Normativity and The Metaphysics of Mind

Abstract

I consider the metaphysical consequences of the view that propositional attitudes have essential normative properties. I argue that realism should take a weak rather than a strong form. I argue that expressivism cannot get off the ground. And I argue that eliminativism is self-refuting.

Notes

¹I take it that rational norms are at least ways in which the person who has them ought to think, intend or feel. Where there is a norm, there is an ought, at least in my usage. Some writers have recently pursued an issue about whether ‘rationality is normative’; but it is not clear whether this makes sense given the way I use these words. Some writers restrict the use of the word ‘normative’ only to refer to ‘all things considered’ oughts, and again, this is not my usage. Perhaps relatedly, I did not state the issue over normativity and the mental in terms of ‘reasons’. I think that this generates confusion. But even if there are issues there, my concern is with the relation between propositional attitudes and rational normative properties, however it is with ‘reasons’.

²Perhaps normative properties are explanatory when we discharge an obligation. We might give £5 because we owed the money. Or we might infer something because we are rationally required to do so.

³There is a menu of possible relations that might be used in formulating a thesis called ‘physicalism’. Many of these relations fall short of identity. Jaegwon Kim has argued that once they do so there is a problem, that of ‘explanatory exclusion’[Kim 1998. Many philosophers feel they know where they are with identity, but other relations worry them. But this seems to be a kind of favouritism towards identity among all the other relations. What's so special about identity? Leibniz's law? Is that enough to privilege it? I think that such anxiety about relations other than identity can be overcome so that more relaxed forms of physicalism are feasible.

⁴A possible alternative view would be that normative properties are necessary but not essential to propositional attitudes.

⁵I embraced Strong Normative Essentialism in [1998], but rejected it in favour of Weak Normative Essentialism in [2005].

⁶Normative dependence and supervenience are so central to normative thought that expressivists about normativity who would avoid an error theory about our normative thought must strive to capture them, or at least expressivist surrogates of them.

⁷There are Arthur Prior's sort of examples to worry about, such as ‘Undertakers are church officers, therefore undertakers ought to do whatever church officers ought to do’. But perhaps there is a fix for such examples.

⁸Whether Davidson's actual view should be characterized as response-dependent is an interpretative question I shall not broach.

⁹The same is also plausibly true of expressivism about necessity, essence and identity.

¹⁰The mental states on which all existing expressivist accounts are built are propositional attitudes, not merely objectual attitudes or infinitive attitudes: one takes displeasure, for example, in the fact that a cat is being burnt. And these sentiments are propositional attitudes that have essential normative properties. But even if the moral sentiments were objectual sentiments, it is plausible that they would still have essential normative properties. Love and hate, for example, are objectual intentional states that have essential normative properties. (Love makes it rational to care.)

¹¹Compare Descartes's cogito: we might think ‘John does not exist’ but not ‘I do not exist’ (although we might say but not think ‘I do not now exist’, in a letter or recorded message, for example). Thinking ‘I do not exist’ is self-refuting. It is not rationally thinkable, Descartes thought. And my view is that we cannot rationally think ‘It is rational for me to think that nothing, including this very thought, is rational’.

¹²Churchland briefly considers the threat to eliminativism from considerations of normativity [Churchland 1991: III and IV]. But the normativity arguments that he describes are very weak and confused, and so it is hardly surprising he has no trouble dispatching them.

¹³Thanks to an audience for this paper at the University of Glasgow, where there was an interesting discussion. In particular, Fiona Macpherson gave the paper a ‘Glasgow kiss’ (a head-butt), which helped greatly. Thanks also to Byron Davies for some last minute suggestions, and to two referees for the journal.