I don’t think there’s a perfect answer, but as a heuristic I defer to the logical positivists—if you can’t even in principle find direct evidence for or against the statement by observing the physical world and you can’t mathematically prove it, and on top of that it sounds like a statement about behaviour or action, then you’re probably in normland.
would ontological statements which can’t be proven by observation also count as normative statements? e.g. I am real, the world is real, I am not real, the self is not real etc.
I’m not sure how to interpret ‘real’ there. If you mean ‘real’ as opposed to something like a hologram, I’d say the sentence is underdefined. If you mean it as synonymous for a proposition about physical state, such that ‘there are two oranges in front of me’ would be approximately equivalent to ‘the two oranges in front of me are real’ , then I think you’re asking about any proposition about physical state.
In which case I don’t think there’s much reason to call them ‘normative’, no statement can be proven by physical observation, so that would make basically all parseable statements normative, which would make the term useless. Although I’m sympathetic to the idea that it is.
I don’t think there’s a perfect answer, but as a heuristic I defer to the logical positivists—if you can’t even in principle find direct evidence for or against the statement by observing the physical world and you can’t mathematically prove it, and on top of that it sounds like a statement about behaviour or action, then you’re probably in normland.
would ontological statements which can’t be proven by observation also count as normative statements? e.g. I am real, the world is real, I am not real, the self is not real etc.
I’m not sure how to interpret ‘real’ there. If you mean ‘real’ as opposed to something like a hologram, I’d say the sentence is underdefined. If you mean it as synonymous for a proposition about physical state, such that ‘there are two oranges in front of me’ would be approximately equivalent to ‘the two oranges in front of me are real’ , then I think you’re asking about any proposition about physical state.
In which case I don’t think there’s much reason to call them ‘normative’, no statement can be proven by physical observation, so that would make basically all parseable statements normative, which would make the term useless. Although I’m sympathetic to the idea that it is.