Questioning the Supposed Gap between “Facticity” and “Normativity”: On Ontological and Semantical Trialism

At the beginning of any search for knowledge lies a fundamental methodological maxim: concepts are important, and in some types of inquiries, they are even decisive.Our understanding of the entities of the world depends on the concepts we use to conceive and describe them.The most abstract -and therefore in their meaning least changing -concepts to describe the entities of the world are: thing, property, relation, world, structure, system, whole, part, necessity, possibility, becoming, body, mind, force, cause, action, etc.It is essential to begin with these concepts and focus on them to understand the fundamental elements of the world.Applying this fundamental methodological maxim to philosophy is crucial, as philosophy seeks knowledge of the structure of the world as a whole.Therefore, it employs the most general descriptive concepts, which are old and ubiquitous.Concepts are decisive in philosophy because only by describing them in their relationship with each other can we elucidate the structure of the world.One consequence of this is another fundamental methodological maxim: Be careful and scrupulous with newly invented general and philosophical concepts, such as quintessence, phlogiston, idea, being (Sein), should (Sollen), entity, monad, trope, truthmaker, zombie, etc.The concepts of facticity and normativity are also such newly invented philosophical concepts.These terms are not commonly used in other academic disciplines or in real-life discourse.Even in law or jurisprudence, we do not find these terms as legal or commonly used terms.Therefore, we must be careful and scrupulous with the newly invented philosophical concepts of facticity and normativity 1 .They are not self-evident or self-explanatory.They may be similar to the concepts of quintessence or phlogiston 2 , without any reference to reality in the world.