The Nature Of Normativity

The semantics of normative thought and discourse -- Thinking about what ought to be -- Expressivism -- Causal theories and conceptual analyses -- Conceptual role semantics -- Context and the logic of 'ought' -- The metaphysics of normative facts -- The metaphysical issues -- The normativity of the intentional -- Irreducibility and causal efficacy -- Non-reductive naturalism -- The epistemology of normative belief -- The status of normative intuitions -- Disagreement and the a priori.

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Why read Kant's Critique of Judgment? For most readers, the importance of the work lies in its contributions to aesthetics and, to a lesser extent, the philosophy of biology. Hannah Ginsborg, by contrast, sees the Critique of Judgment as a central contribution to the understanding of human cognition generally. The fourteen essays collected here advance a common interpretive project: that of bringing out the philosophical significance of the notion of judgment which figures in the third Critique and showing its importance both to Kant's own theoretical philosophy and to contemporary views of human thought and cognition. For us to possess the capacity of judgment, on the interpretation defended here, is for our natural perceptual and imaginative responses to involve a claim to their own normativity with respect to the objects which cause them. It is in virtue of this capacity that we are able not merely to respond discriminatively to objects, as animals do, but to bring objects under concepts. The Critique of Judgment, on this reading, rejects the traditional dichotomy between the natural and the normative: our natural psychological responses to the spatio-temporal objects which affect our senses are both causally determined by those objects, and normatively appropriate to them. The essays in this book aim collectively to develop and illuminate this understanding of judgment in its own right, and to use it to address specific interpretive issues in Kant's aesthetics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of biology; they are also concerned to bring out the relevance of this conception of judgment to contemporary debates regarding concept-acquisition, the content of perception, and skepticism about rules and meaning.

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.

Nature and Normativity argues that the problem of the place of norms in nature has been essentially misunderstood when it has been articulated in terms of the relation of human language and thought, on the one hand, and the world described by physics on the other. Rather, if we concentrate on the facts that speaking and thinking are activities of organic agents, then the problem of the place of the normative in nature becomes refocused on three related questions. First, is there a sense in which biological processes and the behavior of organisms can be legitimately subject to normative evaluation? Second, is there some sense in which, in addition to having ordinary causal explanations, organic phenomena can also legitimately be seen to happen because they should happen in that way, in some naturalistically comprehensible sense of 'should', or that organic phenomena happen in order to achieve some result, because that result should occur? And third, is it possible to naturalistically understand how human thought and language can be legitimately seen as the normatively evaluable behavior of a particular species of organism, behavior that occurs in order to satisfy some class of norms? This book develops, articulates, and defends positive answers to each of these questions.

Defeat is the loss of justification for believing something in light of new information. This Element mainly aims to work towards developing a novel account of defeat. It distinguishes among three broad views in the epistemology of defeat: scepticism, internalism, and externalism and argues that that sceptical and internalist accounts of defeat are bound to remain unsatisfactory. As a result, any viable account of defeat must be externalist. While there is no shortage of externalist accounts, the Element provides reason to think that extant accounts remain unsatisfactory. The Element also explains the constructive tasks of developing an alternative account of defeat and showing that it improves on the competition.

What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity--the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave--and offers a novel account of responsibility.

Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard.