Staying in touch with normative reality

Abstract

Ralph Wedgwood has, almost single-handedly, attempted to shoulder the burden that critics of Platonic non-naturalism have laid at its feet for years. If there are irreducible, non-natural normative facts, properties, and relations, critics have pressed, just where are they in the order of things? And if they are outside the natural, causal order, how can we come to know them, or refer to them, or be necessarily moved by them? The standard answer, "These facts are known a priori, by rational intuition", has only deepened the mystery. For, as Kant pointed out, normative truths would have substantive implications for thought and action, and so must be synthetic rather than analytic. But how could purely rational a priori intuition deliver knowledge of such truths? Wedgwood finds the Intuitionists' self-assurance about their contact with normative reality not much better than magical thinking, and therefore seeks to offer a fundamental philosophical explanation of "the nature of normative facts, properties, and relations" that provides an illuminating, recognizably Platonic response to these worries. Aware of the constraints imposed upon metaphysical accounts of the normative by supervenience, Wedgwood also aims to work within the assumptions of what he calls "moderate naturalism", according to which all the contingent facts in the world contingent normative facts included are "realized in facts of the sort that are studied by the natural sciences and physics". No brief commentary can do justice to the full sweep and ingenuity of The Nature of Normativity. Here I will confine myself to some of the issues that are the central focus of Part II, which is presented as the metaphysical portion of the story. However, the intricate, interlocking nature of this story will require me to venture a bit into the semantic and epistemological concerns that take up Parts I and III.