Explaining the Normative - Softcover

This book does to the many overblown claims concerning ‘normativity’ what Turner previously did against fashionable ideas of ‘social practices’: throws cold water on extravagant claims made on behalf of norms as a distinctive and unavoidable basis for social inquiry. The real strength of this analysis is the way that Turner shows that the current debates about norms have a long history, the consideration of which is essential to understanding the current discussion for good or ill. The book is certainly the best of its kind and an important contribution.
James Bohman

This is the most systematic discussion of normativity by a social theorist (or philosopher of the social sciences). The argument is forceful and original throughout. Turner brings together considerations from a variety of different fields - philosophy of law, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of mind and language, cognitive science - and these different strands re-enforce and strengthen one another. It is particularly intriguing to see how philosophers defending normativity have in many ways "re-invented the normative wheel" that some social theorists have used for a long time. This book should be obligatory reading for philosophers and social scientists alike.

Martin Kusch

Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as 'correct, ' 'ought, ' 'must, ' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries.

The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsNminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of 'concepts' themselves.

Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience.