In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, Laura Valentini poses and answers this overall question: When and why, if at all, are socially constructed norms morally binding? Valentini develops an original account, the agency-respect view, that offers an answer to this general question by offering a moral criterion in terms of agency respect. I agree with the criterion proposed by the agency-respect view, given the account of socially constructed norms that it assumes. However, its account of socially constructed (...) norms seems too narrow to answer the general question. More specifically, I argue that the account of social norms is too narrow, even according to Valentini’s own standard, since it does not account for teleological social norms, which are about standards of excellence rather than standards of behavior. Taking teleological social norms into account calls the moral criterion proposed by the agency-respect view into question: it is plausible concerning the type of social norm assumed by the agency-respect view, but not for teleological social norms. Hence, the general question has not been fully answered. (shrink)

The paper presents a novel view of social norms that reflects the importance of different agent types, their specific motivations and roles. How one identifies with a role and behavioral options available to the agent is crucial for the sustainability of the social norms. The analysis of a simple case of social norm is suggested as a default model for analysis, and then the classification of subjects, enforcers, and audience is introduced. This triangular typology of agents is (...) extended by introducing a network of interlocking patterns underlying social behavior. Lastly, the paper describes two categories of transgressions based on misidentification. (shrink)

I argue that imperatives express contents that are both cognitively and semantically related to, but nevertheless distinct from, modal propositions. Imperatives, on this analysis, semantically encode features of planning that are modally specified. Uttering an imperative amounts to tokening this feature in discourse, and thereby proffering it for adoption by the audience. This analysis deals smoothly with the problems afflicting Portner's Dynamic Pragmatic account and Kaufmann's Modal account. It also suggests an appealing reorientation of clause-type theorizing, in which the cognitive (...) act of updating on a typed sentence plays a central role in theorizing about both its semantics and role in discourse. (shrink)

This paper describes the automated classification of legal norms in German statutes with regard to their semantic type. We propose a semantic type taxonomy for norms in the German civil law domain consisting of nine different types focusing on functional aspects, such as Duties, Prohibitions, Permissions, etc. We performed four iterations in classifying legal norms with a rule-based approach using a manually labeled dataset, i.e., tenancy law, of the German Civil Code ). During this experiment the (...) \ score continuously improved from 0.52 to 0.78. In contrast, a machine learning based approach for the classification was implemented. A performance of \ was reached. Traditionally, machine learning classifiers lack of transparency with regard to their decisions. We extended our approach using so-called local linear approximations, which is a novel technique to analyze and inspect a trained classifier’s behavior. We can show that there are significant similarities of manually crafted knowledge, i.e., rules and pattern definitions, and the trained decision structures of machine learning approaches. (shrink)

Information avoidance is a prevalent communication phenomenon that is less well understood than information seeking. The present study adopts a social-normative perspective on information avoidance as social norms are powerful drivers of behaviors. We aim to separate various types of avoidance-related norms and examine how they relate to information avoidance intentions about the COVID-19 vaccination. Our online survey of a stratified sample of the German population (N = 1,508) revealed that there are personal and societal-level injunctive, descriptive (...) and subjective norms. Except for societal-level descriptive norms, all norms were related to increased avoidance intention. Personal-level norms were revealed to be more important than societal-level norms in predicting avoidance behaviors. (shrink)

Displacing the physiological model that had held sway in 19th-century medical thinking, early 20th-century hormone research promoted an understanding of the body and sexual desires in which variations in sex characteristics and non-reproductive sexual behaviours such as homosexuality were attributed to anomalies in the internal secretions produced by the testes or the ovaries. Biotypology, a new brand of medical science conceived and led by the Italian endocrinologist Nicola Pende, employed hormone research to study human types and hormone treatments to (...) normalise individuals who did not conform to accepted medical norms. Latin American medical doctors, eugenicists, and sexologists took up biotypology with enthusiasm. This article considers the case studies of Italy, Argentina, and Brazil, and analyses the work of medical doctors who adopted a biotypological mode of reasoning and employed to various extents hormone therapies in their practice. By focusing on hormone therapies that aimed to normalise secondary sexual characteristics and the sexual instinct, the article suggests that while the existence of normality was contested to the point that a number of medical scientists argued that no such thing existed, the pursuit of normality was carried out in very practical terms through the new medical technologies hormone research had introduced. (shrink)

