Dousing the dragon’s fire

Introduction

When it comes to producing thought-provoking pieces of academic writing, Stephen Turner is indefatigable. More than this, the quality never slips. His writing may be demanding but an engagement with it is always worth the effort. From his earliest publications in the 1970s (for example Turner 1974a, 1974b) right up to and including his present work, his readers are given stimulating analyses of many different intellectual objects. He is, at the very least, a sociologist of science (for example Turner 2002, 2004), a sociologist of law (for example Turner and Factor 1994), a sociological/social theorist (for example Turner 1990, 1992; Turner and Factor 1984), an historian of sociology and research methods (for example Turner 1986, 1991, 2007: Turner and Turner 1990), a philosopher (for example Turner 1994, 1998, 2003b), a political theorist (for example Turner 1989, 2003a, 2006), and a policy analyst (for example Turner 2005, 2008). Precise descriptions are accompanied by complex and compelling arguments, dealing with particular problems. Significantly, Turner is always aware that the solutions he offers will themselves throw up more problems. In short, his work is an intellectual tour de force, comprising over 20 books and over 130 articles/chapters.

While there is clearly no single overriding theme in his work, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that it is nonetheless unified by a determination to offer viable alternatives to blockages generated by adherence to dogmas, particularly those generated by adherence to Kantian metaphysics. In line with this observation I recommend reading Turner’s work alongside that of the Australian historian of the humanities, Ian Hunter (for example Hunter 1995, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007b, 2009, 2010). The two writers employ quite different approaches but share, to a remarkable degree, a relentless drive to ‘detransendentalize’ the study of human culture and society.

Defining normativism

The book under discussion is Turner’s bold attempt to describe and contest ‘the common form of argument underlying various assertions about the necessity or indispensability of the normative’ (2009: 9). He says at the outset that this involves him examining a wide variety of positions, ‘each of which accounts for a different kind of normativity’. These positions ‘are not easily reconciled with one another’, containing as they do ‘different ideas about the sources of particular kinds of normativity, such as legal or semantic normativity’ (2009: 9). Nevertheless, Turner contends, there are ‘extremely strong family resemblances between these arguments’ (2009: 9), resemblances strong enough to warrant the use of the term ‘normativism’ to describe the aforementioned commitment to the idea of ‘the necessity or indispensability of the normative’.

Among Turner’s preliminary remarks, which set out the central issues as normativists see them, are: that normative arguments are collective arguments (vii–ix); that the normative is everywhere (2009: 1–2); that the normative is distinct from the causal world (2009: 2); that the normative is therefore David to the Goliath of science (2009: 3); and that normativism is therefore in competition with the social sciences, especially sociology (2009: 5). Of course, this is only how normativists regard normativism, it is not how Turner himself regards it.

In Turner’s eyes, ‘Normativism begins with a big idea: that there are mundane and undeniable things, like the meaning of what we say … that cannot be explained by science’. To put this another way, while normativists insist that the normative itself cannot be explained, Turner is saying to them, politely but firmly, ‘Yes it can, I’ll show you how’. As part of his answer to the normativists, he regards their ‘big idea’ as a ‘big claim’. For normativists, ‘All that is needed to support this claim is to recognize other obvious facts: that we distinguish between promises and expectations, acting in accordance with routines and following the law; that we use normative language and take claims about normative topics to be true … and so forth’ (2009: 186).

Turner’s objections to normativism

Throughout the book Turner allows his own position to emerge by gently raising objections to the normativists’ arguments. To the above set of normativists’ arguments, for instance, he first poses a Weberian sociological reply ¹ – ‘There is a familiar rejoinder to this … To explain what people actually do we need only appeal to the beliefs that people have about what is correct, genuine, and the like’ (2009: 186) – and then offers a suggestion in the form of a question: the main difference between the normativists and the Weberians ‘comes down to this: is there a special domain of fact that cannot be explained as part of the ordinary stream of explanation, but can only be understood, and accessed, in a special way?’ (2009: 186).

