Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,’ ‘ought,’ ‘must,’ and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries.
The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsÑminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts’ themselves.Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism.
These claims have regularly come to grief when the time comes to explain what normativity means, where it comes from, and why it is that what is normative in one social setting or intellectual context is not normative in another. The last issue, the problem of local normativity, is especially important. Different groups of people, different professions, users of different languages have different norms. The fact that what counts as correct, true, or valid differs from setting to setting compels us to recognize that this variation is, in some sense of this problematic term, “social.”Unsurprisingly, answers to questions about the source and authority of norms traffic in sociological concepts. Community plays a central role in Saul Kripke’s discussion of rule-following in Wittgenstein (1982, 56, 79–81, 89–109 passim) and in subsequent discussions of the problem. Collective intentionality is central to Sellars, who reinterprets Kant’s notion of rational beings in terms of a rational collectivity of rational beings whose collective intentions are the source of the binding character of reason (DeVries 2005, 266–67; Sellars 1968, VII § 144: 225, 226; 1967, 411).1 Do these usages mean that the end of the regress is in sociological facts? Kripke’s seems to – it ends, or appears to end, in actual communities. Sellars’s community of rational beings, however, is entirely virtual. The normativist can deny that there is an issue here and say that the relevant sociological concepts, such as community, are themselves dual concepts, with both a normative and a sociological sense. This allows them to say that the sense of community needed to account for the normativity of rule-following is the normative sense rather than the sociological. Or they can argue that such concepts as “practice” are normative rather than causal (Rouse 2002, 19–22).
Each of these arguments has problems. But the dual-character argument opens a door that normativists do not want to open; a door to a dualism in which the normative has no explanatory or metaphysical significance at all. The issue appears in a particularly sharp form in connection with the program known as SSK, the sociology of scientific knowledge. SSK operates with what it takes to be a naturalistic notion of reason, in which reasons figure as causes of the beliefs of scientists. But SSK wishes to remain neutral with respect to questions about validity, and objects, in the words of David Bloor, to “the intrusion of a non-naturalistic notion of reason into the causal story” ([1976] 1991, 177, cited in Friedman 1998, 245). This insistence, Michael Friedman suggests,
rests on a misunderstanding. All that is necessary to stop such an “intrusion” of reason is mere abstinence from normative or prescriptive considerations. We can simply describe the wealth of beliefs, arguments, deliberations, and negotiations that are usually at work in scientific practice, as Bloor says above, “without regard to whether the beliefs are true or the inferences rational.” In this way, we can seek to explain why scientific beliefs are in fact accepted without considering whether they are, at the same time, rationally or justifiably accepted. And in such a descriptive, purely naturalistic enterprise, there is precisely enough room for sociological explanations of why certain scientific beliefs are accepted as the empirical material permits. Whether or not philosophers succeed in fashioning a normative or prescriptive lens through which to view these very same beliefs, arguments, deliberations and so on, is entirely irrelevant to the prospects for empirical sociology. In this sense, there is simply no possibility of conflict or competition between “nonnaturalistic,” philosophical investigations of reason, on the one hand, and descriptive, empirical sociology of scientific knowledge on the other. (1998, 245)
This is a very rich statement, and it provides an alternative picture, with a distinctive but nevertheless impeccably Kantian pedigree, for an account of the relation of the causal or sociological and the normative that does not invoke normativity as something in the same explanatory domain as the causal, that is to say as a fact which is relevant to explanation.
Friedman prefaces this statement by asking “why SSK represents itself as in conflict or competition with traditional philosophy. Why do we not simply acknowledge the fundamental divergence in aims and methods and leave it at that?”