Clinical biobanks processing data of participants in the European Union fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation, which among others includes requirements for consent. These requirements are further specified by the Article 29 Working Party —an EU advisory body currently known as the European Data Protection Board. Unfortunately, their guidance is cause for some confusion. While the GDPR allows participants to give broad consent for research when specific research purposes are still unknown, the WP29 guidelines suggest that (...) additional consent for specific uses should be obtained in addition to broad consent when this becomes applicable. This discrepancy elicits the question whether clinical biobanks can fail the requirement of consent if they obtain broad consent, but not a specific consent for each biomedical study. We analysed this discrepancy within the framework of contextual integrity, in order to describe the context-relative informational norms that govern information flows in clinical biobanks. However, our analysis demonstrates that there is no uniform set of norms that can be applied to all clinical biobanks. As such, neither the GDPR nor the WP29 guidance can act as a “one size fits all” approach to all clinical biobanks. Rather, differences between clinical biobanks—especially regarding the scientific aims and patient populations—make the case for context-relative norms that determine the appropriate type of consent. (shrink)

My commentators have brought a set of claims and questions to bear on my analytical distinctions and normative arguments. Alice MacLachlan is interested in the relationship between Lordean rage and the other, more negative anger types that I describe, as well as the limits of the anger of rage renegades. Lidal Dror wonders if we should have Lordean rage, to what extent my account of resssentiment rage is in fact Lordean, and whether it is enough to only experience Lordean (...) rage. And Nic Bommarito wonders if my other anger types could be good in certain ways and if there are other “Lordean emotions.” So, in my replies, I will address each of these in turn. And I end with a brief note about love and Lordean rage. (shrink)

Inspired by a construction of the Tsirelson space , we prove a general theorem for omitting countably many positive formulas in normed spaces. This theorem can be used in functional analysis as a tool to guarantee the existence of complicated normed spaces without having to construct them. The proof of this result is based on the notion of approximate truth and on a study of the relationship between approximate truth and convergence in normed spaces. We illustrate the power of this (...) result with an application to functional analysis. (shrink)

Mainstream accounts of conceptual norms depict them as a specific kind of (sub)norms in as much as they establish a certain equivalence without making reference to an action-type, which implies also that they lack a deontic modalization. However, such non-prescriptive explanation raises some serious problems, mainly when it is assumed that the introduction of a conceptual norm into a normative system changes the content of the system. Those problems pave the way to contrast such explanation with a prescriptive (...) alternative according to which conceptual norms are regulative in character, though with the peculiarity of addressing the mental action of qualifying something in accordance with a given equivalence. All-things-considered, from such contrast it seems to follow that the prescriptive explanation is less problematic than the non-prescriptive one. (shrink)

The power of algorithms has become a familiar topic in society, media, and the social sciences. It is increasingly common to argue that, for instance, algorithms automate inequality, that they are biased black boxes that reproduce racism, or that they control our money and information. Implicit in many of these discussions is that algorithms are permeated with normativities, and that these normativities shape society. The aim of this editorial is double: First, it contributes to a more nuanced discussion about algorithms (...) by discussing how we, as social scientists, think about algorithms in relation to five theoretical ideal types. For instance, what does it mean to go under the hood of the algorithm and what does it mean to stay above it? Second, it introduces the contributions to this special theme by situating them in relation to these five ideal types. By doing this, the editorial aims to contribute to an increased analytical awareness of how algorithms are theorized in society and culture. The articles in the special theme deal with algorithms in different settings, ranging from farming, schools, and self-tracking to AIDS, nuclear power plants, and surveillance. The contributions thus explore, both theoretically and empirically, different settings where algorithms are intertwined with normativities. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalism views epistemic norms and epistemic normativity as essentially involving the instrumental relation between means and ends. It construes notions like epistemic normativity, norms, and rationality, as forms of instrumental or means-end normativity, norms, and rationality. I do two main things in this paper. In part 1, I argue that there is an under-appreciated distinction between two independent types of epistemic instrumentalism. These are instrumentalism about epistemic norms and instrumentalism about epistemic normativity. In part (...) 2, I argue that this under-appreciated distinction matters for the debate surrounding the plausibility of EI. Specifically, whether we interpret EI as norm-EI or as source-EI matters for the widely discussed universality or categoricity objection to EI, and for two important motivations for adopting EI, namely naturalism and the practical utility of epistemic norms. I will then conclude by drawing some lessons for epistemic instrumentalism going forward. (shrink)

