by John F. Post

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Abstract

The method in question is conceptual analysis. The madness comes of its privileging received usage over theories that would revise our concepts so as to conform to the phenomena, not the other way around. The alternatives to capture-the-concept include revisionary theory-construction as practiced not only in the sciences but in some philosophies. I present a revisionary theory of an important kind of normativity -- the normativity involved in a biological adaptation's being for this or that -- which theory, I argue, undermines the received objections to there being any such normativity objectively in the world. So too for other kinds of normativity, including the moral, insofar as the objections to their objectivity have the same form and presuppositions.

Prof: "Get a norm from a description? That's impossible, like squaring the circle."

Student (sotto voce): "But squaring the circle is impossible using only compass and straightedge, you idiot. Try another method."

In a famous aside, Polonius says of Hamlet, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't." But when it comes to how philosophy is done by many of our contemporaries, surely Polonius would put it the other way around: "Though this be method, yet there is madness in't." The method in question is conceptual analysis, so-called, in which the game is capture-the-concept. The aim is to defend or refute candidates for logically necessary and sufficient conditions for a given concept's correct application, all in light of the intuitions of those competent in its use. To take a classic example, some philosophers may still believe that the logically necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of knowledge are justified true belief. Any would-be refutation of this analysis is supposed to take the form of a counter-example, say a scenario in which the would-be knower has justified true belief, all right, but not knowledge, as in a counter-example due to Edmund Gettier.⁽¹⁾ What grounds the counter-example, again in accord with the method, are the intuitions of the competent -- the intuitions of those enculturated in the language game in which our ordinary or received notions of knowledge, justification, truth, and belief are at home.

The method's madness, or one of its forms of madness, is especially vivid in an application of the method by John Searle. Searle rejects any notion of function that is not observer-relative. This includes any notion of the function of a biological trait, or what the trait is for. Even the heart's function, what it's for, namely pumping blood, is not really function properly so called, insofar as its function is defined in purely causal, natural-selective terms and is therefore not observer-relative. According to Searle, "if we take such definitions as capturing the essential features of our ordinary notion, there are counter-examples to the analyses."⁽²⁾ For instance,

[a] perhaps decisive . . . clue that functions, unlike causes, are observer relative is that functional attributions, unlike causal attributions, are intensional-with-an-s. . . . [I]t is trivially true that the function of oars is to row with, and rowing consists in exerting pressure on water relative to a fixed fulcrum; but it is not the case that the function of oars is to exert pressure on water relative to a fixed fulcrum.⁽³⁾

For Searle, any theory that makes functional terms non-intensional cannot be right; the ordinary notion rules, and it is intensional. Since purely causal, natural-selective accounts make functional terms non-intensional, no such account can be right. It simply does not conform to the ordinary notion of function.

What are we to make of this? The intensionality of the ordinary notion, on Searle's account, derives from the fact that according to the notion, having a function is a property of artifacts. An artifact's function, what it's for, is what the artificer/designer meant it to be, as when the artificer/designer makes oars for rowing. This is what generates the intensional context. It follows, in Dennett's hilarious one-liner, that "According to Searle . . . airplane wings are really for flying, but eagles' wings are not."⁽⁴⁾ This reduces Searle's argument to absurdity, one would think, except that he is likely to bite the bullet, indeed with relish, and say, "Exactly, that's my point."

But consider. In 1859 the ordinary notion of adaptation also required a knowing artificer/designer, a being who created the adaptation so as to be for coping with environing conditions. Everyone thought of adaptation as entailing a knowing designer who makes the adaptation so as to be for helping the organism adapt to its environment, whereas Darwin thought not; the watch-maker is blind; adaptation is non-intensional. Thus Searle's account of what something is for would compel us to reject the theory of adaptation at the heart of evolutionary biology on the ground that while Darwin can arbitrarily define adaptation any way he likes, what gets defined is just not adaptation properly so called. We are not allowed to say that the received notion is wrong about a phenomenon in the world; instead we must say that there are two notions here, the received one rules, and any account that fails to conform to it is simply not about adaptation properly so called, hence must be eliminativist about adaptation, however successful it may be in other respects.⁽⁵⁾

By wielding Searle's or any other strategy according to which it is the received notion that rules, creationists and other fundamentalists can make short work of adaptation by natural selection. Alvin Plantinga, notoriously, does just that.⁽⁶⁾ Indeed, why stop there? If the ploy works at all, it can be made to work against anything at odds with received usage. This does reduce the ploy to absurdity.

