Tom Swann Placing Placement Problems In The Physical

I have strong intuitions that a world in which everything (property… whatever) is physical, or supervenes on something that is physical, cannot be understood as involving normatively rational properties (etc). I say I have intuitions because I don’t know how to justify the thought, or even to say much more clearly what the intuitions are compelling me to think. The idea that the normative must be non-reducible seems not strong enough; for one might think, in the current fashion, that there are forms of reduction that are not reductive as in not radically revisionary of the products of our non-fundamentalist epistemic practices (practices not looking for the fundamental qua fundamental. It’s not even obvious to me that this is what physics is, qua physics rather than datum for physicalism).

It seems to me, in an inchoate way, that the functional properties of paradigmatic natural sciences (those concerned with causal substrates) cannot be the explanatory / superveniance / necesitating ground for properties that have anything to do with normatively rational relations.

But there are lots of ways something can be normatively rational!

Tom Swann What Could One Mean By Normatively Rational Relations

I have to think this through a lot more. I’m totally willing for normatively rational relations to in fact turn out to supervene on the physical.

I don’t think it is an option for there to be no normatively rational relations. The thing to chase on this page is the self-undermining character of any view which does deny the existence of something playing the role of what in epistemic discourse is a said relation.

If physicalism cannot find a place for reason, then it cannot assert itself.