Editorial: From Is to Ought: The Place of Normative Models in the Study of Human Thought

Normative rules and regulations are everywhere we turn; they are, as Searle (2005) memorably called them, the glue that holds human society together. We stop at red lights and try (not always very successfully) to be fair and truthful in our personal and professional lives. We humans are the only species that internalizes normative rules (Carruthers, 2006), and feels shame and guilt when we violate them. Moreover, we humans are the only species capable of creating novel norms from scratch (Elqayam et al., 2015)—a species-specific, generative capacity no less extraordinary than the much-celebrated generative capacity to create novel sentences. It is not surprising, then, that normative rules feature so prominently in much of the psychology of higher mental processing— reasoning, decision making, and moral judgment. Normative rules dominate much of the great rationality debate, mainly in the form of the striking normative-descriptive gap (Stanovich and West, 2000). Human behavior often deviates from formal standards of rationality, such as classical logic and probability theory. Can humans be said to be rational at all? The answer depends on whom you ask. see the normative-descriptive gap as formidable, and a high level of human rationality as a rare phenomenon. From this viewpoint, being highly rational is like being a concert pianist—a great achievement and an unusual one. However, human rationality is amenable to education, and part of the Meliorist mission is to suggest how it might be improved. see human rationality as a built-in evolutionary toolkit. Being rational, in this viewpoint, is the default—most of us are rational by dint of being human, just as most of us can all see and walk. If there is a gap between human behavior and any particular normative system, it is the normative system that is usually at fault. As conflicting as they seem, Panglossianism and Meliorism nevertheless share some common ground. Both positions are normativist: They accept that rationality is measured by conformity to certain normative standards, while disagreeing, at least to an extent, on what those standards are, and how far the conformity exists. It is easy to see that identifying which normative standard is the right one would have far-reaching consequences for the Panglossians vs. Meliorists debate. Some normative standards may fit human behavior better than others, decreasing the normative-descriptive gap. In particular, the proponents of Bayesian rationality (Oaksford and Chater, 1998, 2007, 2009) suggested that probabilistic norms might provide a better fit …