Bruno Mölder

Tänapäeval peetakse tähenduse, sisu ja vaimu normatiivsust sageli takistuseks nende naturaliseerimisele. Samas saab normatiivsust ennast mõista mitmel moel. Artikli eesmärgiks on tutvustada väitlusi normatiivsuse üle. Rõhutatakse, et normatiivsuse filosoofilises analüüsis on oluline vältida 'normatiivsuse' mitmemõttelisust ning et tuleb teha vahet eri nähtuste normatiivsusel. Tuuakse esile olulisemad normatiivsuse määratlemise viisid ning vaadeldakse, kuidas tuleks mõista tähenduse ja intentsionaalsuse konstitutiivset normatiivsust. Filosoofiliselt on iseäranis oluline selline normatiivsus, mis on niihästi kategooriline, ettekirjutuslik kui konstitutiivne. Artiklis vaadeldud käsitluste suhtes näidatakse, et väited sedalaadi normatiivsuse esinemise kohta tähenduse ja intentsionaalsuse vallas pole põhjendatud.   It has become increasingly common to invoke the normativity of meaning, content and mind as an obstacle to their naturalisation. At the same time, one can understand normativity itself in various ways. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the debate about the nature and the scope of normativity. It is emphasised that it is important to prevent the ambiguity of 'normativity' and that it is crucial to distinguish between the normativity of different phenomena. The paper covers the most important characterisations of normativity and concentrates on the alleged normativity of meaning and intentionality. The normativity that has a philosophical import is categorical, prescriptive and constitutive. With respect to the accounts scrutinised in this paper, it is argued that there are no good reasons to claim that meaning and intentionality are normative in this sense

An explanatory gap ensues when the truths constituting the explanans do not entail the explanandum. Attempts to give a physicalist account of consciousness seem to generate an explanatory gap, which is special in the following psychological sense. In other cases, it is possible to bridge or close the gap by regimenting or eliminating the respective concepts. In the case of consciousness, however, there is a pervasive intuition that the gap remains even when one works out a notion of consciousness that allows the entailment of truths about consciousness from physical premises. The intuition is expressed by the sense that something essential about consciousness is left out from any such conceptual regimentation. This paper defends the view that this intuition is generated by the way our experiences are given to us. Every experience has a component that is not captured by any specification. The gap intuition is due to this ineffable component in experiences. Since conscious experiences are partly ineffable, it seems that no account of consciousness captures conscious experiences entirely and so would develop the intuition that something has been left out. An alternative explanation to the gap intuition is provided by the “phenomenal concepts’ strategy”. According to this strategy, it is the peculiar nature of phenomenal concepts that feeds the intuition. The main problem with such an approach is that phenomenal concepts are more coarse-grained than the experiences themselves and thus their application still does not entail what it is like to have a particular phenomenal experience.