Normative Models of Rational Agency: The Theoretical Disutility of Certain Approaches

Much of cognitive science seeks to provide principled descriptions of various kinds and aspects of rational behaviour, especially in beings like us or AI simulacra of beings like us. For the most part, these investigators presuppose an unarticulated common sense appreciation of the rationality that such behaviour consists in. On those occasions when they undertake to bring the relevant norms to the surface and to give an account of that to which they owe their legitimacy, these investigators tend to favour one or other of three approaches to the normativity question. They are (1) the analyticity or truth-in-a-model approach; (2) the pluralism approach; and (3) the reffective equilibrium approach.; All three of these approaches to the normativity question are seriously flawed, never mind that the first two have some substantial (and often tacit) provenance among logicians and the third has enjoyed a flourishing philosophical career.; Against these views, we propose a strong version of what might be called normatively immanent descriptivism. We attempt to elucidate its virtues and to deal with what appears to be its most central vulnerability, embodied in the plain fact that actual human behaviour is sometimes irrational.