Normativism and Naturalism
Normativity of intentional and mental states as well as of language.
The question is the essential normativity of linguistic meaning and/or intentional (belief, mental state) content.
Meaning-engendered normativity: Normativity is brought about by the meaning.
Meaning-determined normativity: meaning is, at least in part, determined by norms, conventions, rules for use.
Content-engendered normativity: A mental state or belief with content has normative consequences.
Content-determined normativity: The rules or conventions governing mental states and/or beliefs are normative.
The idea that the normative in some sense is not part of nature goes back at least to the Kant (see, for instance, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), A 547). Already Hume (in the Treatise (1739-1740)) argued against the metaethical naturalist that ought cannot be derived from is - to try to do so would be to commit a so-called "naturalistic fallacy". With the "open question argument", Moore (in Principa Ethica (1903)) added a weapon to the anti-naturalist's arsenal also against giving naturalistic accounts of moral evaluations: According to the open question argument, there is no naturalistic (set of) concept(s) analytically equivalent to the moral concept of goodness, since no matter what naturalistic definition is given, the question whether all and only things satisfying it are good still makes sense. [a naturalistic definition of good must exclude questions concerning the definition of good] - Much of recent normativism about meaning/content continues in this anti-naturalist tradition; many normativists about meaning/content hold that the essential normativity of meaning/content makes at least (fully) reductive naturalism untenable.
This is certainly how many have construed Kripke's Wittgenstein; it is part of his skeptical campaign against semantic facts in general that such facts cannot be reduced to whatever precisely is allowed in a naturalistic supervenience [G.E. Moore : "one of the most important facts about qualitative difference ... [is that] two things cannot differ in quality without differing in intrinsic nature" - fundamental nature of the relationship] base for meaning/content. As we have seen above (section 2.2), matters are rather more complicated here, though. On the one hand, it is a matter of dispute among teleosemanticists (?), for instance, whether the biological concept of a function is a normative concept, or not. (non-normative facts exist) On the other, it is clearly possible to endorse the claim that meaning/content supervenes upon non-semantic, non-normative facts without thereby being committed to reductive naturalism. (meaning/content as a single object can not be changed without changing non-semantic, non-normative facts. this argument does not need to derive ought from is) In between, there is quite some room, for instance for partially reductive accounts construing meaning/content as determined by a dispositional and non-semantic, but normative component.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that if there is an argument of the general, a priori kind of Kripke's skeptic would need, it is supposed to come from normativism (cf. Boghossian 1989a, 509; Wikforss 2001, 203; Hattiangadi 2007, 64).