By adopting this slowly-slowly strategy, Turner is not only able to pay due regard to the sophistication of both sides of the different arguments he joins, he is also able to avoid the trap of caricaturing the normativists. For example, he acknowledges that ‘“Normativism” is a portmanteau term for the doctrine that there is such a special class of facts … Different forms of normativism claim that there are different things beyond science or explanation’ (2009: 186–7). He offers law as an example, pointing out that, for legal normativists, ‘there is such a thing as legal validity that attaches to genuine laws only. Nothing about people’s beliefs about laws makes laws valid’. ‘Validity’, he adds, by way of emphasizing this normativist trope, ‘is a fact of its own special kind’ (2009: 187).

Perhaps, he says, in a similar vein, one way to reconcile the two rival accounts would be to propose that explanation and evaluation ‘proceed, so to speak, in different containers of thought. Explanation never needs to take anything from the container marked “validity, correctness, etc.,” except when we evaluate explanations themselves – but explanation is something distinct from the evaluation of explanation’ (2009: 187). But he quickly knocks this possibility on the head. ‘The normativist rejects this solution. For the legal normativist, for example, one cannot explain the law apart from the normative properties of the law. To ignore these is to change the subject into something other than “the law”’. ‘Explanations’, for the normativist, he adds, in dealing with this important theme in another way, ‘need to be about adequately described things’. And a description cannot possibly be adequate without considering ‘its central feature – its validity’ (2009: 187).

The charge of ‘changing the subject’ is one the normativists level at their opponents very regularly. Normativists regard ‘changing the subject’ as a form of ‘cheating’ – ‘using normative language while pretending to avoid it … failing to acknowledge the nature of all reasoning’ (2009: 187). Turner offers the example of Ernst Cassirer, ‘steeped in the conventional neo-Kantian tradition’, who ‘formulated this generic argument in terms of representation and meaning’. By Cassirer’s way of thinking, ‘the normative always comes first, as a matter of logic. Cause supposes the category of causation’, which can only be supplied by the normative.

The causal world … nevertheless is still there, even for the normativist, and has a peculiar place in the world revealed by transcendental reasoning … [but, the] causal world is insufficient to explain the world revealed by transcendental reasoning – the psychic world and order of symbolic relations. (2009: 188)

In turning to Nikolai Hartmann’s work as another example, Turner says that Hartmann ‘reproduces the core reasoning of normativism: that science can’t explain some range of facts, and that the only account of these facts … including the phenomenon of science itself, must be sought in the transcendental realm’. From this telling example Turner makes another point about normativism’s reliance on metaphysics: ‘Normativism still trades on the claim of explanatory failure’. This means, Turner insists, that normativism relies on ‘a realm of special facts … which cannot be accounted for by science, but which nevertheless is there, presupposed by all our thinking, and by science itself. As the Heideggerian slogan has it, this presupposed stuff is “always already there”, ineliminable and indispensable’ (2009: 189).

Turner is obviously unconvinced by the idea of a repository of supposedly universally and timelessly true meanings and ‘oughts’ which lies beyond mere causation. Of this pervasive form of normativism he asks a double-barrel question: ‘Is there a fact that there are meanings and oughts? Or is there merely a fact that people understand one another and that they have beliefs about obligations?’ (2009: 190). While the ‘repository’ solution is alluring, the ‘troubles with this solution become clear when we ask what oughts and meanings are’. They are not ‘things’, Turner argues, at least not in the usual sense of that term, or ‘facts’, in the usual sense of that term. ‘Nor are they part of the world known to science. They exist, if they exist at all, in a special nether world. And if there is a special nether world, we have all of a sudden found ourselves with an exotic ontology that we need to make sense of’ (2009: 191).

