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Stephen Finlay, Recent Work on Normativity, Analysis, Volume 70, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 331–346, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anq002
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1. The Topic
Although only a recently introduced term of art, philosophical enquiry under the rubric of ‘normativity’ has quickly become a major industry. A date-range search of the Philosopher’s Index for titles with the word returns zero results before 1980,1 three results for the ‘80s, 76 results for the ‘90s and (to date) 218 results for the 2000s.2 Philosophical appeals to normativity are also exceptionally widespread. In addition to the subjects traditionally considered ‘normative’—ethics, practical reason, political and legal philosophy and epistemology—it is increasingly common for philosophers to maintain that normativity is essential in the analysis of subjects as diverse as truth, meaning, probability and psychological attitudes like belief. This article is therefore unavoidably selective and idiosyncratic in the issues and literature it addresses, focusing on some recent developments in metaethics on the nature of normativity.
The explosion of work under this rubric doesn’t signify a newly discovered frontier, however. ‘Normativity’ is merely a new label for one of the oldest and most central of philosophical problems, previously approached through a variety of terms including ‘value’, ‘good’, ‘ought’, ‘justification’, ‘rationality’ and ‘obligation’. So why has this new word been embraced so quickly and widely? The answer is that philosophers are interested in a phenomenon or character taken to be shared by the topics picked out by these terms, but only imperfectly and incompletely picked out by any of them. Normativity is what distinguishes the value side of the ‘fact/value distinction’, but since many writers believe in normative facts this distinction is problematic. It also distinguishes the ought side of the ‘is/ought distinction’, but many paradigmatically normative statements—like those ascribing goodness—involve an ‘is’ rather than an ‘ought’. Hence it is common for contemporary writers, like Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008), to explain what they mean by ‘normativity’ by ostension, in the tradition of Wittgenstein (1997/1930), inviting us to notice the common character shared by various normative notions. The embrace of the term, then, is a consequence of the need for some convenient and efficient way to refer to this important yet hitherto nameless character.