Normative Truths Research Articles

Beyond a Single Story: Peripheral Histories of Boys Brought Up in a Residential School

ABSTRACT In recent decades, a singular story that speaks of awful and endemic abuse in residential schools has assumed a status as normative truth. Schools run by religious orders attract particular opprobrium. A single story can act to totalise experiences and can occlude nuance and complexity in how we understand the past. Invariably, other stories are to be found submerged beneath any grand narrative that has been laid down. In the case of residential schools, these submerged stories belong to those children brought up in residential schools who do not recognise themselves in the dominant story. This article offers an account of life in a Scottish residential school run by a Catholic religious order. The author worked there over the course of the 1980s and has conducted life-history interviews with boys he looked after there. Their accounts offer a powerful counter narrative to the dominant story of the schools. The article proceeds to discuss the gulf between the two stories from a position of narrative inquiry. It cautions against attempts to judge the past from the vantage point of the present and calls for more finely grained and grounded approaches to social work history than are currently evident.

Grounds of Semantic Normativity

There are two prevalent accounts of semantic normativity: the prescriptive account, which can be found in some of Wittgenstein’s remarks, and the regularity account, which may have been Sellars’s view and is nowadays defended by some antinormativists. On the former account, meanings are norms that govern the use of words; on the latter, they are regularities of use which, in themselves, do not engender any prescriptions. I argue that only the prescriptive view can account for certain platitudes about meaning, which motivate the very idea of semantic normativity. After some preliminary clarifications about the form that alleged semantic norms should take in order to be prima facie plausible, I argue—against some antinormativists—that whatever normativity is involved in the meaning of words cannot be brought back to a general norm of truth as distinct from specifically semantic norms, for semantic norms already involve a norm of truth (or truthfulness, depending on how they are phrased). Next, I examine what I take to be the strongest objection to semantic normativity, namely the identification of meaning with use: as use is just a bunch of facts, it cannot be attributed any normative import. Nowadays, this view has been defended by Paul Horwich. After criticizing Horwich’s claim that meaning, though not normative in itself, has unmediated normative implications, I propose a different view of the relation between use and meaning, on which meaning is not quite identical with use but (in most cases) is grounded on use. I propose as a model the idea of a hyperconformist social system: a system in which customs, and only customs, generate norms. I suggest that language is such a system, and describe two reasons why it is plausible for language to work like that. Finally, I analyze statements of meaning (“w means such-and-such”) on the model of Ruth Millikan “pushmi-pullyu” representations, i.e. as having both descriptive and normative import. I point out that, however, there are exceptions to meaning’s being grounded on use, as there are cases in which semantic norms are dictated by authorities of several kinds. Lastly, I briefly discuss the suggestion that meaning supervenes on use, showing that, aside from its inherent difficulties, it does not explain why meaning would supervene on use.

Post-deliberative Democracy

AbstractWithin any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can be violated in specific ways, but that many of the norms governing rational deliberation can also be violated, not just without penalty, but often for significant political gain. As a result, the level of noise (false or misleading communications) has come to drown out the signal (earnest attempts at deliberation). The post-truth political condition is the cumulative result of innovations developed by actors who adopt an essentially strategic orientation toward political communications.

Dementia care, robot pets, and aliefs.

Studies have shown that using robot pets in dementia care contributes to a reduction in loneliness and anxiety, and other benefits. Studies also show that, even when people know they are dealing with robots, they often treat the robot as though it is a real pet with genuine emotions. This disconnect between beliefs and behavior occurs not just for people living with dementia, but with cognitively healthy adults, including those who are knowledgeable about how robots work. One possible explanation is that robot pets prompt contradictory beliefs, and so the use of robot pets encourages self-deception. Sparrow argues that this makes the use of robot pets in dementia care morally objectionable. We disagree. We argue that Gendler's concept of alief offers a better explanation of the belief-behavior disconnect observed when people interact with robot pets. An alief is a mental state composed of an automatic, arational, emotional, and behavioral response to representational input. Aliefs are not beliefs and are not subject to truth norms. Thus, on our view, harms associated with the use of robot pets in dementia care are not likely to include the self-deceptions that Sparrow suggests. It might seem like philosophical hair-splitting to claim that deception has not occurred because discordant aliefs rather than false beliefs have been formed, but this distinction matters. We argue that aliefs carry their own risks. These risks are important to consider when using robot pets in dementia care.

