Normative Naturalism and its problems (normative)

Abstract

Larry Laudan's Normative Naturalism is one of the most important proposals in the philosophy of science. Among other issues, it allows appraising different philosophical theories of scientific methodology because it is a descriptive and normative thesis and, at the same time, it avoids naturalistic fallacy. From my point of view, nevertheless, Normative Naturalism does not satisfactorily explain a couple of roughly common historical situations in science, namely, novel methodological situations and circumstances where successful methodological rules do not work as they used to. In this paper, I confront Normative Naturalism against these couple of anomalies in order to see its reaction and I conclude that Normative Naturalism exhibits substantive normative fissures.