Traditional normative theories of belief in epistemology presume that belief-forming includes a reflective component and a mental agency component. Beliefs are regarded as conscious doxastic attitudes with propositional contents. Let’s call this view the Transcendental View about Belief (TVB). First, I argue that reputed norms of belief as the truth norm, the knowledge norm and the rationality norm all incorporate TVB. Further, I argue that the empirical evidence concerning belief-forming collected in the last two decades by Rüdiger Seitz, Hans-Ferdinant (...) Angel, Raymond Paloutzian and their colleagues suggests that primal beliefs do not correspond to the description provided by TVB. Primal beliefs are byproducts of perceptive and affective type 1 processing. As such, they are non-propositional multilayer relational states of a cognitive system S that do not presuppose conscious awareness. Thus, I maintain that TVB is normatively inadequate, because it is descriptively false. I presume that a good normative account of beliefs should be able to accommodate primal beliefs and provide a norm of primal belief. I conclude by attempting to outline such a positive account. (shrink)

A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs (...) do appear to play an important role in people's beliefs about persistence. Specifically, people are more likely to judge that the identity of a given entity remains the same when its features improve than when its features deteriorate. Study 1 provides a basic demonstration of this effect. Study 2 shows that this effect is moderated by individual differences in normative beliefs. Study 3 examines the underlying mechanism, which is the belief that, in general, various entities are essentially good. Study 4 directly manipulates beliefs about essence to show that the positivity bias regarding essences is causally responsible for the effect. (shrink)

A philosophical conception of norms is developed and defended. Chapter I first examines the received view of norms in the social scientific and philosophical literature. On this view, norms are rule-like, an essentially subjective or internal conception. It will be argued, however, that norms are better described as patterns of behavior, an objective or external conception. The pattern view achieves a better fit with our intuitive understanding of norms, and is better suited to the role (...) norms are to play in social theory. The second chapter continues the appraisal of the pattern conception by looking at how norms perform in an applied theoretical context, namely, utilitarian moral theory. The third and fourth chapters attempt to reconcile the notion of conformity necessary to the pattern conception with the dictates of methodological individualism. The possibility of an individualistic grounding will be seen to depend on the types of individuals that are assumed to exist. As this study assumes the existence of moral motivation, as well as narrowly self-interested, rational motivation, an individualistic grounding will require a moral and a rational grounding for norms. Chapter III discusses the rational grounding and Chapter IV the moral. In addition, the analysis of the types of situations in which conformity is rational and moral will provide a superior typology of norms. (shrink)

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)

The article is devoted to the study of the ethical and value dimensions of the ecological crisis in the situation caused by war, and to the clarification of the significance of human responsibility for one’s actions in relation to nature. It is shown that the observance of moral and ethical norms and orientation to the values vital to man are a necessary condition for the preservation of human life and nature. The analysis of the tasks set in the article (...) is carried out on the basis of the use of ideas of communicative philosophy and discursive ethics, which allows to form knowledge about the ecologically constructive relations of man with nature, to assess the scale of environmental problems in the conditions of war, and to search for ways to mitigate the consequences of the ecological crisis for man and nature.It is substantiated that the ecological crisis has value and cultural origins, therefore the awareness of the need to adhere to universal human values and the correlation of human actions in relation to nature with the norms of cultural and historical universalism becomes especially relevant. Attention is focused on the fact that in the conditions of war, barbaric expansion into the natural world, soullessness, merciless treatment of the plant and animal world, man and humanity must be guided in their actions by humanistic consciousness and moral principles, determine their actions by understanding responsibility for life. It has been established that modern man’s recognition of the importance of moral and ethical norms and humanistic values is an alternative to a lifestyle built on an unlimited, aggressive, exploitative attitude towards nature. Despite the difference between the types of culture and different cultural systems, the dominance of different value systems, people must equally ensure equal rights and bear joint responsibility for life. The most promising development strategy for humanity in a war situation should be the preservation of human life in unity with nature. (shrink)

