Normativity

That falsity is a defect in belief can be captured with a prohibitive norm holding that truth is the necessary condition for permissibility of belief. Furthermore, such a formulation avoids the difficulties encountered in earlier literature that offered prescriptive norms. The normativity of belief thesis is widely discussed in the literature. I criticise bi-conditional formulation of the norm of the normativity of belief thesis which holds that truth is both the necessary and sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation. I argue that the part which holds that truth is the sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation is redundant. The argument follows from clarifying the key ideas at stake in the normativity of belief thesis, namely, that false belief is a defect and that the normativity thesis is supposed to distinguish the concept of belief from other cognitive attitudes and the slogan that belief aims at truth.

Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate.

This paper advances a reductive semantics for ‘ought’ and a naturalistic theory of normativity. It gives a unified analysis of predictive, instrumental, and categorical uses of ‘ought’: the predictive ‘ought’ is basic, and is interpreted in terms of probability. Instrumental ‘oughts’ are analyzed as predictive ‘oughts’ occurring under an ‘in order that’ modifier (the end-relational theory). The theory is then extended to categorical uses of ‘ought’: it is argued that they are special rhetorical uses of the instrumental ‘ought’. Plausible conversational principles explain how this end-relational ‘ought’ can perform the expressive functions of the moral ‘ought’. The notion of an ‘ought-simpliciter’ is also discussed.

The present study intends to investigate the contours of gender performativity in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), which depicts Nafisi’s life experiences in Iran in the 1970s and the 1980s. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s conceptualization of gender performativity, this research probes into the notion of gender roles and gendered subjectivity during the period Nafisi’s narrative covers. The central questions of this research are: 1. How do the contemporary codes of normativity define gender performativity in Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran? 2. How do the major characters of Nafisi’s memoir react to their gender roles, and to what effect? To answer the stated questions, this study adopts Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, which pivots around her view of gender as a social construct. The study reveals that the regulative social structure defines certain gender-oriented roles for both sexes and monitors their implementation. It also shows that the contemporary political system, with its regulative and punitive laws and homogenizing strategies, normalizes and bolsters male domination, and propagates stereotypical gender roles. The characters’ resistance, however, usually ends in the consolidation and absorption of a new set of gender clichés, which is mostly Westernized; put differently, the rejection of certain gender-based performances generally leads to the performance of another set of gender roles.