Norm (philosophy)
Norms are concepts (sentences) of practical import, oriented to affecting an action, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express.
The understanding that permissions are norms in the same way was an important step in ethics and philosophy of law.
The action orientation of such norms is less obvious than in the case of a command or permission, but is essential for understanding the relevance of issuing such norms: When a folk song becomes a "national anthem" the meaning of singing one and the same song changes; likewise, when a piece of land becomes an administrative region, this has legal consequences for many activities taking place on that territory; and without these consequences concerning action, the norms would be irrelevant.
A more obviously action-oriented variety of such constitutive norms (as opposed to deontic or regulatory norms) establishes social institutions which give rise to new, previously nonexistent types of actions or activities (a standard example is the institution of marriage without which "getting married" would not be a feasible action; another is the rules constituting a game: without the norms of soccer, there would not exist such an action as executing an indirect free kick).
Implicit cultural conventions include blocking the top of the stairs on a subway, doing your makeup on the train, or even walking slowly in the city.
An example of such can include being kind to your parents, or giving up the seat for a pregnant lady on the bus.
The aggressive toys included a peg board, a dart gun, and a 3 foot bobo doll.
The young children were more likely to observe and copy the norms and be influenced by the behavior of others, especially those they may see as “older” or a “role model.”[4] In recent years, research has opened up on the hypothesis that non-human animals are also capable of acting according to norms.
This thesis, supported by various philosophers[5] and ethologists,[6] is the subject of a current debate that is primarily based on the distinction between different possible concepts of ‘norm’.
Whereas the truth of a descriptive statement is purportedly based on its correspondence to reality, some philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, assert that the (prescriptive) truth of a prescriptive statement is based on its correspondence to right desire.
Other philosophers maintain that norms are ultimately neither true or false, but only successful or unsuccessful (valid or invalid), as their propositional content obtains or not (see also John Searle and speech act).
There is an important difference between norms and normative propositions, although they are often expressed by identical sentences.
Some ethical theories reject that there can be normative propositions, but these are accepted by cognitivism.
Another purported feature of norms, it is often argued, is that they never regard only natural properties or entities.
Moore's claim that there is a naturalistic fallacy when one tries to analyse "good" and "bad" in terms of a natural concept.
Other thinkers (Adler, 1986) assert that norms can be natural in a different sense than that of "corresponding to something proceeding from the object of the prescription as a strictly internal source of action".
Recent works maintain that normativity has an important role in several different philosophical subjects, not only in ethics and philosophy of law (see Dancy, 2000).