By now it should be obvious how readily the method of capture-the-concept lends itself to a kind of conservatism. The arbiters of what counts as correct usage of a concept, hence of what counts as an adequate analysis, are the intuitions of those enculturated in the existing language game(s) in which the concept is at home. The method of capture-the-concept is decidedly descriptive, not revisionary.⁽⁷⁾ Hence it is strongly disposed, if not bound, to conform to received usage, or to the dominant language, linguistic code, or culture, when instead we need to create a space for alternative representations.⁽⁸⁾

Wittgenstein, at least on one widespread interpretation, is among those who encourage this descriptive stance and its conservative tendency. He writes,

We have only one language, and that is our everyday language.... [O]ur everyday language already is the language, provided we rid it of the obscurities that lie hidden in it.... Our language is complete.⁽⁹⁾

[W]e may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our investigations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.⁽¹⁰⁾

In much the same spirit, Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss write, "A concept that is employed in actual language games should be assumed innocent until proven guilty," and those who would replace the concept with a new one have the burden of producing some good argument that supports their intuitions.⁽¹¹⁾ Received ways of thinking and speaking are presumed innocent. Those of us who would depart from extant language games in favor of new representations labor under the burden of proof.

The methodological stance involved in capture-the-concept imposes a further, and even worse, handicap on those who would advance a new concept, a new representation. A received notion is one which has been around long enough for us to have acquired solid intuitions about its use. The new notion, almost by definition, has not. Indeed, competence in its use typically is something that remains to be spelled out, usually by means of articulating and using some new, imaginative theory in which it plays a key role. Often considerable time and effort are required before even the inventors of the new theory both understand its implications for a given one of its concepts and thereby acquire solid intuitions about the concept's use. Until then, it makes little sense to require the inventors to produce some good argument to support their intuitions, when (a) the inventors do not yet have solid intuitions (and often should not yet have them), (b) support for their eventual intuitions does not come from the kind of foundational linear argumentation conceptual analysts typically have in mind (linear in the sense that no claim may appear in its own evidential ancestry),⁽¹²⁾ and (c) such support comes instead from using the theory over time, new concepts and all, in order to develop a track record of its explanatory and other fruits and failures to compare with the track records of its competitors.

To take just one example, Einstein's special theory of relativity (STR) entails that mass is not conserved in all interactions, whereas for the philosophers of the day, and the classical physicists (and possibly the folk), it was; for the philosophers, at least, mass was a measure of substance, or at least of certain kinds of substance, where substance was by definition a substratum that persists through change. In 1905, Einstein's theory was therefore not only highly counter-intuitive but seemingly open to the charge (made by some) that he was changing the subject, that whatever he was talking about, it simply was not mass (as Searle charges in the case of non-intensional accounts of function). Even those who soon became expert in STR did not always have solid intuitions about its implications, including its implications for mass. Such argument as was eventually given for their intuitions about mass could only come from using the theory over time, including its new concept of mass, in order to develop a track record of fruits and failures to compare with the track records of its competitors. Imaginative theory-construction and evaluation are not reducible to capture-the-concept or to foundational linear argumentation for or against the intuitions of those competent in the use of the concept, received or new.

Does any of this mean that the new concept need bear no resemblance to the old, that there are no received constraints whatever on usage of the same term in the new way? Not at all. Even though for Einstein mass is not conserved in all interactions, his theory, however imaginative, entails that mass retains enough of the features of classical mass to warrant the name. The unit of mass is still the kilogram, the mass of a body still determines both the action of gravity on the body and its resistance to changes in motion, mass still satisfies the principle that f = ma, and so on. These are received constraints on using the same term in the new way -- where the constraints themselves are negotiable in light of evidence and the needs of theory. We retain our competence in applying the surviving classical principles, and, by learning and using the new theory, we add to it a competence in applying both the principle that mass is not conserved in all interactions and any other hitherto undreamt-of principles about mass that likewise derive from the fundamentals of the new theory.

