Unity without Uniformity: Cross-Discourse Contribution

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, we have staked out an anti-reductionist account of normative discourse, albeit a less-than-conventional one. While we eschewed ontological commitments (not just to normative entities, but even to substantive normative properties), we defended an account of action-guiding content on which normative sentences could be true or false. Ontological eliminativism about the normative does not entail doctrinal eliminativism, as we said in the early going. This is an anti-reductionist account in the sense that what we say “at the normative level” will not be explained (and potentially displaced) by a more “fundamental” vocabulary such as psychology or physics, nor will there be entities and properties “at the normative level” identified with entities and substantive properties at a more “fundamental” one (trivially in our case, since we are not positing normative entities or properties at all).