptive claims, with a wholly distinct practical and expressive character. This account suggests that there are no normative facts, and so nothing that needs any troublesome shoehorning into a scientific account of the world. This work explains that nevertheless, normative claims are constrained by the world, and answerable to reason and argumentation, in a way that makes them truth-apt and objective. (shrink)

The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an (...) essentialist view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach. (shrink)

We present the inconsistency-adaptive deontic logic DP r , a nonmonotonic logic for dealing with conflicts between normative statements. On the one hand, this logic does not lead to explosion in view of normative conflicts such as O A ∧ O ∼A, O A ∧ P ∼A or even O A ∧ ∼O A. On the other hand, DP r still verifies all intuitively reliable inferences valid in Standard Deontic Logic (SDL). DP r interprets a given premise set ‘as normally (...) as possible’ with respect to SDL. Whereas some SDL-rules are verified unconditionally by DP r , others are verified conditionally. The latter are applicable unless they rely on formulas that turn out to behave inconsistently in view of the premises. This dynamic process is mirrored by the proof theory of DP r. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that statistical evidence regarding group characteristics (particularly stereotypical ones) can create normative conflicts between the requirements of epistemic rationality and our moral obligations to each other. In a recent article, Johnson-King and Babic argue that such conflicts can usually be avoided: what ordinary morality requires, they argue, epistemic rationality permits. In this article, we show that as data get large, Johnson-King and Babic’s approach becomes less plausible. More constructively, we build on their project and develop a (...) generalized model of reasoning about stereotypes under which one can indeed avoid normative conflicts, even in a big data world, when data contain some noise. In doing so, we also articulate a general approach to rational belief updating for noisy data. (shrink)

It is not uncommon that nurses are unable to meet the normative expectations of chronically ill patients. The purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate Walker’s expressive-collaborative view of morality to interpret the normative expectations of two women with multiple sclerosis. Both women present themselves as autonomous persons who make their own choices, but who also have to rely on others for many aspects of their lives, for example, to find a new balance between work and social contacts (...) or to find work. We show that their narratives of identity, relationship and value differ from the narratives that others use to understand and identify them. Since identities, relationships and values give rise to normative expectations, in both cases there is a conflict between what the women expect of their caregivers and vice-versa. The narratives also show that two similar persons with multiple sclerosis may need very different care. This implies that nurses caring for such persons should listen carefully to their stories and reflect on their own perceptions of self. (shrink)

At the centre of this study is the theoretical and empirical analysis of action-formation mechanisms in norm-relevant, situations. Basically two mechanisms are employed, namely action according to a) moral principles and b) the principle of deterrence. Conflicting assumptions concerning the way these mechanisms work are deduced from two theoretical perspectives, the high-cost/low-cost. hypothesis and Situational Action Theory (SAT). While the high-cost/low-cost. hypothesis leads to the assumption that, criminal action is explained by the principle of deterrence in high-cost, situations and, in (...) low-cost, situations, by moral principles, it. follows from SAT that., in high-cost, situations, the principle of deterrence has an effect, only on those persons with weak moral principles, and influences of moral principles are expected in low-cost, situations. Empirical analysis of these hypotheses is conducted with the help of data that, have been collected as part, of a mail survey (n=2383) of a disproportionately layered random sample of residents of an East. German city. Data analyses are carried out. in order to estimate the influences of the theoretically specified predictors simultaneously for high-cost, and low-cost, situations with multiple group comparisons. The study’s results partially support, both theoretical perspectives. They are finally discussed with respect, to theoretical and methodological aspects. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as (...) well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze and discuss Jennifer Saul’s account of the famous Gricean notions of ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ and the alleged conflict between them and the so- called Speaker- Meaning Exhaustiveness Thesis (SMET), which is standardly attributed to Grice in the literature. SMET declares that speaker- meaning divides exhaustively into what is said and what is (conventionally or nonconventionally) implicated by the speaker. After a detailed interpretation of Saul’s position, we argue that her analysis (...) partly misconstrues the relation between Grice’s theory of speaker- meaning and his normative account of conversational implicature. First of all, because SMET is not a genuine part of the Gricean theory of language and meaning – Grice was never committed to it. Secondly, Saul’s interpretation of the Gricean account of conversational implicature does not reflect accurately his original ideas. Although we agree with Saul that conversational implicature has an essential normative aspect, her account cannot capture well the real nature of this normativity, since it does not identify its source and does not delineate its scope. Finally, we present an alternative, speaker- oriented normative interpretation of Grice’s account of conversational implicatures, and argue that it fits better with the Gricean picture of communication and handles better the various problematic cases of conversational implicature than Saul’s mainly audience- oriented interpretation. (shrink)