In general, for any theory or account of mass -- or indeed for any theory of, say, what wings are for, or of function, or adaptation, or whatever -- and however revisionary, there needs to be some sufficiently strong (family) resemblance between the new usage and the old, if the theory is to count as a theory of a phenomenon by the same name. What counts as a sufficiently strong resemblance varies from field to field and, within a field, from case to case, depending on the needs and aims of theory, on received usage of the relevant terms both in and out of the theory, on various facts about the targeted phenomenon, and more. We should not expect some context-independent, across-the-board criterion for sufficient-strength-of-resemblance between the old and the new.⁽¹³⁾

So far I've been talking mostly of method and madness. But before turning to normativity, more needs to be said about constructive alternatives to capture-the-concept. An especially important kind of alternative may be illustrated as follows. Ball lightning has been reported by ordinary folk since antiquity as glowing, floating balls of colored light, often accompanied by a hissing sound and distinct odor. Its existence has been doubted, indeed dismissed as old wives tales (by physicists, for example, whose theories of electromagnetism ruled it impossible). Nonetheless, let's suspend judgment and provisionally adopt the working hypothesis that ball lightning is a phenomenon objectively in the world best approached not by way of capture-the-concept but by way of revisionary theory-construction. This is substantially how plasma physicists, among others, have actually proceeded. We may characterize their strategy as provisionally "equating" ball lightning and a high-density plasma -- equating them in the sense of claiming that they are either identical in standard conditions or perhaps in some sense only equivalent in standard conditions.⁽¹⁴⁾

The point is not that ball lightning would thereby be reduced to a high-density plasma -- reduced in the sense of the two being logically identical (that is, identical in all logically possible worlds). This is the sense in which water is said by many philosophers to have been reduced to H₂O. Rather, the theory claims only identity in a proper subset of the physically possible worlds. The proper subset consists of the physically possible worlds in which the relevant standard conditions obtain. Given only the evidence for the theory and what the theory may therefore legitimately claim, what happens in other possible worlds is a "don't-care," since it is the testing of the theory (and of relevant background theories) that establishes the range of conditions in which it holds, thereby circumscribing the relevant standard conditions. The theory can claim identity, but only a relatively weak contingent identity -- identity in the relevant proper subset of the physically possible worlds.⁽¹⁵⁾ Counter-exampling a plasma theory of ball lightning by conjuring merely logically possible worlds in which the identity fails would be like countering pawn-to-king-four with a lob over the net.

This provisional assumption of weak contingent identity, if successful, would be justified by its track record of fruits and failures under the bridge theory built around the assumption -- the plasma theory of ball lightning in standard conditions. We would be warranted in claiming to have discovered that ball lightning equates with a high-density plasma in such conditions. If ball lightning thus construed should happen not to conform to some received concept -- the folk concept or the philosophers' or for that matter earlier physicists' -- so much the worse for the received concept and the intuitions that support it.⁽¹⁶⁾

This sort of theorizing is by no means limited to science. It is found in ethics (where it usually takes the form of wide reflective equilibrium), esthetics (where the concept of what counts as art is often revised in light of radically new concrete art works), and more. When we engage in such theorizing, capture-the-concept is beside the point. So too is relying on our intuitions about received notions in order to determine how things must be with the target phenomenon, or even how the target is to be identified in the first place, hence how we are to know when it has been successfully explained rather than eliminated. The aim is to shape our notion so as to fit the phenomenon, by contrast with letting the notion determine, if the notion is to refer successfully, either the nature of the phenomenon, or the nature of the phenomenon properly-so-called, or its nature insofar as we may meaningfully speak of it, or even how to identify the phenomenon in the first place.

At the expense of some repetition, I want to pause to make clear, beyond mistaking, how revisionary the method of theory construction can be, and how it departs in other fundamental ways from much conventional philosophical method. A vivid way to do so is to impose a certain adequacy constraint on any such theory. We see this constraint at work perhaps most obviously in the natural sciences. Thus in physics we learn from Steven Weinberg that "Bohr . . . doubted the [Heisenberg-Pauli] theory would be the great new revolution in physics because it was not sufficiently 'crazy.'"⁽¹⁷⁾ I call this the craziness condition, and I'm confident you'll come to agree that my theory satisfies it -- the theory to be introduced below, of an important kind of normativity. Revisionary theory-construction is a method that has a kind of beneficial madness in't, by design -- imaginative, creative madness, not unlike that in the arts.