Shining a light on the normativists’ ‘hidden structure’

Turner thus begins to highlight the importance for normativism of the crucial idea of a ‘hidden structure’. In the search for a hidden structure, Turner insists, normativists produce any number of ‘regress arguments’. These are arguments that begin with some fact, or rather some description, and identify, through a series of steps of justification, an ‘ultimate justifier’. The regress arguments, he continues, lead to

a variety of places, depending on who is doing the regressing: to Reason with a capital R … to phenomenological certainties, to the concepts that are constitutive of the reasoning in question, to Grundnormen, to practices ordered in relation with one another into a large hidden structure underpinned by commitments and a scoring system. … [T]he huge variety of justificatory end points, and the difficulty of deciding between them or deriving one from another, suggests not so much hidden order as chaos. (2009: 191–2)

Nonetheless, the idea of a hidden structure or hidden order remains vital to normativism. ‘The neo-Kantians’, Turner argues, ‘discovered this on their own, which led to the idea that structures were deeper than mere presupposed categories, and led to Husserl and Heidegger, as well as to Frege, and of course to such present normativists as Brandom and McDowell’. On the basis of these points, Turner offers a warning: ‘But unless there is one deep structure to be found, the strategy reaches multiple dead ends, as neo-Kantianism itself did’ (2009: 192).

In fact he offers more than a mere warning. He will not let this matter rest, will not let the normativists any longer get away with the sleight-of-hand involved in the idea of a hidden structure, for he is sure that they can only do what they do by allowing ‘something normative … to come out of something nonnormative’ (2009: 192). To put this strategy another way, Turner is determined to force the normativists to submit to a stern cross-examination. ‘What is taken for granted and serves as a condition for thought, the a-priori, had to get there somehow’. Their ‘taken-for-granted’, he insists, ‘has a history’. In trying to uncover its history, Turner’s cross-examination focuses on one of the cornerstone propositions of normativism, one mentioned earlier – that normative arguments are collective arguments. Against this position, he argues that what in fact happens is not collective at all. This is to say that the ‘taken-for-granted’ of the normativists is not a collective taken-for-granted. Rather, it is the product of an ‘individual, who thinks, from an environment, which does not think, and does so through such explainable mechanisms as learning’ (2009: 193).

In attempting to widen this breach in the normativists’ defensive wall, Turner readily employs points from Axel Hägerström, Donald Davidson, Franz Brentano, and Max Weber. The points he takes from these thinkers include some which derive from a certain sort of psychologism, the sort that infuriated normativists like Frege and Husserl, who felt that psychology ‘could not explain an important set of facts’. Turner describes their infuriated position in the following terms: ‘In their polemical mode, normativists like to draw a sharp distinction between causal regularities and normative facts, and simply dismiss scientific explanation of normative facts as impossible in principle’. In this particular case, then, Frege and Husserl dismiss psychology because, in relying on causal explanation, psychology ‘itself presupposed a category or concept of causality’ (2009: 193).

How to explain the normative

In his 1929 exploration of the validity of law, Turner argues, Hägerström discovered that the normativists’ ‘claim about the essential character of the legal [was] captured in descriptions that included the notion of genuine legal validity as distinct from “believed in” legal validity’. In other words, Turner suggests, Hägerström uncovered ‘a standard template for normativism: the preferred description warrants the preferred explanation, which in turn validates the preferred description as capturing the real thing’ (2009: 197).

Turner uses Davidson’s work to challenge the normativists’ claim for universal rationality, particularly as it is used to maintain that anything that is deemed ‘intelligible but wrong’ must be ‘irrational rather than simply in error’ (2009: 199). He says that Davidson showed that ‘every idea we can say is false, indeed every idea we can understand, is always already rational’. The normativists’ ‘strategy described above simply collapses in the face of this: there is no situation in which one can say “the following views are intelligible, but when hauled before the tribunal of reason, they must be judged irrational.”’ This is because to ‘get to the tribunal in the first place they must be judged intelligible, and thus rational’ (2009: 200).