Emotions are part of our culture ; particular emotions like resentment andguilt are part of specific cultural heritages. On the other hand, moral judgementsand imperatives have the appearance of objectivity. There lies - or so it seems -a conflict, even a contradiction. Statements like "Slavery is unjust" may beasserted, agreements may be reached concerning what they claim or express,and they may occur as antecedents in conditionals such as "If slavery is unjust,then it must be abolished". When it is claimed (...) that slavery is unjust or that it iswrong to harm others, it is thereby claimed that it is so objectively. We mean bythis (among other things) that it is so independently of the moral emotionsanyone may feel with respect to slavery or the infliction of pain.It will be argued here that there are grounds to believe that emotions must beevaluated cognitively and that they do have cognitive significance, value andcontent. In this cognitive or quasi-cognitive perspective, the appropriatecharacter of an emotion is akin to the truth of a proposition : just as the truth of aproposition may be evaluated in terms of the justifications we are able toprovide in its favour, the correctness of emotions may be evaluated relatively tocognitive bases and classes of available warrants. Some emotions may be ruledout as incorrect or inapproriate, just as some propositions may be rejected asunjustified or in need of a warrant. The parallel relies on the controversial notionof non-propositional forms of moral justification. The notion may be construedin a variety of ways, the most promising construals being, I believe, thoseprovided by the perceptual model.I shall focus on the following point. Moral judgements and imperatives areexpressed with the usual resources of natural languages. These typically includepredicates like "unjust" and "wrong", and deontic sentential operators like"must" and "should". Moral emotions, on the other hand, may be expressed bybodily movements and facial expressions. Although it may be argued thatemotions do not bear the cognitive marks of objectivity when expressed in thisway, there is no reason to think that a reformed language of ethics, i.e. a purelanguage of emotions, free of all the linguistic or symbolic marks of truth,assertability and objectivity, would thereby be free of normative input, or evenbe inadequate to express normative claims. I shall argue that once nonpropositionalforms of justifications are taken into account, the reformingstrategy of emotivists and neo-emotivists is indeed ineffective. (shrink)

High propensities to form coalitions and to negotiate and prevent conflict escalation may be found in monkeys as in great apes. However, there is no evidence that non-human primate communities intend to suppress individual power that grows too strong. Qualifying as protomoral those abilities needed to keep low the dominance gradient is not useful. When communication about social norms appeared in some hominids, it would not have been limited to sanctions against domination.

Thought experiments and normative case studies can play different and complementary roles in moral and political philosophizing. Thought experiments help us to sculpt and refine normative concepts and alert us to contradictions between intuitive judgments and basic principles, or among intuitive judgments, thus informing our reflective equilibrium about what fundamentally matters. Normative case studies assist us in judging how to trade off conflicting values in specified circumstances. Engaging with a sufficient number of well-wrought normative case studies can thus inform our (...) ultimate judgments about the relative weights of different values. (shrink)

There is a puzzle about Hume's is-ought gap involving an epistemic `ought'. From the premise `Snow is white,' we can infer `Sophia's belief that snow is white is correct.' `Snow is white' is paradigmatically non-normative, and that Sophia's belief is correct, a claim about what belief she ought to have, seems to be normative. The argument seems valid, so the is-ought gap is supposed to block this kind of inference. The puzzle is over whether we should give up on the (...) is-ought game or find another way to resolve the conflict. In the first chapter, I provide a formulation of the is-ought gap in a general semantic framework that avoids some other known problems. I turn in chapter 2 to discussing the puzzle about correct belief. I cast doubt on a solution proposed by Allan Gibbard by showing that it can admit of no epistemology of the normative. In chapter 3, I defend a solution to the puzzle while more directly tackling the question of the nature of oughts for belief. I offer a new explanation of why we ought to believe the truth. At the heart of the account is the idea that it's a conceptual truth beliefs ought to be true, which I provide a new argument for. I then claim that being an agent requires being subject to this norm of belief. This results in a non-moral, distinctly doxastic, account of why we ought to believe the truth. My conclusion is that asking why we ought to believe the truth is like asking why a bachelor must be unmarried: the answer is contained in the ideas that make up the question. In the final chapter, I respond to Gibbard's claim that an analogous story cannot work for `ought' claims for degreed belief. I pose a worry for Gibbard's proposed alternative explanation, and I undermine Gibbard's motivation for pursuing such an account in the first place. By taking belief to have an aim in a normative sense, I sketch how we can make sense of epistemic rationality in terms of that aim. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than they seem. We then argue that those three theories (...) struggle to account for three phenomena pertaining to social norms (namely context-dependence, conflicting norms and self-evidence), with which any complete game-theoretic account should in principle be able to deal. (shrink)

