the normativity of mental content thesis appears to have been the most influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. paul boghossian (2003, 2005) has developed an argument for the normativity of mental content on the basis of two premises, i.e. firstly, the normativity of the notion of belief and secondly, the priority of the notion of belief to the notion of desire. in his recent article ale...

Normativity is widely regarded as being naturalistically problematic. Teleosemantic theories aimed to provide a naturalistic grounding for the normativity of mental representation in biological proper function, but have been subject to a variety of criticisms and would in any case provide only a thin naturalist platform for grounding normativity more generally. Here I present an account that id...

in this article, on the basis of habermas’ universal pragmatics, we have tried to indicate that empirical pragmatics in linguistics, suffers from ‘normativity deficit’ in the field of foreign language education. what we mean by ‘normativity deficit’, is the lack of normative resources required for judging the validity claims inherent in social interactions. since agreement on the validity claim...

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is som...

The central issue is both general and well known as being problematic. It concerns the relation between the factual and the normative, between ‘what is the case’ on the one hand, and ‘what has to be done’ or ‘what has to be’ on the other. This issue is fundamental and recognized to have a direct relevance to contemporary neuroscience (Changeux, 2000; Damasio, 2003) and to current philosophy (Go...

To many it seems obvious that normativity or justification depends upon desire. Few answers to the question, ‘Why should I?’ seem more natural than ‘Because I want to,’ and if we are told, ‘You should do this,’ there is something natural about the objection, ‘But I don’t want to, so why?’ I believe that the very nature of normativity can be comprehensively explained in terms of desire: the myst...

On the nonnaturalists’ view, ... reality has ‘brute, inexplicable’ normativity, which cannot be explained in motivational or other natural terms. This inexplicability is twofold: we cannot explain what normativity is in nonnormative language, and neither can we explain why the fundamental normative truths hold (e.g., why the fact that pain hurts counts in favor of preventing it). (Finlay 2007: 24)

In this paper I defend a teleological explanation of normativity, i. e., I argue that what an organism (or device) is supposed to do is determined by its etiological function. In particular, I present a teleological account of the normativity that arises in learning processes, and I defend it from some objections.

Development is guided by multiple norms, and further normativities emerge in development. This should be a commonplace observation — after all, it characterizes the core dialectic of developmental processes — but normativity is instead a perplexing and sometimes desperately ignored aspect of development. I will address some reasons why normativity is so perplexing, reasons that begin with Parme...