OnNormativity

Normativity is the sense of "ought". Either in an ethical sense that you ought not to do something that's wrong (CategoricalImperative) or a sense of purpose or function such as "a working heart should pump blood". (HypotheticalImperative)

Questions about normativity are very curious. On the one hand, there's a strong intuition that "you can't get an ought from an is". No amount of mere descriptionseems to imply a prescription. On the other hand, science gives us a picture of the universe composed of law-like causal relations between elements. And somehow we want to use that to model and explain the universe. But how does normativity get in? How is it possible we can say that the heart ought to pump blood, that it has a purpose of pumping blood, or that a heart which doesn't pump blood is faulty?

But we can't just do without considering normativity. For example, as I argue in DefendingAdaptionism, a science like EvolutionaryBiology depends heavily on it's notions of purpose. I argue that, for example, hearts are organs which belong to the class of "pumps" and it only under this functional category that it makes sense to compare hearts from two different species as being examples of the same kind of thing, and it's this which lets us do "science" on them. (DemarcatingScience)

Or to take another example, normativity can be a route to understanding the mind. We view brains as instances of the functionally demarcated category of "minds" which have a purpose to keep track of, or model or represent the state of the world and possible past and future states. That's not to say that being purposeful is the whole story of minds, but understanding how physical systems can have purposes might be a useful step towards understanding them.

A connection between normativity and mindedness can occur in the set of ideas due to LudwigWittgenstein. Wittgenstein's position seems to be something like : what it is to be rational is to know how words or symbols ought to be played, as moves in the LanguageGame which your society / culture plays. Failure to follow the rules correctly is equivalent to failure to have a mind at all.

Without a set of normative rules to govern the use of words, there is no language and no rationality.

Some other pages which I'm connecting with normativity :

• TheQualityWithoutAName / AntiPattern (I think ChristopherAlexander is feeling for a theory of normativity in TheTimelessWayOfBuilding. Good patterns are patterns which you ought to have, or are at least beautiful or alive.

• CategoryEthics

• HellForStars