Mit praktischer Rationalität meint man heute meist eine pragmatische Rationalität in Bezug auf ein bedingt motiviertes und partikulär bestimmtes Tun. Eine moralische Nötigung dagegen ist nach Kant Ausdruck einer spezifisch praktischen Richtigkeit, begründet eine unbedingte Geltung und führt eine allgemeine Verbindlichkeit bei sich. Verbleibt man im handlungstheoretischen Rahmen einer empiristischen Ethik, ist nicht zu sehen, wie sich eine solch starke Form der Normativität begründen lassen sollte. Thomas orientiert sich in dieser Frage an der aristotelischen Urteilstheorie: Wenn sich zeigen lässt, unter (...) welchen Bedingungen es möglich, unmöglich oder notwendig ist, bestimmte Aussagen vernünftigerweise als wahr zu denken, dann lässt sich auch zeigen, unter welchen Bedingungen es möglich, unmöglich oder notwendig ist, bestimmte Handlungen vernünftigerweise als gut zu wollen. Die nähere Analyse macht deutlich, warum es genau drei Klassen von Prinzipien einer moralischen Nötigung gibt.Today, in most cases practical rationality is interpreted as a pragmatic rationality concerning a particular action and its conditional motives. According to Kant, however, a moral necessitation is the expression of a specifically practical rightness, it is the foundation of an unconditional claim of validity, and it implies a universal obligation. Remaining strictly within the framework of an empiricist ethics, one cannot see how such a strong form of norm-giving can be justified. Facing this question, Thomas takes his orientation from the Aristotelian theory of judgment: If it is possible to find out the conditions which make it possible, impossible or necessary to reasonably think of certain statements as true, then it is also possible to find out the conditions which make it possible, impossible or necessary to reasonably want certain actions as good. Further analysis elucidates the reasons why there are precisely three types of principles of a moral necessitation. (shrink)

The present paper focuses on the phenomenon of normativity and genericity in language and cognition. More specifically, it investigates the use of normative generics, which are generalizations that state an ideal norm for a given category, in the context of norm breaching in parent-child interactions in English. This issue is researched by means of a specially designed questionnaire including 8 norm breaching parent-child interactions, which has been completed online by ca. 70 English-speaking female respondents. The paper uses qualitative and quantitative (...) methods to address two specific research issues. First, it compares the frequency of use of normative generics in norm breaching situations vis-à-vis the use of other types of normative linguistic expressions. Second, it analyses selected factors that are believed to favour the use of normative generics, including interactive openness of a given situation, norm salience, and perceived norm importance. Moreover, the paper sketches an explanatory model of normative generics that draws upon insights from the Conceptual Metonymy Theory, Construction Grammar, and Dual System Theory. (shrink)

Living agency is subject to a normative dimension (good-bad, adaptive-maladaptive) that is absent from other types of interaction. We review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centered perspective, identifying two central problems and their solution: (1) How to define the topology of the viability space so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure, and (2) how to relate both the processes that establish norms and those that result in norm-following behavior. We (...) present a minimal metabolic system that is coupled to a gradient-climbing chemotactic mechanism. Studying the relationship between metabolic dynamics and environmental resource conditions, we identify an emergent viable region and a precarious region where the system tends to die unless environmental conditions change. We introduce the concept of normative field as the change of environmental conditions required to bring the system back to its viable region. Norm-following, or normative action, is defined as the course of behavior whose effect is positively correlated with the normative field. We close with a discussion of the limitations and extensions of our model and some final reflections on the nature of norms and teleology in agency. (shrink)

Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti-realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non-parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be accepted by more or less everyone who accepts NAN) to (...) back up this consensus. I show that we cannot establish versions of NAN which are interesting in their own right (and not merely as instances of a general naturalistic ontology) by appealing to the nature of natural properties or the kind of in-virtue-of relation to which NAN refers, plus other plausible nonparochial assumptions. On the way, I distinguish different types of 'in virtue of claims. I conclude by arguing that the way in which assessment of meta-ethical hypotheses is theory-dependent predicts the failure of non-parochial justifications of NAN. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to identify a type of fact-given warrant for action that is distinct from reason-based justification for action and defend the view that there are two types of practical warrant. The idea that there are two types of warrant is familiar in epistemology, but has not received much attention in debates on practical normativity. On the view that I will defend, normative facts, qua facts, give rise to entitlement warrant for action. But (...) they do not, qua facts, give rise to reason-based warrant. Normative practical reasons, I will argue, are true propositions that represent fact-based favouring and that are made true by normative facts. (shrink)

