Abstract
This essay addresses the problem of logically modelling the concept of normative supervenience. We will argue that alternatives of classical logic can grasp specific aspects of this concept. We will examine two cases: (a) the idea of institutional supervenience corresponding to the counts-as relation, (b) modal logics for jumping or generating the normative dimension of supervenient properties.
One virtue is that the plurality of the consequence relation comes at little or no cost. Another is that pluralism offers a more charitable interpretation of many important (but difficult) debates in philosophical logic than is otherwise available; […] pluralism does more justice to the mix of insight and perplexity found in many of the debates in logic in the last century. (Beall and Restall 2000 , 31)
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Notes
- 1.
More intuitions are of course offered in the other essays in this volume.
- 2.
We will discuss later some complexities behind reflexivity.
- 3.
Notice that this assumption is generic and it does not necessarily mean that individual normative properties directly provide grounds for single prescriptive statements. We simply assume that such properties are normative insofar as they are true in the context of ideal worlds. For instance, one can argue that the sentence “This piece of paper counts as a five euro bill” is normative without directly stating that something here is obligatory: indeed, this sentence presupposes the existence of a certain human institution which (i) refers to a set of ideal worlds where some properties apply to certain individuals, (ii) is globally oriented to guide human behaviour (see Sect. 4).
- 4.
As Searle (1995) strongly emphasises, in all such cases the ascription of a status-function through the appropriate rule is not enough to establish such types of facts. To establish these facts we have to believe, or otherwise accept, acknowledge, collectively intend, etc., that X has the status-function assigned by the corresponding rules. This means that, in order to do their job these rules have to be agreed upon or believed in by members of the relevant community qua members of a collective. The reason for this is that it is a merely contingent fact that some X stands in a certain counts-as relation to some Y, because the only connection between X and Y obtains in virtue of collective belief or acceptance, and intention—or, to put it in Searle’s words, satisfying the X term is not by itself sufficient for being money, and the X term does not specify causal features that would be sufficient to enable the stuff to function as money. In order to function as money, human agreement has to be involved. Roughly, this is nothing but the idea that the ontology of institutional facts relies on a kind of “epistemic objectivity”.
- 5.
It would sound perhaps more reasonable to emphasise the causal role that mental attitudes, such as collective intentionality, play in bringing into existence institutional reality. But even in this case, Searle (2001, sec. II) argues that “collective intentionality is not something which just causes institutional reality, it is constitutive of that reality precisely because it is constitutive of the ontology according to the constitutive rules”.
- 6.
In addition to the intuitive observation that cases 2., 4., and 5. speak of being a handwritten signature as a brute fact, we should also recall that NS, in the sense of Definition 4, does not rely on distinguishing in the formal language different sorts of predicates or propositional letters.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
We assume, for the sake of simplicity, to work with constant domains. This assumption makes things simpler but is not conceptually required and thus is not essential for our purposes. It is a rather straightforward, but pedantic exercise to extend the analysis to varying domains.
- 10.
Of course, we could have other models that make trivially true the conditionals by falsifying the antecedent.
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Rotolo, A. (2017). Logics for Normative Supervenience. In: Brożek, B., Rotolo, A., Stelmach, J. (eds) Supervenience and Normativity. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 120. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61046-7_1
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