Normativity and Realism
Apr. 5th, 2005 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apollianaThing 1: There isn't a sphere of "the normative": there's a family of distinctions. As a description applied to types of statement, it doesn't work, since "normative" statements often take the form of simple declarative sentences. Cavell: "if a normative utterance is one used to create or institute rules or standards, then prescriptive utterances are not examples of normative utterances. Establishing a norm is not telling us how we ought to perform an action, but telling us how the action is done, or how it is to be done. Contrariwise, telling us what we ought to do is not instituting a norm to cover the case, but rather presupposes the existence of such a norm, i.e. presupposes that there is something to do which it would be correct to do here. Telling us what we ought to do may involve appeal to a pre-existent rule or standard, but it cannot constitute the establishment of that rule or standard" (MWMWWS, 22-23). If we cannot get from an "is" to an "ought" it's because there is no "ought" unless there is already an "is"--an action with respect to which that "ought" is a recommendation. It's not because there are only scientific explanations of things on both sides; but rather because this is how it's done contains an "is." All of language can be thought of as "normative," and indeed all of life, insofar as all the things we learn how to do are things there are ways of doing, correctly or incorrectly or clumsily or by mistake, and so on.
"Normative" is also often used to mean something like "subjective" or "first personal." But it doesn't mean these things; it just means that there are standards nearby. (And maybe those standards want defining.) The wide use of "normative" to distinguish first personal sorts of things from scientific sorts of things really distinguishes deflationary accounts from non-deflationary ones. The "normativist" would say that the norms the deflationary account rejects are exactly what require to be explained, and explaining them away gets us nowhere. (Specifically, it gets us nowhere intelligible to us, nowhere we can navigate to and from when dealing with the concepts in question. In that sense, in the sense of pertaining to people who have certain concepts and who act in the world, "normative" does refer to us, as individuals.) The "normativist" insists that the philosophical problems keep coming back; because, within the concepts from which they arise, they do. This is practical, anti-philosophical, and pro-philosophical, all at the same time.
In Moran, there are "deliberative" and "theoretical" perspectives we can take on ourselves and our actions. The theoretical stance deflates the deliberative, but it is equally natural. (This is like saying global skepticism is natural; and that it can't be a thoroughly "third personal" activity because it is something that we do and have ways of doing.) But the "theoretical" stance is dangerous, all the same.
Thing 2: Ontological commitment: we're "committed" to whatever we need for our sentences to make sense. Or at least to some value filling its variables. But we're not always in the business of theorizing when we utter existential generalizations. SW seems to mean by this something like presupposition, that if we refer to something we're presupposing it (or at least some value filling its variable). Think of the kind of existential generalizations accompanied by pointing: "there are some dogs" (what someone in the Chinese Room couldn't do). Must we be realists about entities to which we 1) have immediate access and/or 2) can refer to by ostensive existential generalization? Does it depend on what we're trying to do with those statments? (Footnote: I want to accept direct perception, but: I think the use of "perception" to describe it is odd, and foisting it into the service of "language grounding" also seems odd: it puts the findings from ordinary language philosophy about the unreflective, untheoretical things we do with words and into the service of a problem they seemed to repudiate.)
Thing 3: Ways of doing things have consequences for us. Not presuppositions, exactly, but consequences, e.g. about what we must mean if we say such-and-such. They place us in the world in certain ways ("saying something is never merely saying something, but is saying something with a certain tune and at a proper cue and while executing the appropriate business" MWMWWS, 33). And if there's something to be said about what we "must" mean, that's because our action in speaking has been interepreted as belonging to a preexisting kind.
All this is making me want to be a realist about something, but I'm not sure what.
"Normative" is also often used to mean something like "subjective" or "first personal." But it doesn't mean these things; it just means that there are standards nearby. (And maybe those standards want defining.) The wide use of "normative" to distinguish first personal sorts of things from scientific sorts of things really distinguishes deflationary accounts from non-deflationary ones. The "normativist" would say that the norms the deflationary account rejects are exactly what require to be explained, and explaining them away gets us nowhere. (Specifically, it gets us nowhere intelligible to us, nowhere we can navigate to and from when dealing with the concepts in question. In that sense, in the sense of pertaining to people who have certain concepts and who act in the world, "normative" does refer to us, as individuals.) The "normativist" insists that the philosophical problems keep coming back; because, within the concepts from which they arise, they do. This is practical, anti-philosophical, and pro-philosophical, all at the same time.
In Moran, there are "deliberative" and "theoretical" perspectives we can take on ourselves and our actions. The theoretical stance deflates the deliberative, but it is equally natural. (This is like saying global skepticism is natural; and that it can't be a thoroughly "third personal" activity because it is something that we do and have ways of doing.) But the "theoretical" stance is dangerous, all the same.
Thing 2: Ontological commitment: we're "committed" to whatever we need for our sentences to make sense. Or at least to some value filling its variables. But we're not always in the business of theorizing when we utter existential generalizations. SW seems to mean by this something like presupposition, that if we refer to something we're presupposing it (or at least some value filling its variable). Think of the kind of existential generalizations accompanied by pointing: "there are some dogs" (what someone in the Chinese Room couldn't do). Must we be realists about entities to which we 1) have immediate access and/or 2) can refer to by ostensive existential generalization? Does it depend on what we're trying to do with those statments? (Footnote: I want to accept direct perception, but: I think the use of "perception" to describe it is odd, and foisting it into the service of "language grounding" also seems odd: it puts the findings from ordinary language philosophy about the unreflective, untheoretical things we do with words and into the service of a problem they seemed to repudiate.)
Thing 3: Ways of doing things have consequences for us. Not presuppositions, exactly, but consequences, e.g. about what we must mean if we say such-and-such. They place us in the world in certain ways ("saying something is never merely saying something, but is saying something with a certain tune and at a proper cue and while executing the appropriate business" MWMWWS, 33). And if there's something to be said about what we "must" mean, that's because our action in speaking has been interepreted as belonging to a preexisting kind.
All this is making me want to be a realist about something, but I'm not sure what.