Now back to ball lightning. Given only a description of ball lightning purely in the vocabulary of plasma physics, one cannot infer that ball lightning has this or that higher-level property -- say, odoriferous, hissing, red, floating. Just as, in conformity with what J. L. Mackie calls Hume's Law, one cannot infer an ought from a descriptive is, so too one cannot infer an odor or hiss or color from a description purely in the plasma-theoretic vocabulary. But to conclude from this, as many do in the case of normativity, that the theorist has not successfully equated would-be objective ball-lightning properties with high-density plasma properties, would miss the point. Plasma theorists are not out to infer the higher-level properties of ball lightning from a description purely in the plasma-theoretic vocabulary. Rather, they provisionally propose -- hypothesize, posit, try on for size -- the identity of key ball-lightning properties and certain plasma properties, in standard conditions, then test the proposal by exploring its fruits and failures under the containing bridge theory (which, like all such theories, includes terms from both the lower level and the higher). It follows that Hume's-Law objections are out of order.

Another general feature of this sort of revisionary theory-construction is that open-question arguments are as out of order as Hume's-Law objections. According to Moore's open-question argument, we can easily imagine ourselves both recognizing that some descriptive condition C obtains (say, that an act or policy x would conduce to the greatest happiness of the greatest number) and nonetheless asking meaningfully -- or, as he says, "with significance" -- whether x has normative property N (say, whether x is good). Since this is an open question, it "shows clearly that we have two different notions before our minds"; therefore, N and C cannot be identical or equivalent, or their predicates synonymous.⁽¹⁸⁾ One problem with this line of argument is that we can likewise imagine ourselves learning that something has high plasma density and nonetheless asking "with significance" whether it is ball lightning. We do indeed have two notions before our minds here: the (folk) notion of ball lightning and the notion of high plasma density. Yet to conclude from this that ball lightning and high plasma density cannot be equated would miss the point of the revisionary theorizing involved in the plasma theorist's account (not that Moore would so conclude, though he would owe us some justification for the double standard -- that such theorizing is OK for ball lightning but not for normativity).

This revisionary method of positing the best equivalence/identity looks as though it could (i) free philosophers from the oppression of capture-the-concept or indeed any other method that privileges existing language games, received usage, forms of life, linguistic codes or cultures, and (ii) create a space for alternative representations. In the case of normativity, the method promises also to free us from the oppression of Hume's-Law objections and open-question arguments, thereby improving our chances of finding an adequate account of the relations between norms and descriptions.

There are several kinds of normativity, not just one, nor do they form a hierarchy in which one is "ontologically prior" to the others.⁽¹⁹⁾ Here I'll consider only a rather primitive kind, which nonetheless many philosophers have denied can be objective, or "part of the fabric of the world."⁽²⁰⁾ They think that our folk beliefs to the contrary reflect what Hume calls the mind's "propensity to spread itself on external objects." As Searle says, "the only norms are in us and exist only from our point of view."⁽²¹⁾ Or as Mackie puts it, "the supposedly objective values [are] based in fact upon attitudes which the person has who takes himself to be recognizing and responding to those values."⁽²²⁾ Searle, Mackie and many others believe there can be no objective normativity at all, whether moral normativity or any other.

Granted, Mackie talks mostly of moral values when he formulates his argument against objective values. It might therefore appear that he means his argument to apply only to would-be objective moral normativity. Yet he also says,

Now consider what some believe is a kind of objective normativity in the world of biology. According to Robert Brandon's rigorous account of adaptation, it makes sense to think of an adaptation as for something.⁽²⁵⁾ To think of an adaptation as for something is to take a kind of normative stance -- call it the what-for stance. The what-for stance is closely related to what Dennett calls the design stance, and it likewise invites various teleological what-for questions, including "What is the heart for?" and "Which facts determine what it's for?"⁽²⁶⁾

Of course a given trait might not be for anything, in which case a what-for question is out of order. But as Brandon says, "Whenever we hypothesize that some trait is an adaptation, it makes sense to inquire about its function," what it's for. I would add only that an assertion of what something is for is a normative assertion -- as seems implicit in Brandon's account, and is clear in Mackie's account of functional words -- or at least gives every appearance of being normative. To say that the heart is for pumping blood is ordinarily to imply that even when a given heart cannot possibly pump blood, nonetheless pumping blood is what it is for, what it should do, what it is supposed to bring about or effect. We call a heart "bad" or "defective" when it cannot do what it is for, distinguishing between what it actually does or is disposed to do and what it should do.

