Natural sources of normativity

Abstract

Normativity is widely regarded as being naturalistically problematic. Teleosemantic theories aimed to provide a naturalistic grounding for the normativity of mental representation in biological proper function, but have been subject to a variety of criticisms and would in any case provide only a thin naturalist platform for grounding normativity more generally. Here I present an account that identifies a basic form of valuational normativity in autonomous systems, and show how the account can be extended to encompass key aspects of the normativity of functions and practical reasons.