From a strictly Darwinian perspective, there is no normativity since reality amounts to/is reducible to "what is the case" [reduction to behavioural regularities}

from an attenuated Darwinian [eg: Nozick, 2001], there are "normativity modules" along the lines of Chomskean LADs

neither perspective adequately explains "what has to be", nor even "what has to be doine". But it is plain fact of human life that the "mind's best work" is shot through with both of these normativities. Recall Luther's famous declaration about what he had to do, what he could not do otherwise; recall Spinoza's reminder that a true proportion had to be so and could not be otherwise. Well then: where did these normatvities come from, including their binding character. How did they get into human minds, how were they constituted, how were they developed into better norms?

Note that these normativities are not confined to the moral domain - the latter is distinctive, of course. But these examples pick up a huge class of phenomena which cry out for a developmental explanation.

Lo: enter Piaget (1918) Recherche, or Piaget (1995) Sociological studies.

---------------
(This article is from email discussions through owner-piaget-list@interchange.ubc.ca)