According to one view about the rationality of belief, such rationality is ultimately nothing other than the rationality that one exhibits in taking the means to one’s ends. On this view, epistemic rationality is really a species or special case of instrumental rationality. In particular, epistemic rationality is instrumental rationality in the service of one’s distinctively cognitive or episte...

Belief, some say, is normative. To say this is to say, not only that beliefs are subject to normative standards or principles, but that it is part of the essence of belief to be subject to such norms. Call this view, Normativism. Normativism, so characterised, should be distinguished from three related claims. First, that it is part of the concept of belief that it is subject to normative stand...

I discuss eight theses espoused or occasioned by Toulmin: (1) The validity standard is nearly always the wrong standard for real-life reasoning. (2) Little in good reasoning is topic neutral. (3) The probability calculus distorts much probabilistic reasoning. (4) Scant resources have a benign influence on human reasoning. (5) Theoretical progress and conceptual change are connected. (6) Logic s...

This paper investigates a puzzling feature of social conventions: the fact that they are both arbitrary and normative. We examine how this tension is addressed in sociological accounts of conventional phenomena. Traditional approaches tend to generate either synchronic accounts that fail to consider the arbitrariness of conventions, or diachronic accounts that miss central aspects of their norm...

The paper addresses some frequent objections to the claim that meaning is normative, thus defending the inferentialist construal of meaning that does entail this claim. The objections we discuss are (i) that there is no norm that assertions should aim at the truth, (ii) that there are no norms commanding us how to speak and (iii) that a normative account is bound to collapse into a naturalistic...

I shall argue that the concept of (valid) law is a purely normative notion, irreducible to any factual description. This uncontroversial notion, which is shared by all approaching the law from the internal point of view, needs to be distinguished from the competing theories on the grounds of legal bindingness, namely, on the reasons for qualifying a norm as legally valid. I shall consider some ...

This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have ‘content’—that is, how they can se...

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John Hare has proposed “prescriptive realism” in an attempt to stake out a middle-ground position in the twentieth century Anglo-American debates concerning metaethics between substantive moral realists and antirealistexpressivists. The account is supposed to preserve both the normativity and objectivity of moral judgments. Hare defends a version of divine command theory. The proposal succeeds ...