Normativity is the key to the difference between the human and the natural sciences

In this paper I take the human sciences to comprise psychology, social, economic, and political sciences, archaeology, history, ethnology, linguistics, philologies, literary and cultural studies, and similar fields having emerged besides and in between. So, the human sciences study the individual and collective ways and products of the human mind. After the term “Geisteswissenschaften” has narrowed its meaning, the term “Humanwissenschaften”, “human sciences”, seems more appropriate. By contrast, the natural sciences are to comprise all the other fields of empirical study, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, engineering, etc. In this paper I would like to give an update of, and a fresh attempt at, the longstanding heated issue whether or not there is a principled difference between the human and the natural sciences

Metaphysics, Deep Pluralism, and Paradoxes of Informal Logic

The paper argues that metaphysical thought, or thought in whose context our general framework of sense is under scrutiny, involves, legitimates, and requires a variety of informal analogues of the ‘true contradictions’ supported in some paraconsistent formal logics. These are what we can call informal ‘legitimate logical inadequacies’. These paradoxical logical structures also occur in deeply pluralist contexts, where more than one, conflicting general framework for sense is relevant. The paper argues further that these legitimate logical inadequacies are real or inherent in sense itself rather than conventional, shows how they can feature in argumentative practice in these metaphysical and pluralist contexts, and discusses some of their implications for metaphysical truth and for philosophical inquiry and disagreement