It is plausible to suppose that the normativity of evaluative (e.g., moral and epistemic) judgments arises out of and is, in some sense, dependent on our actual evaluative practice. At the same time, though, it seems likely that the correctness of evaluative judgments is not merely a matter of what the underlying practice endorses and condemns; denial of this leads one into a rather objectionab...

Incompleteness — the absence of alternative natural numbers — can be ascribed to a ready-made normativity, inducing a rigid departure syntax/semantics. Geometry of Interaction, set in the noncommutative universe of von Neumann algebras, makes normative assumptions explicit, thus rending possible their internalisation, a possible way out from the semantic aporia. As an illustration, we define an...

When Pat Suppes asked if I would be willing to take part in a panel on norms and their conflicts last year, I asked him what he had in mind—what did he mean by a norm, and what kinds of conflicts among norms did he hope the panelists would discuss? Pat said that he preferred to let the panelists interpret the topic as they saw fit. So let me begin by offering an interpretation of the topic—of t...

This paper begins to develop an improved contextualist account of normative language, focusing in particular on normative readings of modal verbs— so-called deontic modals. The proposed account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, which I call Discourse Contextualism (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinct...

Normative theories of urban design deal with the question of how to create the best urban environment, or, as Lynch (1981) puts it, Ôhow to know a good city when you see oneÕ. However, what is best is a question of values as well as how cities are conceptualized in terms of what they are for. For some, the most important aspect of a city may be its aesthetic qualities. Although aesthetics may b...