"Normative" vs. "empirical" (and the "Naturalistic Fallacy")

Both normative and empirical are necessary, as suggested in the following two quotes:

"To those who advocate a cut-and-dried division of labor, research traditions representing a blend of philosophy and science have always been particularly offensive. Marxism and psychoanalysis are cases in point. They cannot, on this view, help being pseudosciences because they straddle normal and abnormal discourse, refusing to fall on either side of the dividing line. On this point Rorty speaks the same language as Jaspers. What I know about the history of the social sciences and psychology leads me to believe that hybrid discourses such as Marxism and psychoanalysis are by no means atypical. To the contrary, they may well stand for a type of approach that marks the beginning of new research traditions."  What holds for Freud applies to all seminal theories in these disciplines, for instance, those of Durkheim, Mead, Max Weber, Piaget, and Chomsky. Each inserted a genuinely philosophical idea like a detonator into a particular context of research. Symptom formation through repression, the creation of solidarity through the sacred, the identity-forming function of role taking, modernization as rationalization of society, decentration as an outgrowth of reflective abstraction from action, language acquisition as an activity of hypothesis testing--these key phrases stand for so many paradigms in which a philosophical idea is present in embryo while at the same time empirical, yet universal, questions are being posed. It is no coincidence that theoretical approaches of this kind are the favorite target of empiricist counterattacks. Such cyclical movements in the history of science, incidentally, do not point to a convergence of these disciplines in one unified science. It makes better sense to view them as stages on the road to the philosophization of the sciences of man (Philosophischwerden der Humanwissenschaften) than as stages in the triumphal march toward objectivist approaches, such as neurophysiology, that quaint favorite child of the analytic philosophers."
     — Jürgen Habermas "Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter" in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp.14-15.

Rat (rational) choice had both in some form.

• Origin in game theory
• Normativity through the concept of "rationality", "maximization", and the implicit assumption (and acceptance) of "subjectivism".
• Empirical vality in that people actually act this way in our society.  See the Wisman quote:

  "Mainstream economics, in its positivistic and instrumental orientation, pretends to be principally concerned with discovering regularities and correlations within the economic order which might permit greater prediction and control of economic phenomena. However, its uncritical stance, combined with its pretense of ethical neutrality, has precluded attempts to differentiate those regularities and correlations representing invariant forms of social life from those which merely 'express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that in principle can be transformed' (Habermas 1971). Regularities which represent the ideological imprisonment of humans make predictions of social phenomena more likely. Indeed, the more firmly ideology is entrenched, the greater will be the predictive power. Such predictions can become powerful instruments for control and manipulation of society by the state or private centres of concentrated power."
       — Jon D Wisman, 1991. "The scope and goals of economic science: A Habermasian perspective". In Economics and Hermeneutics, ed. Donald Lavoie. New York: Routledge. 113-133 Passed along by Rakesh Bhandari from the Habermas elist.

The connection between the two was that the normative elucidated the empirical.

Rat choice is the subject of intense debate:

• It seems to make selfishness a virtue.
• Non-individualist concerns are accepted but defined away or dismissed as exogenous.
• It glorifies our classical liberal institutions;  it provides no critical perspective.