Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the relationship between the concepts
of normativity and supervenience. The research on normativity – a term introduced
to the philosophical jargon by Edmund Husserl almost one hundred years ago –
gained impetus in the 1990s through the works of philosophers such as Robert
Audi, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Brandom, Paul Boghossian and Joseph Raz.
The problem of the nature and sources of normativity has been investigated not
only in morals and in relation to language but also in other domains, e.g. in law
or in the context of the theories of rationality. Supervenience, understood as a
special kind of relation between properties and weaker than entailment, has become
analytic philosophers’ formal tool of choice since the 1980s. It features in the
theories pertaining to mental properties, but also in aesthetics or the law. It is no
surprise that it has also been extensively used to account for the nature of normative
properties or normative and evaluative discourse. On the one hand, it may help a
moral or a legal philosopher to avoid the Scylla of the “queer” realism and the
Charybdis of reductionism. On the other, it is usually claimed that the relation
of supervenience is – at least to a certain extent – ontologically neutral; hence,
it does not force any particular ontological view. In recent years, the ‘marriage’
of normativity and supervenience has become an object of many philosophical
theories as well as heated debates. It seems that the conceptual apparatus of the
supervenience theory makes it possible to state precisely some claims pertaining to
normativity, as well as illuminate the problems surrounding it. For example, it seems
prima facie possible – with the use of the concept of supervenience – to explain how
the normative dimension of law and morals is related to physical facts, and avoid the
claim that there exists an ‘unavoidable gap’ between Is and Ought; or to show where
normativity, which undoubtedly forms an important part of our experience,