The argument of Explaining the Normative

Abstract

The term “normativity” is ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy. It is a term that purports to explain. What it explains are facts of an apparently ubiquitous kind, namely correctness, social institutions, rationality, and much more —semantics, scientific truth, and ethics. But there is a problem with these “explanations.” These facts, sometimes under different descriptions, have already been explained by social scientists, especially some of the classical sociologists and anthropologists, in terms that do not appeal to “normativity.” In other cases, there are rivalries: one can give a normative account of scientific truth, and a sociological and historical one which does not appeal to normativity. These are issues with first-order explanations. But there is also a question about second-order matters: can we even provide explanations without appealing to normative notions such as correctness, as they apply to the explanations themselves? And if not, normativity is indispensable, at least to our metaphysics. So what is normativity? The concept appears in so many contexts that it is difficult to explain except by analogy to paradigm cases. It is the property that makes something correct, that makes an inference valid, or makes a reason rational. The classical case is the law: what makes a law binding? The normative property of bindingness, without which law would not be law, that is to say it would not possess a property we normally associate with law and even define law in terms of. The problem with this claim is simple: nothing that actually happens in the world of social action or behavior seems to require that this property actually exists. What is required to explain what people such as judges and policemen do is that they believe the law is binding. Normativism, however, rejects this, and makes the claim that belief is not enough: the law is really binding and to explain real bindingness requires that we appeal to a special set of facts or entities which can explain this special normative feature of the law. There is an apparent circularity in normativist explanations and descriptions: you have to describe the fact in a certain way to necessitate the normativist explanation. But normativists typically claim that their descriptions are the only correct ones, or that they are part of the normal world of belief and thus provide the material that needs explaining. And they can also argue that the social scientist who tries to explain the same material non-normatively necessarily uses normative language and therefore implicitly accepts normativism. The anti-normativst replies that his language is used in a non-normative way, and thus does not have the normative implications the normativist says its does. Claims about normativity turn out to have a more or less standard form, and a more or less standard conflict with alternative explanations. Something is described in a par-