We show that the contemporary debate surrounding the question “What is the norm of assertion?” presupposes what we call the quantitative view, i.e. the view that this question is best answered by determining how much epistemic support is required to warrant assertion. We consider what Jennifer Lackey ( 2010 ) has called cases of isolated second-hand knowledge and show—beyond what Lackey has suggested herself—that these cases are best understood as ones where a certain type of understanding , rather than knowledge, (...) constitutes the required epistemic credential to warrant assertion. If we are right that understanding (and not just knowledge) is the epistemic norm for a restricted class of assertions, then this straightforwardly undercuts not only the widely supposed quantitative view, but also a more general presupposition concerning the universalisability of some norm governing assertion—the presumption (almost entirely unchallenged since Williamson’s 1996 paper) that any epistemic norm that governs some assertions should govern assertions—as a class of speech act—uniformly. (shrink)

Psychiatric treatment and diagnosis rests upon a richer conception of normativity than, for example, cognitive neuropsychology. This paper explores the role that considerations of rationality can play in defining this richer conception of normativity. It distinguishes two types of rationality and considers how each type can break down in different ways in delusional psychiatric disorders.

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)

Celano’s notion of a “pre-convention” is grounded in the opposition between two types of normative behaviour: following a rule and conforming to a norm. The opposition plays a central role in Celano’s paper, and marks a crucial point in his intellectual trajectory. Nevertheless, it remains largely implicit. In this paper I try to make it fully explicit, giving a more precise, albeit sketchy, characterization of both kinds of normative behaviour. I also focus on the importance of distinguishing between them, (...) express some conjectures regarding Celano’s future research, and propose a critique. (shrink)

This entry discusses the notion of a unit of normativity. This notion may be understood in two distinct ways. One way to understand a unit of normativity is as some particular type of assignment of normative status, e.g., a requirement, an ought, a reason, or a permission. A second way to understand a unit of normativity is as a measure of a quantity of normativity, perhaps associated with the numerical assignment given to the strength of reasons. This entry outlines some (...) basic differences among units of normativity in the first sense, noting that they vary slightly depending on whether one is talking about normativity in a more general or more robust sense. This entry also discusses in more detail the question of whether there might be a unit of normativity in the second sense. It discusses the relevant metaphysical questions. It also provides an explanation of why reasons can be assigned numerical strengths, even if there are no units of normativity in the sense of measurements of quantities of normativity. (shrink)

In "Assertion," Geach identified failure to attend to the distinction between meaning and speech act as a source of philosophical errors. I argue that failure to attend to this distinction, along with the parallel distinction between attitude and content, has been behind the idea that meaning and content are, in some sense, normative. By an argument parallel to Geach's argument against performative analyses of "good" we can show that the phenomena identified by theorists of the normativity of content are properties (...) in the first instance of speech act and propositional attitude types, rather than content as such. (shrink)

Most normative accounts of meaningful work have focused on the value of autonomy and capability for self-development. Here, I will propose that contribution–having a positive impact on others through one’s work–is another central dimension of meaningful work. Being able to contribute through one’s work should be recognized as one of the key axiological values that work can serve, providing one independent justification for why work is valuable and worth doing. Conversely, I argue that having to do work that has no (...) positive impact, or where one is separated from such impact, is an underrecognized type of alienation. Such alienation as pointlessness can be as harmful as the more recognized types of alienation such as powerlessness. Recognizing contribution as a core dimension of meaningful work is compatible with both subjectivist and objectivist accounts of meaningfulness, but I come to support a mixed view where the subjective sense of contributing must be sufficiently warranted by the facts of the situation. Recognizing the inescapable interest humans have for being able to contribute and engage in work that is not pointless has implications for the duties societies, organizations, and individuals have as regards ensuring that work conducted includes a recognizable positive impact. Along with autonomy and self-development, contribution should thus be seen as an independent axiological value that work can serve, its frustration being associated with a specific type of alienation, and it itself playing a key role in what makes work valuable and meaningful. (shrink)