In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay

In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay

Designed Generalization from Qualitative Research

In our earlier work on generalizing from qualitative research (GQR) we identified our two-decade struggle to have qualitative research outcomes formally “listened to” by policy personnel and bureaucratic systems in general, with mixed success. The policy sector often seems reluctant to acknowledge that qualitative research findings can be generalized, so impacts tend to be informal or simply ignored. The “official” methodological literature on generalizing from qualitative research is epitomized by Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) still oft quoted, “The only generalization is: there is no generalization” (p. 110). We now understand there are many alternative possibilities for generalizing. In this paper we hope to provide a platform for discussion on GQR. We suggest Normative Truth Statements (NTS) as a foundation. NTSs, used in our proposed generalizability cycle, are a potential key to ensuring designated qualitative research methodology provides a capacity for generalization—and therefore be considered as a valid form of evidence in policy decisions. In other words, we need a platform to articulate how to design qualitative research to maximize the type and scope of generalizability outcomes, referred to here as Designed Generalization from Qualitative Research (DGQR). Five steps of DGQR, using progressive NTSs in the generalizability cycle, are proposed as a way forward in understanding how generalizing from qualitative research may be made more transparent, accountable, and useful. The five steps are illustrated by reference to two example studies.

On the politics of discomfort

This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Building on the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, I trace discomfort as an affective intensity that matters for opening up resistant and anti-colonial feminist research practices and modes of knowledge production. Starting, and staying, with discomfortis theorised as a form of resistance to the reiteration of comfortable and normative truths and ‘wilful ignorances’. Weaving together the work of postqualitative and postcolonial feminist theorists, the sticky praxis of discomfort is conceptualised as involving a number of research strategies, including: (1) engaging with ‘gut feelings’ and (2) embracing interpretive hesitancy. In moving beyond an idealisation of empathy as the central affective principle underlying feminist research praxis, this article explores the epistemic and political salience of discomfort as affective intensity, ‘sweaty concept’ and potentially transformative interpretive resource.

Assertions and Their Function

I argue that the norms of assertion are engendered by the function of assertions, and that the function of assertions is, roughly, to facilitate the transmission of information from those who have it to those who need it. Assertions can play this role if they are governed by two norms. One norm is deontic in nature, and specifies the conditions under which a speaker may issue an assertion. I argue that the deontic norm permits A to issue an assertion to B if and only if: (1) doing so would improve B’s epistemic position with regards to the proposition thus conveyed, and (2) the proposition conveyed is justified (for A) in a way, and to a degree, appropriate to the purposes for which B is likely to use it. The other is not deontic; it says what it is for an assertion to be good, qua assertion. This is a truth norm. Assertions ought to be true, in that an assertion is good, qua assertion, when it is true.

Epistemic Norms, the False Belief Requirement, and Love

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other.

Business and accounting standards that only support the capitalist interest: Critical thinking with institutional theory

The interests of investors have become the attention and purpose of regulators of business regulation, especially accounting regulations. Through the development of IFRS-based accounting standards, accounting regulators place the results of capital market-based studies as the main reference in developing accounting standards in the World. This study tries to uncover the other side of IFRS that is changing the world and directing its goals towards achieving the goals of investors. Using an institutional theory approach, this study places a critical mind on how an organization will be contaminated with external factors. There is an institutional environmental pressure that causes institutionalization. Institutional theory encourages the institutionalization of an organization under external pressure, which is an idea that will form a symbol and eventually become the norm of truth in the organization as a common goal.

The Phenomenon of Conscience in Social Work

The Phenomenon of Conscience in Social Work

Anti-Exceptionalism About Requirements of Epistemic Rationality

I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like (Bradley, Philosophers’ Imprint, 19(3). 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them (Smithies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85(2). 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid.