Note well that none of the foregoing is meant to prove that an adaptation A's being for doing or effecting E is indeed a normative property of A. Instead, the strategy is to suppose for the sake of argument that it is, then see what follows. If you already believe that this property is indeed normative, then read me as arguing that this normativity is objectively in the world. If you believe no such thing, read me as arguing that because we can make good objective sense of such would-be normativity, the reasons why so many have doubted there is any such normative property in the first place are successfully undermined.

Now with what objective affairs might we equate the supposed normative matter of an adaptation A's being for E? Here too Brandon is instructive. It is true, as he says, that "Adaptations in nature seem to call for teleological explanations" -- explanations of an adaptation's function, what it's for. Melanism in the peppered moth is an adaptation, and as such it calls for a teleological explanation -- that is, an explanation of what the color is for (it is for camouflage, according to the classical textbook story, though the role of cryptic coloration and selective predation in industrial melanism in the moth is significantly less than once thought, which may be why Brandon uses a different example). But not only do such explanations tell us specifically that an adaptation A is for E (the black color is for camouflage). They explain how it came about that A is for E: A is for E because E is the effect of A's past instances in virtue of which A was selected for. Adaptation explanations are both teleological (in virtue of being answers to what-for questions), and "perfectly good causal/mechanical explanations." For according to an adaptation explanation, the "adaptation is the direct product of the process of evolution by natural selection," and this process is a causal/mechanical matter of "the ecological consequences of the adaptation, or its precursors, that explain its adaptive advantage over its alternatives."⁽²⁷⁾

This suggests that we try equating the supposed normative matter of adaptation A's being for E with the causal/mechanical matter of E's being the effect of A's past instances in virtue of which A was selected for -- the effect in virtue of which A had an adaptive advantage over its alternatives. Specifically, let's adopt the defeasible bridge principle that where A is an adaptation,

The qualification "directly" is necessary because many adaptions, in addition to being directly for something in the sense defined by DFOR, can also be normatively for other things in senses not definable by DFOR. The imprinting mechanism in a newly-hatched chick is an adaptation directly for imprinting Junior on its mother. But the mechanism is also, and derivatively, for imprinting Junior on the here-now specific individual that is Junior's mom -- call her Henna. Since the here-now Henna is nowhere to be found in the evolutionary history, imprinting on Henna cannot be the effect of the mechanism's past instances in virtue of which it was selected for. It follows by DFOR, as it should, that Junior's imprinting mechanism is not directly for imprinting on Henna. Nonetheless, the mechanism is objectively normatively for doing so, in a derivative sense spelled out elsewhere.⁽²⁹⁾

By DFOR, black color in the peppered moth has the normative property of being directly for camouflage if and only if camouflage is the effect of the black color's past instances in virtue of which it was selected for. Since the latter is a descriptive, causal matter, DFOR bridges or connects the normative and the causal-descriptive, in the case of this primitive sort of normativity, thereby effecting a kind of unification of them. If the normativity thus construed should happen not to conform to received notions of what something is for -- including philosophers' notions or for that matter biologists' -- we should consider putting the received notions on trial.⁽³⁰⁾

What is DFOR's modality? The theory built around DFOR claims only that DFOR is true in every physically possible world in which certain standard conditions obtain, namely those physical conditions that enable adaptation via natural selection, specifically selection for a trait in virtue of its past instances having had a certain effect (or effects) in the relevant environments. What happens in other possible worlds is a don't-care. It follows that in order to counter-example DFOR, one must show that the world W in which DFOR is said to be false is not only (i) physically possible but (ii) such that the relevant standard conditions obtain in W. That some philosopher's imagined world W satisfies these two conditions cannot be inferred from the fact (when it is one) that (a) W is conceivable, and not even from the fact (when it is one) that (b) it is conceivable that W is both physically possible and such that the relevant standard conditions obtain in it. The inference from (a) or (b) to (i) and (ii) is a non-sequitur. The method of counter-exampling by invoking conceptually possible worlds -- whether in the style of Gettier or Searle or whomever -- has no force against DFOR.⁽³¹⁾

It is a peculiarity of DFOR that it defines a property P in terms of something that is not itself a property of what has P.⁽³²⁾ What has the definiendum property P -- the property of being normatively for E -- is an adaptation A. What has the definiens property of being the effect of A's past instances in virtue of which A was selected for is not A but E. Even when a here-now token x of A actually has effect E, x and its effect are not the same; what has the definiens property is again not what has the property to be defined. It follows that DFOR does not imply identity of the definiendum and definiens properties, since two properties are identical only if the same things have them; so too for equivalence of the properties. Any objection to DFOR which presupposes that DFOR implies either property identity or property equivalence is thereby ruled out. What DFOR does equate A's property of being for E with is a state of affairs -- the state of affairs in which E is the effect of A's past instances in virtue of which A was selected for.

