Normativity between philosophy and science

ABSTRACT

Recent decades are marked by the upswing of the use of the term “normativity“ not only in philosophical discussions, but increasingly also within reports of empirical scientists. This may invoke the question how far these developments overlap and in how far they go past each other. A significant overlap might lead to an interesting coalescence of the two approaches to norms, which may provide for a ”naturalization” of some philosophical speculations about normativity, putting them on a firmer foundation, while offering the empirical scientists some new impulses for directing their research. In this paper I give an overview of some recent empirical results concerning human normativity and I point out a certain philosophical tradition, rooted especially in the works of Wittgenstein, Sellars and Brandom, which treats normativity so that it becomes more or less compatible with these results.

KEYWORDS:

• Normativity
• naturalism
• rule
• norm
• normative attitudes

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to Ladislav Koreň and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for valuable critical comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The recent volume with the telling title The normative animal (Roughley & Bayertz, 2019) is led by the idea of taking this importance seriously. However, as I argued (Peregrin, 2020), it does not take it to its most important consequences.

2. Thus, for example, Andrews (2009) argues that “having a theory of mind requires having at least implicit knowledge of the norms of the community, and that an implicit understanding of the normative is what drives the development of a theory of mind” (p. 433); while Cash (2009) urges that “contentful intentional states are normatively constituted within linguistic, social practices” (p. 133). In general, the view that normativity is not a result of our complex cognitive and/or discursive efforts, but rather already a specific dimension of our, human low-level coping with the world and with each other, has been argued for by a number of authors (see. e.g., Baerveldt & Voestermans, 2005; Rietveld, 2008; or Ginsborg, 2011). Some aspects of the recent development are summarized by Finlay (2010).

3. Thus, for example, Rossano (2012) refers to a number of studies that “indicate that social norms are unique to humans and play a pivotal role in our hyper-cooperative tendencies” (p. 4). In a similar spirit, Rochat (2015) stresses that “the human state of being normative is unique in nature” (p. 741); while Rakoczy (2015) concludes that human children, unlike primates or other non-human animals, “use their essentialist and generic thinking for developing a distinctively social ontology, to conceive of their surrounding in terms of socially constituted objects governed by general prescriptive norms” (p. 683).

4. In a paper where I discussed Turner’s criticism in detail I dubbed this view “social normativism” (Peregrin, 2016).

5. Many of the papers discussed here, for which normativity is a central concept, do not offer any explicit explanation – not to speak about definition – of the concept. See, for example, Baerveldt and Voestermans (2005), Wyman et al. (2009), and Schmidt et al. (2011). Explanations in other papers are often only cursory or partial.

6. See, Millikan (1984).

7. Rakoczy (2015, p. 689), claims: “Just as the glue that organizes the natural world (as we think of it) are descriptive regularities, the glue that keeps together the socially constituted world (as we think of it) are prescriptive rules.”

8. Rochat (2015, p. 741), writes: “This is what we refer here as human normativity: practices or judgments that are collectively construed and internalized as either right or wrong, good or bad, true or untrue.”

9. Wittgenstein’s meticulous investigation into the nature of rules taught us some important lessons and indicated that rule following is far from a transparent enterprise. This conclusion was picked up by other scholars who tried to elaborate on Wittgenstein’s analyses, the most influential of which was Kripke’s book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Kripke, 1982). This book stimulated a new wave of “rule following discussion” (McDowell, 1984; Goldfarb, 1985; Boghossian, 1989; Haugeland, 2000). Thus, the legacy of Wittgenstein, in this respect turned out to be eminently stimulating.

10. Brandom (1994, pp. 20–21).

11. See, Peregrin (2021).

12. For other results regarding the role of norms within human ontogenesis see, Kenward et al. (2011), or Schmidt et al. (2016).

13. It is somewhat controversial whether this “agent neutrality” absent from the behavior of non-human animals or whether at least primates evince it too. Riedl et al. (2012), for example, carried out an experiment, in which chimpanzees could punish their conspecifics who stole food. The result was that they did it only when their own food was stolen, not when it was the food of third-parties. Some recent results, however, seem to support the opposite view (Fitzpatrick, 2020; Von Rohr et al., 2015).

14. Again, this is not to say animals other than humans have nothing whatsoever akin to “cultural inheritance”. Primates, for example, do hand down practices related to tool use by means of social learning and sometimes teaching (Musgrave et al., 2016; Whiten, 2021). But again, only we humans have raised pedagogy and enculturation to our complex and systematic enterprise.

15. See also already Sripada and Stich (2007).

16. See, also Rossano (2012).

17. Rakoczy and Schmidt (2013, p. 17) write: “Even very young children learn and understand social activities as governed by conventional norms that (a) are arbitrary and shared by the community, (b) have normative force and apply to all participants, and (c) are valid in context-relative ways. Importantly, such understanding is revealed both in the fact that children themselves follow the norms, and in the fact that they actively enforce them toward third parties.”

18. See, Peregrin (2014) for a more detailed discussion.

19. See, Peregrin (2020a).

20. Of course, this kind of superstructure is again based on rules and it is subject to all the problems concerning rule following, hence the erection would involve “third-order” attitudes aimed at the “second-order” ones etc.; which may make the resulting configuration immensely complex.

21. See, Peregrin (2014) for more detail.

22. I think that Rochat’s (2015) point that this is the source of what we call our self-consciousness may be appropriate; and I think that also our concept of objectivity and of the objective world has very much to do with our tendency to always take into account the viewpoints of others.

23. Quine (1992, pp. 55–6), for example, explains that “how mathematics could be meaningful despite lacking empirical content” by the holistic nature of our scientific theories: “Holism lets mathematics share empirical content where it is applied”. Thus, mathematical statements are meaningful not because they express some peculiarly mathematical facts, but because they are part of scientific theories, which are contentful as wholes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [G20-05180X].

Notes on contributors

Jaroslav Peregrin

Jaroslav Peregrin is the research professor at the Department of Logic of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Hradec Králové, Czechia. He is the author of Inferentialism (Palgrave, 2014), Reflective Equilibrium and the Principles of Logical Analysis (together with V. Svoboda; Routledge, 2017) and Philosophy of Logical Systems (Routledge, 2019). His current research focuses on logical and philosophical aspects of inferentialism and on more general questions of normativity.