![]() Secondly, there seems to be no intuitive way for marrying the fact that something is non-natural with the fact that it is mental. But if the vast majority of mental phenomena could be explained in natural terms-why should not the same be possible for normative ones? 2)-from which he of course explicitly excludes mental disorders. Nevertheless, Stier grants (at least for the purpose of his paper) that “every single aspect of our mental and behavioral life could be explained in purely physical terms” (p. Indeed, Stier himself gives a prominent example of a prima facie irreducible ontological domain besides the physical: The mental itself is often seen as an important challenge for the hard-boiled naturalist. Whether these people are right or wrong is certainly subject to discussion, but their efforts at least suggest that taking phenomena at face value and not even mentioning competing accounts can hardly be the adequate strategy. Parfit mentions Nicholas Sturgeon and Frank Jackson as prominent proponents of this type of naturalism ( Parfit, 2011, p. 295) precisely aims at re-defining normative notions in terms of natural notions. What Derek Parfit calls “Analytical Naturalism” (cf. ![]() With respect to the first, there is a whole bunch of philosophers out there that intend to explicate all kinds of normative facts related to human behavior in naturalistic terms, therefore reducing the normative to the natural. 1).īoth thoughts appear to be problematic. Integrating this alleged fact into his ontological dichotomy between the mental and the natural, it follows for him that the normative must belong to the realm of the mental, for “here seems to be something peculiar about behavior that is beyond purely physical explanation because the difference between, say, acting kindly and unkindly can hardly be grasped in physical, non-normative terms” (p. Regarding the relationship between the normative and the non-natural, Stier argues that the normative cannot be grasped in naturalistic terms. I shall argue that it is questionable that this understanding leads to the conclusion Stier aims at-that the specification of mental disorders cannot be succeed on the physical but only the mental level due to the impact of normative considerations in this enterprise. In what follows, I will explore three of his implicit suggestions on the essential linkages his concept of the normative bears to other concepts: the non-natural, the non-objective, and the relative. Unfortunately, he nowhere makes clear what he takes to be the content of the concept of the normative, although he gives some hints about his understanding at various passages. He takes this as evidence that we have to specify mental disorders at the mental level, and thus will never be able to give a purely physical account of them. ![]() Following his two main theses, he thinks that these frameworks shape what counts as deviant as well as non-deviant behavior. Stier states that mental disorders have an irreducible normative element built in, expressible through various “normative frames of reference” they are tied to. In Marco Stier's article “Normative preconditions for the assessment of mental disorder,” the concept of the normative occupies a central role ( Stier, 2013).
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