The paper discusses theories of scientific explanation from the point of view of the norms or ideals of science they exemplify. The relationship of the adoption of these norms to metaphysical positions on determinism is explored, and means for reducing the conflict between methodological and metaphysical issues are suggested.

In this article, we present an argumentative approach to normative reasoning. Special attention is paid to deontic conflicts, contrary-to-duty and specificity cases, which are modelled by means of argumentative attacks. For this, we adopt a recently proposed framework for logical argumentation in which arguments are generated by a sequent calculus of a given base logic of Argument & Computation ), and use standard deontic logic as our base logic. Argumentative attacks are realized by elimination rules that allow to discharge specific (...) sequents. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by means of various well-known benchmark examples, and show that this approach is rich enough to capture a variety of paradigms for handling conflicting norms such as reasoning with maximally consistent sets, prioritized norms and deontic formalisms based on I/O logic. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher presents an ambitious account of pragmatic naturalism that incorporates an explanatory story of the emergence and development of ethics, a metaethical perspective on progress, and a normative stance for moral theorizing. This article contends that Kitcher's normative stance is incompatible with the explanatory and metaethical components of his project. Instead, pragmatic naturalists should endorse a normative ethics that is experimental, grounded in practice, and acutely aware of cognitive and informational limitations. In particular, the ethical project would benefit from (...) endorsing empirical work on participatory democracy for the identification of mechanisms to guide us on deep moral conflicts. (shrink)

Jane Friedman claims that when we inquire, there is a tension between the instrumental normativity of our inquiries and some basic epistemic norms: The former forbids what the latter permit. Moreover, she argues that since the instrumental normativity of inquiry is epistemic, the previous tension shows that our current conception of epistemic normativity is incoherent and needs to be revised. To solve the problem, she suggests that all our epistemic norms should be considered “zetetic”, namely, norms of (...) inquiry. In this paper, I will argue that the instrumental normativity of inquiry Friedman depicts is inaccurate. I will propose the following alternative picture: All our reasons to inquire and take means to answer our questions are instrumental and can be derivative from the epistemic, the practical, or both. However, developing this alternative view, I will argue that our duties to inquire and take means to answer our questions are just practical in nature. Based on this, I will show that the tension between the epistemic and the zetetic Friedman depicts is just a conflict between the practical and the epistemic: A conflict that does not show per se that the current conception of epistemic normativity is incoherent and needs to be revised. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of inter-normative engagement, of constructing dialogical interaction across substantive normative difference. Focusing on how this affects democratic and pluralistic contexts, it argues that a social-practice-based approach to normativity and reasoning offers unique resources to understand and frame such encounters. It specifically draws on pragmatism and the work of Richard Rorty to reframe normativity, authority, identity, and reason, linking these understandings to recent trends to deliberative political inclusivism in democratic theory. The upshot is that framing inter-normative (...) engagement as calls to responsive engagement between diverse systems of normative authority offers real insights for constructing and maintaining ongoing democratic engagements in a non-hierarchical manner. This, the article argues, extends emerging methodological trends in the broader literature while overcoming the morass between conflict- and consensus-oriented approaches in democratic th... (shrink)

To adequately deal with unpredictable and dynamic environments, normative frameworks typically deployed in mechanisms for modifying the norms at runtime are crucial. We present the syntax and operational semantics of programming constructs to facilitate runtime norm modification, allowing a programmer to specify when and how the norms may be changed by external agents or by the normative mechanism. The norms take on the form of conditional obligations and prohibitions, instantiating obligations and prohibitions. We present rule-based constructs for (...) runtime modification of the norms and their instances, and a mechanism for automatically updating the instances when their underlying norms change. Moreover, we investigate a mechanism for avoiding norm conflicts. (shrink)

