Determinate attitudes and indeterminate norms

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer a version of social normative pragmatism – that is, the approach that takes norms to be the result of shared practices – that comes closer to social reality than its cousins in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. The purpose is presenting a framework that can be useful for social theorists sympathetic to normative concepts. This version introduces the concepts of the adoption of the normative stance, the projective structure of evaluation and a sketch of a theory of normative force in terms of accumulation of normative attitude. In order to motivate this conceptual tools, we present them as allowing us to overcome the traditional skeptical challenge put forward by Kripke.