Resisting normativism in psychology

Abstract

Normativism, the thesis that intentional states are essentially constituted by rational norms, lacks a stable foundation due to the absence of a unified account of rational standards. Empirical evidence from psychology reveals that intentional attribution frequently explains arational actions, systematic fallacies, and brute physical responses that do not presuppose rationality. Reliance on folk-psychological intuitions, or “superficialism,” fails to account for the internal causal structures of the mind, which often operate through non-inferential, informationally encapsulated modules. While contemporary defenses of normativism suggest that possessing concepts requires dispositions to conform to rational norms and recognize defeating conditions, these normative requirements are not constitutive of intentional content. Instead, apparent normative constraints are better explained as analytic conceptual connections within a substantive theory of lexical semantics. Separating conceptual competence from rational performance allows psychology to proceed as a natural science without invidious distinctions between mental and physical phenomena. – AI-generated abstract.