Norms conferring public or private powers, i.e., the competence to issue other norms, play a very important rôle in law. But there is no agreement among legal philosophers about the nature of such norms. There are two main groups of theories, those that regard them as a kind of norms of conduct (either commands or permissions) and those that regard them as non-reducible to other types of norms. I try to show that reductionist theories (...) are not quite acceptable; neither the command-variety (Kelsen, Alf Ross inOn Law and Justice), nor the permission-variety (von Wright, Kanger, Lindahl) provide a satisfactory account of competence norms.Among the authors who maintain that competence norms are different from (and hence not reducible to) norms of conduct are Hart, Ross inDirectives and Norms, and Searle. Ross and Searle distinguish between regulative and constitutive rules as two radically different kinds of rules and classify competence norms among constitutive rules. This distinction runs parallel to von Wright's distinction between rules that are prescriptions and determinative rules. While the first regulate actions (by commanding, prohibiting, or permitting them), determinative rules define certain concepts. To view competence norms as (partial) definitions of certain legal concepts (like those of legislator, judge, etc.) seems to open interesting perspectives and to shed light on at least one aspect of these elusive norms. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that beliefs are constitutively normative from two kinds of objection. After clarifying what a “blindspot” proposition is and the different types of blindspots there can be, I show that the existence of such propositions does not undermine the thesis that beliefs are essentially governed by a negative truth norm. I argue that the “normative variance” exhibited by this norm is not a defect. I also argue that if we accept a distinction between subjective and objective (...) norms there need be no worrying tension between doxastic norms of truth and doxastic norms of evidence. I show how a similar approach applies to the attitude of guessing. I then suggest that if we distinguish between practical and theoretical rationality, we will prefer a negative form of norm that does not positively oblige us to form beliefs. I finish by considering an alternative possible subjunctive form of norm that would also avoid problems with blindspots but suggest this has a non-intuitive consequence. (shrink)

In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing on unreflective expert action. More particularly, I use Wittgenstein’s examples of craftsmen (...) (tailors and architects) absorbed in action to introduce situated normativity. Situated normativity can be understood as the normative aspect of embodied cognition in unreflective skillful action. I develop Wittgenstein’s insight that a peculiar type of affective behaviour, ‘directed discontent’, is essential for getting things right without reflection. Directed discontent is a reaction of appreciation in action and is introduced as a paradigmatic expression of situated normativity. In the second part I discuss Wittgenstein’s ideas on the normativity of what he calls ‘blind’ rule-following and the ‘bedrock’ of immediate action. What matters for understanding the normativity of (even ‘blind’) rule-following, is not that one has the capacity for linguistic articulation or reflection but that one is reliably participating in a communal custom. In the third part I further investigate the complex relationships between unreflective skillful action, perception, emotion, and normativity. Part of this entails an account of the link between normativity at the level of the expert’s socio-cultural practice and the individual’s situated and lived normativity. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

The article approaches »truth« from a situational point of view, arguing that truth claims are characterized by a certain type of validity claim that is in the last instance of a moral nature. In scenes of truth, a normative type of validity claim, which in Durkheim’s sense refers to the maintenance of a norm even when it is trespassed by an individual, is suspended. As a consequence, scenes of truth cannot tolerate the mismatch between reality construction and empirical observation that (...) is characteristic of normative validity claims. Instead, they tend to eliminate any distance between construction and observation, radicalizing the norm to a quasi-natural law with a moral inflection. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and (...) conversation. Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached), while giving them a uniform type of analysis. The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is a distinctive norm of assertion. A plausible idea is that there is an analogous, perhaps weaker, norm for indirect communication via implicatures. I argue against this type of proposal. My claim is that the norm of assertion is a social norm governing public updates to the conversational record. Off the record implicatures are not subject to social norms of this type. I grant that, as happens in general with intentional actions, off the (...) record communicative acts may be subject to normative assessments on different levels (for instance, regarding their moral or prudential appropriateness). However, such assessments do not generate distinctive norms that apply to all cases of implicature. (shrink)

Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non-epistemic norm of (...) belief formation. In this article I present an objection to unusability pessimism and argue that Robert Hopkins, the view's most prominent defender, fails to motivate adequately the claim that there are such non-epistemic belief norms. The cases which putatively legitimize usability norms can be explained by appeal to more familiar norm types: epistemic norms of belief formation, and non-epistemic norms which govern action other than belief formation. The intent of this article is not primarily negative, however, and I will also argue that understanding why the unusability position fails helps us to identify a promising new direction for the pessimist's opponents who wish to defend the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. (shrink)

