So much has been written in the last twenty years about norms and their relevance to translation that it is reasonable to assume at least a certain familiarity with the concept of norms as such (cf. Baker 1998 for a concise statement and references). Allow me therefore to preface my remarks with no more than a brief reminder, in the form of a quotation from Thomas Merton’s 1942 essay ‘The Norma...

This collection of papers, presented at the biennual SPT meeting at Delft (2005), is devoted to technology and normativity. As such, that is a very broad topic, since various kinds of norms play a role in technology. For instance, with science, technology shares the important role of epistemological norms and values; reliability of knowledge claims is clearly of paramount importance in technolo...

One of the most enduring elements of Davidson’s legacy is the idea that intentionality is inherently normative. The normativity of intentionality means different things to different people and in different contexts, however. A subsidiary goal of this paper is to get clear on the sense in which Davidson means the thesis that intentionality is inherently normative. The central goal of the paper i...

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. Th...

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...

Although in everyday life and thought we take for granted that there are norms of rationality, their existence presents severe philosophical problems. Kolodny (2005) is thus moved to deny that rationality is normative. But this denial is not itself unproblematic, and I argue that Kolodny’s defense of it—particularly his Transparency Account, which aims to explain why rationality appears to be n...

It seems to be a platitude that belief is governed by a norm of truth. Isn’t the point of belief to believe truths ? Isn’t it a requirement of believing that we should not believe falsehoods? A number of philosophers, however, deny this. Although they recognise that there is an intimate connection between belief and truth, they reject the idea that this connection is normative. Indeed, they tel...

My thesis concentrates on the distinction between pro tanto reasons and allthings-considered judgments, and their relation to normative justification. Negatively, it seeks to show that a prevailing kind of account of this relation should be rejected, namely that family of views which takes it that every reason has an associated weight, and the truth with respect to any issue is established by w...

A striking feature of the contemporary philosophical scene is the flourishing of a number of research programs aimed in one way or another at making intentional soup out of nonintentional bones—more carefully, specifying in a resolutely nonintentional, nonsemantic vocabulary, sufficient conditions for states of an organism or other system to qualify as contentful representations. This is a move...