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Research project

Few words about the research project

Human beings, unlike planets, molecules or amoebas, think and act for reasons. However, the cognitive appropriation of these reasons goes beyond any empirical description of people’s thinking or acting; it takes us to the territory of normativity, away from the objectivity of empirical descriptions. This idiosyncratic feature of human beings poses a dilemma for the sciences which are concerned with them, i.e the social sciences: Either the social sciences are less objective and hence inferior in comparison with the natural sciences or the social world is stripped of normative content. If we side with the first horn of the dilemma, we will have to conclude that the social sciences cannot reach the status of the natural sciences. If we choose the second horn, we will be forced to conclude that the image of humans as rational beings characterized by freedom and responsibility is, strictly speaking, illusionary.

The purpose of our research project is to dissolve the dilemma. In order to carry out this task we plan to do the following: 1) Identify the central assumption which generates the dilemma. 2) Construct a philosophical account which retains both the image of the social sciences as proper sciences and the autonomy of the normative realm. To do this we address the problem of normativity – the interaction of reasons with the natural-causal order – in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of action. Finally, we plan to: 3) Provide a case study which illustrates the sustainability of the proposed account. We will study the case of opinion polls in political science, in order to show how this phenomenon (i.e. opinion polling) should be understood as a description of social reality under some circumstances (and thus as an instantiation of the practice of an empirical science (i.e. political science)) and as the manipulation of public opinion (and thus as an intentional action) under other circumstances.

Methodological approach

Conceptual Analysis. NORMATIVITY takes conceptual analysis as its most fundamental methodological tool. Argumentative and analytical strategies are used to identify the logical core of old problems and bring to the fore new ones. In particular, we will use conceptual analysis in order to: a) reveal the conceptual presuppositions of the SSD, b) map the possible responses to the SSD and the additional philosophical assumptions that they carry, c) construct a novel philosophical account of the normativity of the social sciences.

Interdisciplinarity. The interdisciplinary methodology of NORMATIVITY is crucial for supporting the novel account of the normativity of the social sciences, because the novel conception of the social sciences will emerge from the logical contradistinction between the concept of intentional action and the concept of scientific object. These concepts are the subject matter of different philosophical subdisciplines (i.e., philosophy of action and philosophy of science respectively). Furthermore, this kind of contradistinction is possible only within a specific philosophical conception of the place of mind

in nature. This makes philosophy of mind and metaphysics an indispensable part of the interdisciplinary character of NORMATIVITY’s methodology.

Case study. To test the novel philosophical account, NORMATIVITY will provide a case study: It will focus on opinion polls which are part of the methodological tools of political science. In particular, we will illuminate the distinction between cases in which opinion polls describe the public opinion and cases in which polls manipulate the public opinion.