Nonetheless, we need to consider whether the theory built around DFOR conforms to Hume's Law. According to the theory, the supposed normative matter of A's being for E is not to be inferred from the purely descriptive state of affairs in which E is the effect of A's past instances in virtue of which A was selected for, or indeed from anything else descriptive. That A is for E may be inferred only if the description is conjoined with some appropriate bridge principle, say with DFOR. In like manner, the higher-level properties of ball lightning may be inferred from a description purely in the plasma-theoretic vocabulary only in conjunction with the bridge principle that ball-lightning properties equate with certain plasma properties. Thus the theory built around DFOR conforms to Hume's Law.

As regards open-question arguments, the theory does not propose a meaning-equivalence of terms on the basis of necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of some received notion. The theory no more attempts this than Darwin attempted to capture or conform to what philosophers, theologians or ordinary folk -- or even fellow biologists -- meant when they spoke of adaptation or design. Indeed, we folk can easily imagine ourselves both recognizing that E is the effect in virtue of which A was selected for and nonetheless asking meaningfully -- or, as Moore says, "with significance" -- whether A was adapted/designed to do E; and this does show "clearly that we have two different notions before our minds." But from the fact that these are two different notions it does not follow that A's being for E, or A's being adapted/designed to bring about E, cannot be equated with E's being a certain effect of A's past instances. Nor does it follow that A's being for E, properly so-called, has been eliminated -- eliminated because being for E, by the new notion, does not entail a knowing designer. To suppose that either conclusion follows would be to miss the point of the revisionary method of positing the best equivalence or identity -- or perhaps to get the point, all right, but to insist nonetheless that the received notion rules, a ploy which, as we've seen, can be wonderfully useful against new ideas.

Finally, what about the crucially important distinction or gap -- often called the is-ought gap -- between what someone or something actually does or is disposed to do and what would be normatively better or worse? This distinction or gap is widely construed as criterial for normativity; any theory that failed to preserve the gap would not have preserved a sufficiently strong family resemblance between the new usage of 'normative' and the old, if the theory is to count as a theory of a phenomenon by the same name.

We see the gap at work in our reaction to cynical remarks like "An impeachable offense is whatever the House says it is" (as then Representative Gerald Ford said with regard to Chief Justice Earl Warren). What the House ought to do cannot be equated with what it does or is disposed to do. As Kripke says, "whatever in fact I (am disposed to) do, there is a unique thing that I should do."⁽³³⁾ We also see the distinction at work when we speak of a defective heart, meaning a heart that does not (is not disposed to) do what it should do, or does not (is not disposed to) perform as designed -- or when we speak of a heart "which is not such as to be able to do that," as Mackie would say in this and other cases of function. Let a token heart be so diseased, damaged or deformed as to be totally indisposed to pump blood; nonetheless we regard pumping blood as what it's for, what it is supposed to do.

Does the theory preserve this is-ought gap? Specifically, where x is a here-now token of an adaptation A, and N is the normative property of being for E, does the theory entail that whether x has N is neither equated with nor entailed by what x actually does or is disposed to do? Well, by DFOR,

Of course problems remain. I consider them in some detail elsewhere, including (i) the new, improved open-question arguments, (ii) what exactly is supposed to be the sense in which N is "determined" by or "supervenes" on certain objective affairs, (iii) whether A's normative property of being for E plays an appropriate explanatory and predictive role (as required by Gilbert Harman, among others), and (iv) how the theory's track record to date compares with the track records of its competitors.⁽³⁴⁾ Here there is room for just one more point. Suppose that the revisionary method of positing the best equivalence or identity undermines the entrenched anti-realist arguments in the case of this primitive kind of normativity, as I believe it does. Then it likewise undermines the entrenched anti-realist arguments in the case of other kinds of normativity, including human moral normativity, insofar as they have the same form and presuppositions, as indeed most of them do, if not all.⁽³⁵⁾ Presumably this is why Mackie concludes, as noted, that "there would be at least some initial implausibility in a view that gave the one a different status from the other." It follows that the implications of what I argue here in the case of a rather primitive kind of normativity are substantially more general than they might at first appear.