Tom Swann What Could One Mean By Normatively Rational Relations

My cousin the mathematician? Jason

Tom: But the question here is

What does the ‘normatively’ point to?

A way of being a mathmetician? A cousin? Constitutive of being a mathematician? A cousin? That their being a mathematician relates you to them normatively? Their being a cousin? And how many ways could the answers to these be related? Presumably, normatively…

But actually, I think the deeper question is, in each case: normative how? If the previous questions ask for an extension, don’t I need to ask for what draws the referential line around these features in this way? That is, {[red what does ‘normative’ mean? ]}

I guess someone like Quine will say that we give the meaning of a term, in any acceptable meaning of that term, just by saying /what/ it applies to. (is this right? {[pink YES. Jason ]} still to read that essay by Quine against ‘meaning’, its name eluding atm.) As far as I can see the thought is not changed relevantly by asking about how the line is drawn in all possible worlds.

This is all a bit messy, I have to get back to it to clean it uo…

but

Seems to me even within such a framework that we need to ask questions like these: What do we need to presuppose in order to make sense of something as normative? This as I undertstand it is roughly Davidson’s modification to Quine’s. Or at the meta level, the question being: what do we need to presuppose to make sense of ourselves as making sense of something as normative? This would be Mc Dowell’s issue, lurking in the shadows of Mind and World. Or in the terms of a transcendental turn of thought: what does something need to be in order to be normatively rationally related to something else, and so to be something we can correctly make sense of as such? This is a much more phenomenological thought. (Though Mc Dowell might agree?)

Of course, all of this skips over very many controversial steps. I’m not sure I can hope even to get to a situation where asking that last question seems respectable. But it seems to me the question all the others questions are wanting to get to. (Or is it just my own wants, my own prejudices?)

Maybe Quine’s thought will reject all of this as misunderstanding his skepticism about meaning. For perhaps the question of what our terms mean for Quine ultimately bottoms out just in a matter of what we the meaning-assigners ‘take’ our terms to apply to, understood in some appropriate way, be it first or other personally. This would be to understand meaning as something that, even if we can rationally reflect upon, understand as normatively constrained and adjudicate internal to some framework / way of asking questions, yet we cannot ask such questions of it externally to all frameworks.

It seems to me that Quine takes this thought to justify the falling back to a position where we can ‘ultimately’ only hope to describe the causal role of various ways of ‘taking’ things to be, be it the meaning of a term or the object of a perception or anything else. Of course the behaviourism is arguably already there for him before these thoughts develop, but this seems one important way it is expressed. If it is right, T That would bring out the parallel with Hume: inding that he cannot justify the basis for many kinds of putative justifications, Hume has to resort to offering descriptions or causal explanations.

Of course one difference is that Quine tells the story in a posteriori terms, whereas Hume always works with what he takes to be a priori acceptable grounds for any justificatory story - namely, in terms of impressions or experiential states, which he then takes to be causally related by processes of habituation and bundling and so on. The irony for Hume on this point of retreat to causal explanation is not often enough stressed. But Hume hangs on to a transcendental, if postivistically pruned, normativity of reason. Quine seems eager to take science to give us a grip on a broadest view of our thinking where there is no clear distinction between what epistemology has often taken to be a schism.

I’m happy to agree with Quine that we have to adopt a way of thinking in order to ask questions like ‘what draws the line around the ’normative’? Indeed for any questions at all. But at this point Price’s reading of Quine intervenes, teasing apart Quine’s naturalist metaphysical commitments from the more transcendental thoughts about epistemic frameworks within and through which we ‘take things to be’ certain ways. (On What There Is: “To be /assumed/ as an entity is, purely and simply, to be /reckoned/ as the value of a variable.”, my slashes). Any descriptive or causal explanatory account (at least qua scientific image where they are at least essentially connected if not equivalent) evaluates things as being like so, and gives a kind of evaluation of the ways things are the intelligibility of which is only possible within a way of thinking, a project we have to take on in order to ask its questions.

The commitments of this idealised scientific causal-explanatory project then are /its/ commitments. And the scientific, or scientistic, way of thinking is one in which prevailing ways of understanding what reasons are block our placing them in the same explanatory picture as the kind of causal story Quine wants to tell about what is involved in reasons to constrain our thoughts, or our taking it to be so. Isn’t that at worse to beg questions? And at best to misconstrue something - perhaps, what it takes to be causal or respectably explanatory?

Which leads back to my task: answering how could normatively rational relations supervene on the physical? by coming to some position not only on what is it to be physical (in all its possibke emergent complexity)? but what is it to be a normatively rational relation?