Two Ways for a Normativist to Disprove Physicalism Way 1: If there are any genuinely normative facts, physicalism is false (because, by definition, genuinely normative facts fall outside the purview of the physical sciences, and that’s the physicalist’s benchmark). Current question: Are the “normative” facts that Wedgewood endorses genuinely normative facts?

Way 2 Normative facts are any facts we express or refer to using standard normative language: ‘ought’, ‘should’, or ‘correct’. These might or might not fall in the purview of the physical sciences. Current question: Can the physical sciences accommodate the normative facts that Wedgewood endorses?

The Nature of Psychology A weaker claim is simply that Wedgewood’s dispositional properties play a role in our best psychology – even if their existence is consistent with physicalism.

What Role? Possessing the relevant dispositions is part of the essence of the first-person intentional states that are in the purview of psychology. We posit – for standard causal- explanatory purposes – that there are psychological states with intentional content that are connected to norms in the way Wedgewood says.

A Deflationary Reading of Wedgewood On this way of treating Wedgewood’s proposal, it’s an empirical hypothesis. Norm Hyp: There are such things as concepts that play a causal role in the production of intelligent behavior. Their individuation conditions are given by a priori insight into the core dispositions necessary to possess each of them. Is this the sort of thing that would be useful in psychology? Does psychology deal in essences?

Rey’s Response: Superficialism Objection: It’s naive for philosophers to think that they can discover, from the armchair, the nature of the mind. The mind is part of the natural world and thus must be investigated as such, just like mechanics, chemical reactions, or reproduction.

Wedgwood’s response: Distinguish between the personal and the sub-personal, and pitch normativism as a thesis about the personal level. Personal-level: first-person perspective, consciousness, what we would attribute to the entire person.

The dispositions at issue are at the personal level. They should reveal themselves as they guide reflection by the self, upon the self. Empirical psychology tells us mostly about the contingent features of our sub-personal mechanisms, but there is an overarching concept of these states and of their content, the essence of which we can investigate a priori. But what if psychology explains all of the relevant data by appealing to subpersonal processes? What role is left for personal-level states to play? Should they be thought as part of the directly observable bedrock data?

Incoherent Concepts Objection: We have concepts of, e.g., witches and immaterial souls; but because these concepts are incoherent, their possession can’t be grounded in rational dispositions. Wedgwood’s response: There still can be a rational core to these concepts; otherwise, a fully rational being couldn’t have them. Since our mistaken views about these things could be corrected by a fully rational being, it must be possible for that being to possess these concepts.