Nietzsche’s Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Parfit
Keyword(s):  
Normative Beliefs ◽  
Normative Concepts

This chapter discusses the convergence claim. This claim argues that, if everyone knew all of the relevant non-normative facts, used the same normative concepts, understood and carefully reflected on the relevant arguments, and was not affected by any distorting influence, we would nearly all have similar normative beliefs. It also discusses some counterpoints to attempts to reconcile some of Friedrich Nietzsche's claims with what most of us believe. Though Nietzsche sometimes denies that suffering is in itself bad, and even suggests that suffering may be in itself good, that was not, in most of his life, what Nietzsche believed. The chapter goes on to discuss further arguments for and against the Convergence Claim.

Normative Beliefs about Aggression toward the Out-Group among Israeli and Palestinian Youth

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric F. Dubow ◽  
L. Rowell Huesmann ◽  
Erika Y. Niwa ◽  
Paul Boxer ◽  
Simha F. Landau ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Normative Beliefs

Normative Beliefs about Cyberbullying in U.S. and Israeli Youth

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mandy B. Medvin ◽  
Yehuda Peled ◽  
Linda Domanski ◽  
Alissa R. Johnston ◽  
Efrat Pieterse
Keyword(s):  
Normative Beliefs

Perceived Risks and Normative Beliefs as Explanatory Models for College Student Alcohol Involvement: An Assessment of a Campus with Conventional Alcohol Control Policies and Enforcement Practices

NASPA Journal ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd F. Lewis ◽  
Dennis L Thombs
Keyword(s):  
College Student ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
Normative Beliefs ◽  
Control Policies ◽  
Perceptions Of Risk ◽  
Student Drinking ◽  
Alcohol Control ◽  
Effective Interventions ◽  
Alcohol Involvement ◽  
University Communities

The aim of this study was to conduct a multivariate assessment of college student drinking motivations at a campus with conventional alcohol control policies and enforcement practices, including the establishment and dissemination of alcohol policies and the use of warnings to arouse fear of sanctions. Two explanatory models were compared: perceptions of risk and normative beliefs. An anonymous questionnaire was administered to 1,396 students at a large Midwestern university. Data analyses were conducted on the subsample of participants who had reported using alcohol within the past 12 months (n = 1,322). Overall, the results from a canonical correlation analysis indicated that alcohol involvement was best explained by normative beliefs about the drinking practices of one’s closest friends. Perceptions of drinking risk were less important to the explanation of alcohol involvement, and some of these measures unexpectedly had positive associations with indicators of alcohol risk behavior. The findings call into question the conventional deterrence strategies used in many university communities (i.e., belief that students who perceive there to be a low risk of receiving sanctions are those most likely to engage in alcohol related misbehavior). Furthermore, the findings suggest that effective interventions will need to impact students' normative beliefs about the drinking practices of proximal peer groups.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
Unique Experience

Literary works since the rise of high modernism have been intensely hostile to abstract generalization, and have focused attention on the unique experience and singular expression. This nominalist impulse—summed up in the cry “show, don’t tell!”—has encouraged a deep wariness toward broad normative concepts: “good,” “bad,” “courage,” “justice,” etc. More than is often recognized, however, this literary skepticism parallels the skepticism toward such concepts in the natural sciences, which accords no place to such abstract “high words” in a world of matter and calculable motions. Against this dual literary and scientific inheritance, the postwar sage offers a “weak realism” about normative concepts and a “reflective” mode of composition: a movement between the particular and the general, art and argument. Such a literary–intellectual project is risky, and opens the sage to charges of sentimentalism. Closely attending to their works, however, suggests that we should avoid entering this protest too quickly.

Normative Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Eklund
Keyword(s):  
Positive Answer ◽  
Thick Concepts ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

What is it for a concept to be normative? Some possible answers are explored and rejected, among them that a concept is normative if it ascribes a normative property. The positive answer defended is that a concept is normative if it is in the right way associated with a normative use. Among issues discussed along the way are the nature of analyticity, and there being a notion of analyticity—what I call semantic analyticity—such that a statement can be analytic in this sense while failing to be true. Considerations regarding thick concepts and slurs are brought to bear on the issues that come up.

The Value of Rationality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Wedgwood
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Substantive Theory ◽  
Normative Concept ◽  
Normative Concepts

Rationality is a central concept for epistemology, ethics, and the study of practical reason. But what sort of concept is it? It is argued here that—contrary to objections that have recently been raised—rationality is a normative concept. In general, normative concepts cannot be explained in terms of the concepts expressed by ‘reasons’ or ‘ought’. Instead, normative concepts are best understood in terms of values. Thus, for a mental state or a process of reasoning to be rational is for it to be in a certain way good. Specifically, rationality is a virtue, while irrationality is a vice. What rationality requires of you at a time is whatever is necessary for your thinking at that time to be as rational as possible; this makes ‘rationally required’ equivalent to a kind of ‘ought’. Moreover, rationality is an “internalist” normative concept: what it is rational for you to think at a time depends purely on what is in your mind at that time. Nonetheless, rationality has an external goal—namely, getting things right in your thinking, or thinking correctly. The connection between rationality and correctness is probabilistic: if your thinking is irrational, that is bad news about your thinking’s degree of correctness; and the more irrational your thinking is, the worse the news is about your thinking’s degree of correctness. This account of the concept of rationality indicates how we should set about giving a substantive theory of what it is for beliefs and choices to be rational.

Freeing Reason from Desire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua May
Keyword(s):  
Neurological Disorders ◽  
Normative Beliefs ◽  
Humean Theory

The previous chapter showed that our beliefs about which actions we ought to perform frequently have an effect on what we do. But Humean theories, holding that all motivation has its source in desire, insist on connecting such beliefs with an antecedent motive. However, reason needn’t be a slave to the passions. We can allow moral (or normative) beliefs a more independent role to generate intrinsic desires by developing an anti-Humeanism (distinct from internalism) that is empirically sound. Since an anti-Humean theory provides perfectly ordinary and intelligible explanations of actions, Humeans have a burden to justify a more restrictive account. However, they cannot discharge this burden on empirical grounds, whether by appealing to research on neurological disorders (acquired sociopathy, Parkinson’s, and Tourette’s), the psychological properties of desire, or the scientific virtue of parsimony.

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