Análisis cuestionario docentes

A further objection needs to be dealt with that threatens to rule out any appeal to generic propositions for any purpose. In a discussion of alternative approaches to generics, Bernhard Nickel presents an objection to Thompson’s natural-historical judgements, stating that in fact generics never express such judgements (Nickel 2016, Chapter 4). This objection, if it is successful, creates just as much of a problem for GPs in general. Nickel is concerned that if Thompson is right about the existence of natural-historical judgements, “then certain generics express metaphysically basic facts and that just means that no informative characterization of genericity is possible for the propositions expressed by these generics” (Nickel 2016, 107). Since Nickel wants to provide such a theory of

22 Because they both rely on individuals having a certain history, both the etiological proper function account and the generic account are subject to Swampman-like objections. That is, they are bound to say that freaks of nature like Davidson’s (1987) Swampman that do not come about in the normal way but pop into existence, physically identical to members of a kind like human beings, are nonetheless not real members of the kind. In fact, they must say they have none of the organs, functions, or vital processes characteristic of the kind they resemble. Lindeman addresses these “swampobjections” in her defense of the proper functionalist account by explaining away the appearance of normativity in terms of Swampman’s interests (2014, 75-81).

Even though his organs don’t have proper functions, their operations may serve his interests and thus may be judged better or worse for that. I, on the other hand, am inclined to say that on our intuitive understanding of living kinds, a creature that comes about in a completely different way from normal is a borderline case of belonging to the kind, and the norms for it do not clearly apply or fail to apply.

genericity (a metaphysics of generics), he finds it necessary to provide an argument against Thompson. The problem is that any general metaphysics of generics would conflict with some generics, the GPs, having their own primitivist metaphysics. Now, I don’t dispute that a GP theorist is committed to true GPs being metaphysically basic facts. However, I’m not so sure that the fact that we cannot analyze them in terms of concepts like processes, mechanisms, explanatory strategies or psychological tendencies means that we can’t meaningfully explore the relations they bear to these things. Rödl, as we have seen, thinks that GPs are crucial for understanding processes, for example.

And it’s not clear to me that a primitivist metaphysics of GPs could not find a systematic place in a broader metaphysics for generics - we would not know until it was attempted. Regardless, let us proceed to Nickel’s argument, since it stands independently of its motivations.

Nickel interprets Thompson as holding that natural-historical judgements of the form “Fs are Gs”

ground claims of the form “All Fs ought to be Gs”, and that this is what their normativity consists in.

However, Nickel argues that no form of generic, even natural-historical judgements, could ground such normative statements, because many generics do not state a feature that should be fulfilled by every individual of the kind. For instance, any generic that characterizes a subgroup of a species like a sex is not something that should be fulfilled by all species members. “The lion has a mane” is true, but it is not true that “All lions ought to have manes”, since only male lions should (Nickel, 108). “Bees produce honey” is true but it is not true for each individual bee that it ought to produce honey—that’s not the job of queens or drones, for instance.

Nickel goes on to consider ways in which Thompson might be able to deny that these are really natural-historical judgements, but we need not consider these, since it’s clear that Thompson would want these to be natural-historical judgements, as they are important parts of their species’ natural history and still have normative force. If a male lion does not have a mane or a beehive is not collectively producing honey, then something is amiss, even if these norms do not apply equally to every individual of the species. Indeed, we might well add more examples to Nickel’s arsenal. “Buffalo

form protective circles” has already been flagged as a case where it is groups of buffalo that ought to form protective circles, and not each individual. Furthermore, most natural-historical judgements only pertain to a certain phase of the life cycle: “Monarch butterflies form chrysalises” only applies as a norm to individuals at the caterpillar stage, not to eggs or adults. And to give one further case,

“Aquatic frog eggs hatch into tadpoles which metamorphose into adult frogs” is a true natural-historical judgement but it’s certainly not the case that all frog eggs ought to do this. The failure of most eggs is part of the species’ characteristic way of perpetuating itself in its characteristic environment.

All these examples are natural-historical judgements, and they are all just as normative as any natural-historical judgement that applies strictly to each and every individual. This latter observation is the key to resisting Nickel’s argument. It’s clear that the normativity of these judgements cannot reside in their grounding a statement of the form “All Fs ought to be Gs”. Their normativity must be more complicated than that. Thompson nowhere commits himself to the norms taking this simplistic form, though admittedly he does say that natural-historical judgements are normative for individuals by way of this inference pattern: from “The F is G” and “This F is not G” we infer “This F is defective in that it is not G”, according to a very abstract sense of defect (Thompson 2008, 80). This does not account for different subgroups within the species which are the targets of particular norms, but since Thompson also gives examples of natural-historical judgements with more specific subjects than the species, such as “the female bobcat” or “the mother”, he would presumably have no problem with admitting more specific kinds of natural-historical judgement beyond the paradigm case that takes the name of the species as subject. After all, if we consider the changes that every organism goes through in its life cycle, almost no natural historical judgements will attribute properties that all species members should have at all times. Thus, it does not make any trouble for the idea that generic propositions are norms for a kind, that they are not always to be fulfilled by the traits of individuals, but also by groups, phases, sexes or other divisions of the kind.

We should also observe that no one GP gives the full story of how it is to be fulfilled. All you can glean from “The lion has a mane”, without any further information about lions, is that some class of groupings of lions ought to have manes and all lions ought to contribute to this in their normal way.

Further GPs can be provided to fill in the gaps in this story: adult male lions contribute to the fulfillment of this norm by growing manes, juvenile male lions contribute to it by growing into adult lions, female lions contribute to it by giving birth to healthy male offspring and so on. In general, all the possession of the kind’s essence requires for an individual is contribution in the way characteristic of the kind to the expression of its essential traits by itself, other individuals, groups, its own future phases and so on. What this way of contributing consists in will be specified by further more specific GPs. Interestingly, this is not far from Nickel’s own account of characterizing generics, which posits various different ways and respects of being normal with respect to a generic trait, so as to make sense of cases like “Lions have manes.” To conclude this section, there is no threat to Thompson’s natural-historical judgements being expressed by generics. There would be a problem if natural-historical judgements had to always ground norms for individuals only, but we have seen that this is not the case.