Axel Honneth’s most recent book, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, is an ambitious and thought-provoking work of social and political theory. Its main impetus is to provide a Hegelian reading of contemporary Western societies – and thus, so to speak, an actualisation of Hegel’s Philosophy of right. Readers of Honneth’s writings will recognise the hallmark of his previous work. He is committed, more than ever, to a Hegelian lens through which he pursues a methodology that explicitly blends (...) normative argumentation and social theory, a method Honneth refers to as normative reconstruction. Similarly to his approach in The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflict (Honneth, 1996), Honneth (2014: 125) focuses on a single notion – this time it is freedom – through which he develops a theory of justice on the basis of an adaptation of Hegel’s three ‘ethical spheres’ (the family, the market, and the state). (shrink)

Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs (...) about our friends in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety. (shrink)

Individualists and externalists about language take themselves to be disagreeing about the basic subject matter of the study of language. Are linguistic facts are really facts about individuals, or really facts about language use in a community?The right answer to this question, I argue, is ‘Yes’. Both individualistic and social facts are crucial to a complete understanding of human language. The relationship between the theories inspired by these facts is analogous to the relationship between anatomy and ecology, or between micro- (...) and macro-economics: both types of facts are important objects of study in their own right, but we need a theory that accounts for the complex relationship between the two. I argue that modern extensions of the signaling-games approach of Lewis (1969) do just this, defusing the conflict while preserving the core positive insights of both sides of this debate.The upshot is that arguments for social externalism and the normativity of meaning pose no threat to individualist explanations and can be accountedfor within a naturalistic theory of language. A good externalist theory will make crucial reference to individualistic facts, but go further by examining language users’ interactions in a systematic way. (shrink)

In a recent article in Argumentation, O’Keefe (Argumentation 21:151–163, 2007) observed that the well-known ‘framing effects’ in the social psychological literature on persuasion are akin to traditional fallacies of argumentation and reasoning and could be exploited for persuasive success in a way that conflicts with principles of responsible advocacy. Positively framed messages (“if you take aspirin, your heart will be more healthy”) differ in persuasive effect from negative frames (“if you do not take aspirin, your heart will be less healthy”), (...) despite containing ‘equivalent’ content. This poses a potential problem, because people might be unduly (and unsuspectingly) influenced by mere presentational differences. By drawing on recent cognitive psychological work on framing effects in choice and decision making paradigms, however, we show that establishing whether two arguments are substantively equivalent—and hence, whether there is any normative requirement for them to be equally persuasive—is a difficult task. Even arguments that are logically equivalent may not be information equivalent. The normative implications of this for both speakers and listeners are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores an internal relation between wrong-doing and the ability to think in moral terms, through Hobbes ’ thought. I use his neglected retelling of our ‘original sin’ as a springboard, seeing how we then discover a need to vindicate our own projects in terms shared by others. We become normatively demanding creatures: greedy for normative vindication, eager to judge others amid the difficulties of our world. However there is, of course, no choice for us but to choose our (...) own principles of judgment, or at least some authority to provide these. Unconvinced by Hobbes ’ remedies, I conclude with one implication for moral philosophy@ a need to look rather differently at agency and responsibility. (shrink)

In complex societies, there will always be situations in which an individual's deeply held beliefs conflict with the collective norms of the society. When only one individual challenges those norms, the norms generally hold. When challenges come from many individuals, the norms themselves may change. The tolerance for different beliefs will depend upon the political structure of the society and the specific beliefs that are being challenged.The Greek tragedy Antigone is an exploration of the choices (...) that rulers can make regarding such conflicts. They can either tolerate the unpopular and subversive views of an individual or punish the individual in a way that attempts to uphold the existing rules, bolster the... (shrink)

Harry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict by unifying your foundational motivational states. As Frankfurt puts it, the ‘totality of things (...) that an agent cares about’ plus his ‘ordering of how important to him they are effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live’ (The Reasons of Love(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 23). In this paper, I critically assess the three main reasons given for such a coherency requirement: 1) we can do only one action at a time; 2) our motivational states come with normative pressure towards coherency; and 3) conflicting motivational states provide us with an incoherent decision-making framework. I conclude that these reasons do not ground a coherency requirement for practical deliberation and argue that we can autonomously express ourselves as volitionally conflicted by acting on our conflicting motivational states over the course of multiple actions. (shrink)