Traditional methods for deriving property-based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is-a vehicle) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels), or unspecified relations (e.g., car—petrol). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large-scale acquisition of unconstrained, human-like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide (...) our extraction, yielding concept-relation-feature triples (e.g., car be fast, car require petrol, car cause pollution), which approximate property-based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human-generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human-judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state-of-the-art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human-like character of our generated properties. (shrink)

This essay attempts to explain the traditional and contemporary philosophical neglect of disability by arguing that the philosophical prioritization of rationality leads to a distinctly philosophical conception of disability as a negative category of non-normative embodiment. I argue that the privilege given to rationality as distinctive of what it means to be both a human subject and a moral agent informs supposedly rational norms of human embodiment. Non-normative types of embodiment in turn can only be understood in contradistinction (...) to these rationalized norms, which are predicated on the elimination of certain features and types of embodiment deemed inimical to reason. To establish this thesis, I focus on Platonic philosophy and the Republic as Platonic conceptions of reason and normative types of embodiment have a historical and conceptual influence on contemporary assumptions concerning rational human nature, medicine, mental health, vice, disease, and impairment. (shrink)

The article approaches »truth« from a situational point of view, arguing that truth claims are characterized by a certain type of validity claim that is in the last instance of a moral nature. In scenes of truth, a normative type of validity claim, which in Durkheim's sense refers to the maintenance of a norm even when it is trespassed by an individual, is suspended. As a consequence, scenes of truth cannot tolerate the mismatch between reality construction and empirical observation that (...) is characteristic of normative validity claims. Instead, they tend to eliminate any distance between construction and observation, radicalizing the norm to a quasi-natural law with a moral inflection. (shrink)

Jonathan Ichikawa (2012) argues that the standard counterexamples to the knowledge norm of practical reasoning are no such thing. More precisely, he argues that those alleged counterexamples rest on claims about which actions are appropriate rather than on claims about which propositions can be appropriately treated as reasons for action. Since the knowledge norm of practical reasoning concerns the latter and not the former, Ichikawa contends that proponents of the alleged counterexamples must offer a theory that bridges the gap between (...) the two types of claims. I argue, first, that the standard counterexamples do not rest on claims about which actions are appropriate, second, that even if they did, we would not need a theory to bridge the gap between the two types of claims, and, third, that even if we did need such a theory, a plausible theory is on offer. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish between two main critical questions: ‘how possible’ questions, which look for enabling conditions and raise issues of epistemic normativity; and ‘whether permissible’ questions, which relate to conditions of legitimacy and ethical normativity. I examine the interplay of both types of questions in Foucault’s work and argue that this helps us to understand both the function of the historical a priori in the archeological period and the subsequent accusations of crypto-normativity levelled against Foucault by commentators (...) such as Taylor and Habermas. I chart the complex conceptual space available for a defense. After examining several possible replies, I conclude that the most effective option, and the one that fits Foucault’s approach best, is to refuse the demand for normative justification as self-defeating, and to opt for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical sensibility through an emphasis on critique as a performative practice of the self. I offer in conclusion some thoughts on what such practice may look like for Foucault. (shrink)

Andréanne Turgeon | : La littérature normative, lorsqu’il est question d’étudier les pratiques religieuses passées, est souvent perçue comme limitative pour le chercheur ; en effet, les prescriptions morales contenues dans ce type d’écrits témoignent davantage des attentes du clergé en matière de moeurs et de piété que des pratiques effectives qui avaient cours parmi les fidèles. Au cours des dernières décennies, cette littérature a généralement été exclue du corpus documentaire de nombreux chercheurs qui s’intéressaient à la religion « vécue (...) », afin d’éviter de transposer sur celle-ci une image biaisée, véhiculée par des productions ecclésiastiques. Au Québec, la notion de « réveil religieux », et le débat historiographique qu’elle a suscité au cours des années 1990, fournit un excellent exemple de catégorie, puisque cette notion s’est construite et fortifiée en l’absence d’une riche documentation qui, pourtant, encadrait la pratique que l’on comptabilisait et dont on cherchait à interpréter le sens. Cet article vise à montrer que la littérature normative peut donc s’avérer indispensable pour expliquer les transformations socioreligieuses d’une époque, et que c’est la prise en compte de cette documentation, dans les études historiques récentes, qui a mené à l’éclatement de la catégorie de « réveil religieux ». | : Historians often perceive normative literature as restricting the scholarly study of past religious practices : the moral precepts contained in those writings inform readers about the clergy’s expectations related to piety and morality, but do not tell much about effective practices that prevailed among the faithful. In the last decades, many scholars interested in the religion as experienced by people have excluded normative literature from their documentary corpus, in an attempt to avoid transposing the biased image conveyed by ecclesiastical productions into their research. The concept of “religious revival” and the ensuing historiographical debate in Québec during the 1990s provides a good example of such a problem, this category being created and reinforced without taking into consideration the normative documentation underlying the religious practices historians were trying to explain. This article intends to demonstrate that normative literature may be crucial in explaining past socioreli- gious transformations, and that its use in recent historical studies has even contributed to invalidate the concept of “religious revival.”. (shrink)

