Neurodiversity and Normativity
In this paper, I aim to reconcile two aims of philosophical theorizing about cognition: accommodating neurodiversity and making normative evaluations. At first glance, they seem to be in tension. On the one hand, neurodiversity is the idea that there are many different and non-defective ways of thinking well. On the other hand, the practice of making normative evaluations of cognition, as is common in epistemology, seems to presuppose that there are better and worse ways of thinking. How can we say there are better and worse ways of thinking when we also want to say that there are many diverse ways of thinking, and specifically that many ways of thinking that are traditionally thought of as defective are in fact just different? I evaluate different approaches to this apparent tension and ultimately offer a strategy for reconciling the two aims.
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Claire Field University of Zürich