Value and moral component of the concept «future» in Russian linguoculture

The paper deals with culture generating texts treated as speech products corresponding to dominant features of civilization in cultural history. Three types of such texts - sacral regulations, mass circulation products and virtual net messages - have radically changed the idea of authorship and corresponding attitudes of public to texts. The first text type brought to life selected priests who were regarded as keepers of sacral knowledge to be transmitted to coming generations, the second text type initiated numerous artisans who produced various one-time texts suitable for everyday purposes, the third text type generated illusionists who launch secondary texts through the world electronic network for the sake of carnival play with life. The characteristics of three types of text as indicators of culture have been described on the material of aphorisms. Autosemantic sentences of the first type are usually expressed as manifestations of general truth or common norms of behavior, the second type phrases function as trivial observations or specific recommendations in particular situations, whereas the third type texts have a paradoxical nature or are used as banter expressions uttered to fill the gaps in conversation. Sentences of the first type make the core golden reserve of human wisdom, and they are often used in situations of social inequality when people demonstrate their experience and right to give lessons to others. Sentences of the second type are very important for everyday routine life, and they appear in corresponding habitual situations. Sentences of the third type are applied mainly in interactions which require a critical reaction to any type of edification, either moral or utilitarian, their aim is to establish equality as such by means of ridicule of any kind of self-admiration.

Welfare and Freedom: Towards a Semi-Kantian Theory of Private Law

The Kantian theory of private law, as Ernest Weinrib and Arthur Ripstein have developed it over the last two decades, is based on a fundamental normative truth, viz., no person is subordinate or superior to another person. Kantians construe any attempt to understand and justify the distribution of the rights-claims and rights-liberties that constitute private law in terms of aggregate welfare and/or distributive justice, as a deep category mistake. This essay outlines a ‘semi-Kantian’ theory of private law, which is like Kant’s in that it understands private law as a means of instituting and protecting private freedom. Yet, semi-Kantians insist that the choice between different private law programs, which respect private freedom equally well, can at times be justified by considerations of aggregate welfare and distributive justice, as well as other considerations that concern the impact on society as a whole.

The knowledge norm of belief

Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief as a knowledge norm, rather than a truth norm. I argue that a specific kind of knowledge norm—one that has a subject's obligation to believe that p depend on her being in a position to know that p—might avoid the well-known formulation problems with truth norms.

Truth in Democratic Politics

This article clarifies the recent epistemic rehabilitation of democracy and adds to it in two respects. First, I point out that the epistemic rehabilitation of democracy identifies an internal connection of democracy with normative truths—but only an external connection with substantial truth and correctness. Second, such an internal connection surfaces when we focus on the place of criticism in democracy. Criticism, however, presupposes pluralism and a recognition of the provisionality of decisions. So I, third, analyse prominent theories of truth and examine what conceptions of pluralism and provisionality they allow. This evokes a view emphasizing the unruly role of truth; criticism introduces a commitment to correctness, and this commitment to correctness underwrites the provisional nature of democratic decisions.

Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma by Eduardo J. Echeverria

Reviewed by: Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma by Eduardo J. Echeverria Michael McClymond Revelation, History, and Truth: A Hermeneutics of Dogma by Eduardo J. Echeverria (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), xxi + 199 pp. Catholic fundamental theologians ought to attend to Eduardo Echeverria's wide-ranging new book, appearing when foundational theological issues stand in the foreground, as witnessed by debates over Amoris Laetitia, critiques from the Dubia Cardinals, controversies over the death penalty, and the 2019 Amazon Synod. The scope of argumentation in Echeverria's work is ambitious, encompassing essentialist-versus-historicist disputes over Vatican II (1–45), the nature of revelation, Scripture, and Tradition (47–92), questions of epistemic and theological foundationalism (93–152), and definitions of a Lérinian hermeneutics of tradition (153–74), as well as the development of dogma (175–95). While each theme might have filled out an entire volume, Echeverria in surveying each theme provides a compact yet comprehensive vision. The book is a contemporary manifesto for Catholic fundamental theology. Catholic readers will be struck by the many Protestant (and especially Protestant Evangelical) authors cited here, including such luminaries as G. C. Berkouwer, G. E. Ladd, Colin Gunton, Paul Helm, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Oliver Crisp. This engagement with non-Catholic authors reflects Echeverria's earlier, PhD-level training in Protestant dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam. Nonetheless, this work is not a mediation between Catholic and Evangelical reasoning, but rather a constitutively Catholic argument that selectively deploys ideas from Protestant as well as Catholic sources. Protestant insights here serve Catholic purposes. It is [End Page 1414] not just that non-Catholics have good things to say, but that Evangelical thinkers in their two-century-long battle against modernist Protestantism have accumulated their own rich repertoire of arguments that prove useful. For Echeverria, ecumenism involves co-belligerency: the enemy of my enemy may prove to be my friend. Among the Catholic thinkers whom Echeverria cites appreciatively are Thomas Aquinas, Yves Congar, Pope John XXIII, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Avery Dulles, Pope Benedict XVI, Aidan Nichols, Germain Grisez, Thomas Guarino, and (more surprisingly) Karl Rahner and David Tracy. Edward Schillebeeckx receives a mixed review in the book in light of his mid-career shift from realism to non-realism (24), as does Gavin D'Costa, since D'Costa rejects relativism but offers a position that Echeverria says is in need of a more robust metaphysical underpinning (27–29). Catholic historians and theologians who serve as a foil, against whom Echeverria reasons, include Giuseppe Alberigo, John O'Malley, Massimo Faggioli, Richard Gaillardetz, Lieven Boeve, and Christoph Theobold. Echeverria opens his book by stating that "I am centrally concerned with the matter of diversity and discontinuity in theological expressions and formulations within a fundamental unity of truth" (1). As collectively "the specter of relativism, antirealism, or fideism" (97), he opposes a cluster of interrelated ideas: that theological assertions make no objective claims regarding the world (non-realism), involve no intellectual or propositional content (non-cognitivism, non-propositionalism), and are always subject to revision or replacement by some new assertion (fallibilism). He writes that "the rejection of a realist notion of truth and language is behind why many find implausible the normative truth of dogmas, creeds, and confessions" (129). The author displays constructive as well as polemical intent in his book, seeking not only to refute false ideas but also to propose better, alternative formulations. Continuity and change in Catholic teaching, argues Echeverria, can be properly understood only if one distinguishes the universal and unchanging truths of the faith from their particular and time-bound forms of expression. What remain changeless are not specific words, nor even doctrinal concepts per se, but the underlying theological judgments and patterns of judgment (xvi). This core claim sets Echeverria at odds with John O'Malley, who uses the words "substantialism" or "essentialism" to typify those who in this way distinguish unchanging truths from their changing expressions (11). Echeverria argues that the truth–expression distinction is not only legitimate but necessary, and that it serves a central purpose in what he calls "the Lérianian legacy of Vatican II" (11). In defense of the truth–expression distinction, Echeverria...

What’s Wrong with Relaxing?

In his new book Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer argues that there is no way round the result that all metaethical views other than the error theory fail either for the same reasons as metaphysical normative realism or expressivism. In this contribution, I show that this is false: we can avoid this result by ‘relaxing’ about normative truths. Even if Streumer were right about the fate of other metaethical positions, then, relaxed realism remains immune to the problems he raises.

How has Australia significantly been affected by globalization? A critical realist explanatory analysis

ABSTRACTThis article discusses whether and how globalization has had a significant effect on Australia, by referencing normative concepts of good or bad, of presence or absence and whether normative truth questions can be asked. These questions are answered by employing Bhaskar’s most recent iteration of the RRREI(C) schema for explanatory analysis. Viewed generally, the essential or necessary component of globalization is the ideology of neo-liberalism from which has emerged the more radical neo-conservatism. Overall these ideologies, which underpin globalization, are having a detrimental effect economically and socially: economically because of widening wealth inequalities both in Australia and globally; and socially because of growing push for protectionism in wealthier countries like Australia. These emerging social and economic ontologically real phenomena are causing consternation and fuelling divisiveness worldwide. Nevertheless, by conducting this explanatory analysis, we were able to identify feasible interventions that would, if implemented, possibly absent the negative aspects of globalization.

The World is Not Enough*

AbstractThroughout his career, Derek Parfit made the bold suggestion, at various times under the heading of the “Normativity Objection,” that anyone in possession of normative concepts is in a position to know, on the basis of their competence with such concepts alone, that reductive realism in ethics is not even possible. Despite the prominent role that the Normativity Objection plays in Parfit's non‐reductive account of the nature of normativity, when the objection hasn't been ignored, it's been criticized and even derided. We argue that the exclusively negative attention that the objection has received has been a mistake. On our reading, Parfit's Normativity Objection poses a serious threat to reductivism, as it exposes the uneasy relationship between our a priori knowledge of a range of distinctly normative truths and the package of semantic commitments that reductivists have typically embraced since the Kripkean revolution.