Normativists about belief hold that belief formation is essentially rule- or norm-guided. On this view, certain norms are constitutive of or essential to belief in such a way that no mental state not guided by those norms counts as a belief, properly construed. In recent influential work, Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss develop novel arguments against normativism. According to their regress of motivations argument, not all belief formation can be rule- or norm-guided, on pain of a vicious infinite regress. I (...) argue that the regress of motivations argument is unsuccessful: an appeal to the notion of blind rule-following, drawn from a plausible interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, stops the regress of motivations in its tracks. (shrink)

Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put (...) forth for and against them. (shrink)

That it can explain the phenomenon of transparency, namely the fact that if you resolve whether p, you have thereby resolved whether to believe that p, was originally put forward as a great virtue of normativist conceptions of belief. However, non-normativists have convincingly shown that the permissive version of the truth norm of belief, which is one of the most plausible and promising versions of it, cannot in fact accommodate this phenomenon. Alarmed by this situation, in this paper I re-assess (...) the transparency phenomenon and its relation to different versions of the truth norm of belief. I argue that, contrary to how it appears, it is not even clear that the most tenable injunctive versions of the truth norm explain this phenomenon. I then argue that the transparency phenomenon consists of two distinct aspects which should be, but have not been, distinguished. What I call the ‘question-shifting’ aspect is explained by the truth norm, irrespective of how it is formulated, while what I call the ‘answer-shifting’ aspect is explanatorily empty and does not require any explanation, be it normative or otherwise. Therefore, understood properly, explaining transparency does remain a strength of normativist accounts of belief, and has no implications for which particular formulation of the truth norm we may adopt. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have argued that there is a basic problem in the no-guidance argument against content normativism. The problem is that the argument restricts the essential normativity of intentional states to the formation of these states being guided by certain norms. But it is suggested that the essential norm-governedness of intentional states can be equally plausibly construed as the assessability of these states by norms, which does not imply complying with them. Although I concur with the problem diagnosed (...) in the no-guidance argument, I take issue with the alternative conception of normativity which is put forward. In its stead, I argue that considering intentional states as commitments whose discharging requires complying with certain norms is preferable because it both respects the insight provided while remaining unscathed by the problems besetting this conception of normativity. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative inferentialism, an utterance has the content that it has in virtue of its normative status, that is, in virtue of the (...) set of commitments and entitlements that the speaker undertakes by producing this utterance. This normative status is determined by the normative attitudes shared by members of the utterer’s linguistic community. I propose here an account of such normative attitudes based on the ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. I explain how social normativity can be understood in that framework as the way in which members of a group shape their social niche to make it more predictable. Finally, I apply this account of social normativity to basic communicative practices, thereby explaining how social normative expectations can emerge to regulate these communicative practices, eventually leading to the institution of the sort of normative statuses constitutive of linguistic content. (shrink)