I define a social norm as a regularity in behavior whose persistence is causally explained by the existence of sanctioning attitudes of participants toward violations—without these sanctions, individuals have motive to violate the norm. I show how a universal precept "When in circumstances S, do action F" can be sustained by the conditional preference of each to conform, given that others do, of a convention, and also reinforced by the sanctions of a norm. I observe that a precept with moral (...) force can be reinforced by a social norm. I then consider constitutive norms and show by means of an example, competitive figure skating, how a type of activity or practice G can have a constitutive norm NG. An ongoing activity in a community is engagement in that practice only if NG is reinforced as a social norm by participants. I apply this to the case of assertion: the speech act type Assertion has a constitutive norm NA, and a practice of making speech acts in a community is one of making assertions only if it is controlled by NA enforced by the sanctions of a social norm. (shrink)

The distinction between norms and norm-formulations commits legal theorists to treating legal norms as entities. In this article, I first explore the path from meaning to entities built by some analytical philosophers of language. Later, I present a set of problems produced by treating norms as entities. Whatever type of entities we deal with calls for a clear differentiation between the identification and individuation criteria of such entities. In the putative case of abstract entities, the differentiation collapses. (...) By changing the notions of the intension and extension of words by extensional and intensional aspects of what we talk about, I outline a methodological programme for Law and Legal Theory. That programme is based in the identification of normativity. (shrink)

Social norms play an essential role in human interactions and the development of the evolution of human history. Extensive studies corroborate that compliance with social norms typically requires a punishment threat as almost always specific individuals have self-interests that tempt them to violate the norm. Neural imaging studies demonstrate that lateral orbitofrontal cortex and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) are activated when individuals decide to increase social norm compliance when punishment is possible. Moreover, rDLPFC is affirmed to be (...) involved in social norm compliance with or without external punishment threats in a series of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) research. However, these neuroscience studies are based on the ultimatum game in which the decision-making power between the proposer and the responder is unequal, and no studies support the causal relationship between rDLPFC and voluntary cooperative norms compliance among the equal decision-making power of subjects. Whether modulating the excitability of rDLPFC, which plays a role in norm compliance, alters the extent of compliance with voluntary cooperative norms under equal decision-making power and how norms from different types with asymmetric endowment influence compliance remain unknown. The present study aimed to provide evidence of a direct link between the neural and behavioral results through the application of tDCS over rDLPFC on compliance with voluntary cooperative norms under equal decision-making power. Results verified that activating rDLPFC altered voluntary cooperative norms compliance of all our participants and significant effect over different initial endowments was observed. The role of norm.own and norm.other in compliance was changed in the anodal treatment. Findings validate that enhancing the excitability of the rDLPFC using tDCS leads to high compliance in voluntary cooperation and this effect is specific to equal decision-making power rather than unequal decision-making power. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an argument against a type of Non-Analytic Normative Naturalism. This argument, the Normative Property Dualism Argument, suggests that, if Non-Analytic Normative Naturalists posit that normative properties are identical to natural properties and that such identities are a posteriori, they will be forced to posit that these properties which are both normative and natural have higher-order normative properties of their own.

In finite type arithmetic, the real numbers are represented by rapidly converging Cauchy sequences of rational numbers. Ulrich Kohlenbach introduced abstract types for certain structures such as metric spaces, normed spaces, Hilbert spaces, etc. With these types, the elements of the spaces are given directly, not through the mediation of a representation. However, these abstract spaces presuppose the real numbers. In this paper, we show how to set up an abstract type for the real numbers. The appropriateness of (...) our construction works in tandem with the bounded functional interpretation. (shrink)