A Sellarsian Approach to the Normativism-Antinormativism Controversy

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that Sellars’ view of normativity is the key for a proper resolution of the debate between normativism and anti-normativism, as the latter is described in Turner’s recent book Explaining the Normative. Drawing on an early Sellarsian article (“A Semantical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem”), I suggest that both normativism and anti-normativism (including Turner’s brand of the latter) are ultimately unsatisfactory positions and for the same reason: due to their failure to draw a distinction between causal or explanatory reducibility and logical or conceptual reducibility of the normative to the non-normative.