ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an alternative to Crowell’s account of normativity and its ground in anticipatory resoluteness. The chapter argues that intentionality with its orientation toward truthfulness is a “primitive” or “basic” notion that is sufficient to disclose the realm of meaning and to account for the normativity we find in human experience. Intentionality—minding the world—has as its telos getting to the truth of the matter in all the domains of reason. This interest in truth motivates in us the search for evidential insight with the aim of being a self-responsible, truthful, rational agent. The normativity of our everyday norms is grounded in our evidential and self-responsible convictions about what is true, appropriate, and right. Since achieving self-responsible convictions across the domains of reason just is to be a truthful agent, this view accounts not only for individual, everyday norms but also for moral—better, ethical—normativity; it is an account of what it is to live a full and fulfilling human life.
