beauty (Putnam, 2002, p. 31). Mastering concepts such as these means to be able to apply them correctly to competing scientific hypotheses and theories (which is a rational thing to do if one has the relevant disciplinary knowledge). These concepts are not guided solely by an observer’s subjective preferences, but by real, objective, and publicly identifiable properties of hypotheses and theories. And although these concepts pick out real features of the world, they are nonetheless inherently evalu- ative (since, all things being equal, it is normatively better to go for the more coher- ent, simple, and relevant theory over the theory less so). These concepts are thus both guided by real properties in their application and normatively action guiding.
There is no way of separating the evaluative component from the descriptive com- ponent in their meanings (as Hume would have tried), for there simply are no purely descriptive equivalents that pick out the same properties as these concepts. We can only express or translate their meanings by invoking other evaluative concepts.
To anticipate a likely objection, if one came up with the counterargument that although “coherence,” “simplicity,” and “relevance” may be value concepts, they are not moral or ethical concepts, this would be beside the point (and quite likely wrong as well). This argument is not relevant because it does not address the issue that their application involves normative value judgments that are capable of being objective. What are sometimes called “epistemic values” are also values, and if one wants to argue that science should be free from these in order to be objective (itself a value term of course!), then one would have to argue that no value judgment can ever reach a level of be objectivity.
In this first part of the chapter, I have argued against the likes of Hume, the posi- tivists, and Kendler (as a representative of modern mainstream psychology) that science cannot be value-free, because any form of scientific practice presupposes normative values. Thus, in order to arrive at facts about a domain of reality, one has to admit the existence of certain values. This is a very general point about scientific normativity, but what about the social sciences and psychology that not only presup- pose values in the way they are practiced epistemically but also concern a subject matter that is infused with normativity as such?
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natural sciences of his times, he did not think that they could be understood fully from this perspective alone. We also need the perspective of the “dialectician” (an equivalent to modern cultural psychologists) in order to grasp it (Robinson, 1989).
For only the latter would rightly define, e.g., anger “as the appetite for returning pain for pain, or something like that, while the former would define it as a boiling of the blood” (Aristotle quoted in Robinson, 1989, p. 81). The dialecticians under- stand that anger (like any other psychological phenomenon) is never just a physi- ological or neurological happening (like a “boiling of the blood” or some modern neurophysiological equivalent), but always also something done or performed, which is why there is such a thing as justified anger in the face of preposterousness (and there is certainly also unjustified anger). What makes “boiling of the blood”
anger (in addition to a mere physiological perturbation) is precisely that it is per- formed in a practical context where it makes sense to question, justify, and state the reason for “boiling of the blood.” Anger is thus a psychological phenomenon in so far as it is a normative phenomenon that can be done more or less well and per- formed more or less correctly and therefore is subject to praise and blame. If anger belonged entirely to the realm of causal happenings, we should confine it to the science of physiology. As Harré (1983, p. 136) once noted, the reason why dread and anger are psychological phenomena (i.e., emotions) but not indigestion or exhaustion – although all have behavioral manifestations as well as fairly distinc- tive experiential qualities – is that only the former are normative and thus subject to praise and blame, because they belong to the moral orders of human cultures.
The Doing of Psychological Phenomena
We can sometimes say that some psychological process is clearly actively done – for example, when someone is trying to perform mathematical operations, which cannot meaningfully be said to happen to the person. But most of our psychological and emotional life lies in a grey area between doings and happenings: For example, we might feel that our grief (which is an emotion I return to below) occurs to us after a loss. We are overwhelmed by sadness and think of ourselves as victims or sufferers in such a situation. However, even this kind of emotion is not simply a mechanical reaction that happens to occur like an effect following a cause. Grief is also done or performed by skilled human actors, who can only grieve properly if they know their local moral order (Harré, 1983), i.e., know how, and how much, grief is called for in the social practices of their culture (Kofod & Brinkmann, 2017).
This is not to say that grief is an action that can simply be stopped (like playing football with friends, which stops whenever the players become bored with the game or are leaving because of other appointments), but it is to say that grief is not conceivable as a simple mechanical reaction, but is rather a response to a loss. The loss is also not simply conceivable as a cause that mechanically triggers an emotion, but is a reason for feeling and expressing grief. This also explains why grief (like
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other emotions) may be evaluated morally: The person who does not grieve suffi- ciently is easily seen as shallow or aloof (whether justified or not), whereas the person who is experiencing extreme grief in a situation that does not call for deep mourning can be accused of “overdoing it” (Kofod, 2015). The (often implicit) eval- uation of people’s grief is directly linked with the various rituals that prescribe a grieving process around the world. In short, for psychological phenomena, there is an internal, normative relation between the reasons and the responses (rather than an external relation between a cause and a reaction). Fundamentally, it is only possible to understand some response as an instance of grief, if one acknowledges the nor- mative reason afforded by the loss.
Although I have unfolded the point here with grief as an example, I could have referred to any kind of psychological phenomenon as illustration. All of them are normative in the sense of resting on distinctions between veridical and non-veridical (in the case of perception), logical and illogical (thinking), mature and immature (emotions), competent and incompetent (e.g., problem-solving), etc. That psycho- logical phenomena are normative is not just an insight found in Aristotle and his modern successors (e.g., Harré, 1997), but is also argued in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl. Much of Husserl’s work consisted of critiques of psychologism, i.e., the philosophical theory that logic can be explained with reference to how humans actually think and reason psychologically (in other words, that logic is founded on psychology). Husserl reacted against this, because it would mean reduc- ing the normativity of logic to causal explanations of how the psychological system works. And, more generally, there was in Husserl’s phenomenology an awareness of the normativity of our experience as such. Intentionality was a key concept in his work, which he took from Brentano. Famously, Brentano had argued that intention- ality is the mark of the mental. This means that experience is always about some- thing – our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions are always directed at something. But Husserl understood that there is an inner connection between inten- tionality and normativity. One cannot have one without the other, so to speak, which means that if intentionality is the mark of the mental (which is commonly accepted), then the same goes for normativity (which is less commonly accepted). As Crowell (2009) puts it in his account of Husserl’s phenomenology, “intentionality is not simply the static presence of a ‘presentation’ in a mental experience (Erlebnis) but a normatively oriented claim to validity” (p. 13). In colloquial terms, this means that what we experience (e.g., grief) can only intentionally be “about” something (e.g., a loss), because there are more and less correct and valid ways of experiencing it (normatively). To take a very simple example, we may see a dangerous snake in the forest, but – on closer scrutiny – it may turn out to be an innocent branch, and our intentional orientation toward the object involves a normative underpinning of try- ing to “get it right.” Experience in general is not a passive happening, causally effectuated, but is rather a striving for normative correctness, as Husserl argued in his phenomenology. Mental life is centrally about understanding the world cor- rectly, getting it right, not just with respect to perceptual processes but also concern- ing emotional understanding and action.
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