The ‘mysteries’ of normativism are falling one by one at Turner’s hands. Where normativists say that ‘we must simply learn to live with these mysteries’ (2009: 201), Turner is sure that we have no such ‘must’ hanging over our heads. Where the normativists say that the normative cannot be explained, Turner is well down the road to explaining it. Where the normativists insist that there must be a bedrock validity to law, for instance, Turner says that

‘genuine’ validity is not intrinsic to the law, and everything that needs to be explained about the beliefs, behavior, even the meaning of legal acts can be accounted for by the participants’ beliefs about these things. … [T]he actually operative notions of correctness and legal validity can be abstracted from the mass of actual decisions and actions performed in terms of beliefs about validity and correctness. (2009: 202–3)

In taking this final step down the road to explaining the normative, Turner is drawing on Brentano and Weber. For Weber, there were ‘no “undeniable facts” about legal validity, however much it appeared that there were to Kelsen at the beginning of his career’. In drawing this conclusion, Turner argues, Weber is relying on Brentano’s joint notions of empathy and Evidenz (2009: 170–5):

Empathy, in the sense of following the thought of another, explains what is necessary to explain. Empathy … goes beyond the traditional Humean inputs and means of learning. To the extent that we have, and actually employ in ordinary interaction, a primitive capacity for following the thought of another … we have a surrogate for the kinds of a-priori content that Kant thought Hume was lacking, a surrogate without the mysteries of transcendental philosophy. (2009: 204)

For Turner, the ‘explanatory relevance of empathy … is vast’. It covers, for instance, the child’s capacity to understand a teacher presenting ‘basic arithmetic’ and it covers the way we attribute ‘sense to the talk and acts of others’ (2009: 204). Turner supports this argument with evidence from neuroscience’s recent research into mirror neurons. ‘Mirror neurons activate both in the performance of actions and in the perception of actions’. This is to say that they ‘enable the brain to operate on a dual-use basis, so that the neurons used for acting are also used for what Weber would call chopping wood. ² We may be born with some capacities of this sort, which would be what enables a very young infant to do such things as respond to smiles with smiles’ (2009: 176).

Where ‘Brentano’s contemporaries opted for the theories that eliminated subjectivity by accounting for the evident character of such things as mathematics by reference to something objective that warranted the sense of evidence but was itself … a hidden structure of some kind’, Brentano sought to ‘rehabilitate evidence’. While his critics ‘dismissed Evidenz because it was a “feeling” … Brentano provided a way of accounting for the case where understanding is subscribing. Understanding is understanding as others do’ (2009: 205). Crucially, for his case against normativism, Turner now has a way of explaining the normative that is entirely devoid of metaphysical baggage: ‘no explanation of evidence in terms of hidden structures is needed’ (2009: 205). He summarizes this non-normative way of explaining the normative in the following terms. We are capable of following both ‘the thought of another and the feedback generated by actual social interaction’. These are all the facts we need. We do not need ‘collective facts such as practices, collective intentions, or collective responses’. We can explain reason rather than having it supposedly drive our inquiries, for we have effectively ‘detranscendentalized’ it (2009: 205).

Conclusion

Turner’s achievement in ‘detranscendentalizing’ the normative, in such a distinctive manner, reminds me of the way in which the historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock effectively founded a new method for examining political thought in just one seminal book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, first published in 1957 (1987; see also Pocock 1981, 1985). This is a method which allows those interested in political thought to trace its history without recourse to ‘reason’ as a hidden metaphysical structure. It is a method which has inspired two generations of historians of political thought (including Hunter, who was mentioned earlier; see esp. Hunter 2007a, 2008).

Might it be that Turner’s book could similarly become the source of a new method for investigating the operation of norms without recourse to ‘the normative’ as a hidden metaphysical structure? It is too early to tell, though it is not too early to say that this book certainly has the potential to become a seminal one. This outcome would be brought closer, I suggest, were the publisher to promote the book in the context of some of Turner’s fascinating case-studies (for example: Turner 1986, 1992, 2007) and some of his other dedicated attacks on metaphysical blockages (for example 1994). This would, at very least, help to make Turner’s work much more widely read, which is itself something to be wished for.