Three challenges to normativity

Ok.  With apologies, this post will be nothing more than a rehash of earlier posts. I’m trying to get my categories lined up, and I’m afraid the blog is where I do this kind of thing.

So.  I’ve said that there are three very broad orientations to the analysis of social phenomena:

1. Naturalistic or scientistic: analysing human social life as you would any natural phenomenon; no specific ‘empathetic’ or ‘interpretive’ dimension.
2. Intentional: analysing human social life in terms of goal-oriented or intentional action.
3. Moral or values-based: analysing the meanings or norms that structure and shape social life.

I’ve also said that there are three major challenges to normativity associated with ‘modernity’ – in an earlier post I called these nihilism, relativism, and cynicism.  I now want to say that these two sets of three categories line up with each other.

1. Naturalistic or scientistic approaches study social or human life as if it were a natural phenomenon.  Here we seem to risk a specifically scientistic form of the denial of normativity – evacuating human meaning from a world understood in coldly mechanistic terms.  This is the risk of ‘nihilism’.
2. Intentional or goal-oriented analysis can seem to risk ‘explaining’ meaning or norms in terms of gratifications or drives or utility-maximisation – that is, in purely instrumental terms, or in terms of desires or interests rather than values.  This may seem to miss what’s meaningful and valuable in human meaning and value.  This is the risk I’m calling ‘cynicism’.
3. Moral or values-based approaches don’t seem to risk evacuating morality or values – after all, these are the explicit object of analysis.  However, as a social-scientific perspective this is engaging in the comparative analysis of different value systems.  This may seem to risk ‘relativising’ those value systems – undermining what is truly valuable in value, and meaningful in meaning, by treating all values and meanings alike.  This is the risk of ‘relativism’.

So, at this very high level of abstraction we have three different approaches to the analysis of social phenomena, each of which exhibits a characteristic apparent threat to our value- or meaning-systems.  Of course there are many ways we can subdivide each of these categories.  Moreover, there are different ways these categories can interact.  There are characteristic ‘reductionist’ projects associated with the scientistic and intentional approaches, and there are characteristic ‘anti-reductionist’ projects associated with the intentional and values-based approaches.  Or we can try to bring multiple perspectives together, in some kind of grand synthesis.

Anyway, this is a very crude map to the space I’m trying to navigate – but (at least as of right now) it feels (at least to me) like a useful one.