Why Must an Adequate Naturalism Accommodate Substantive Normative Notions?

Abstract

Both scientific and nonscientistic varieties of naturalism reject that values, reasons and meanings understood as normative standards appear as part of the content of causal explanations and are objects of scientific research. This view follows from the hermeneutic assumption that substantive normative categories comprising the human life can only do some sort of interpretive work and thus cannot be part of scientific explanations. However, with the advent of model-based social science, this assumption has been losing its force. In this paper, I argue that if science is the only activity that can give a complete understanding of the human world, the proper version of naturalism must accommodate the explanatory significance of normative standards. To this end, I will draw on three agent-based model (ABM) studies in addiction science to illustrate how norms that derive from interpretation of the values, action reasons, and life meanings of substance users at the individual level are indispensable to the explanatory social mechanisms that dynamically generate the explanandum phenomenon. Then I expand on this argument to show that the dominant versions of naturalism either contain a contradiction or are trivial. Given this surprising conclusion, we would surely need a more adequate conception of naturalism that can seriously consider the normativity of the human world.