The Normativity of Meaning Revisited

The question of whether meaning is inherently normative has become a central topic in philosophy and linguistics. It also has crucial implications for anthropology and for understanding the evolution of language. This chapter defends the normativity of meaning against some recent challenges. Anti-normativists contend that while there are “semantic principles”—aka explanations of meaning—specifying conditions for the correct application of expressions, these are either not genuinely normative or they are not in fact constitutive of meaning. This dilemma can be defused if one clarifies the notions of norm, rule, and convention, distinguishes different dimensions of semantic normativity, and pays attention to different types of mistakes that can afflict linguistic behaviour. One needs to keep apart: norms of truth and of meaning, regulative and constitutive rules, rules and the reasons for following or disregarding them, pro tanto and all things considered obligations. On that basis the chapter argues that correctness is a normative notion and that constitutive rules in general and explanations of meaning in particular play various normative roles in linguistic practices. Furthermore, while speakers may conform to and occasionally violate semantic principle for defeasible prudential reasons, this is perfectly compatible with the principles having a normative status. The final section discusses the question of whether human communication requires communally shared rules or conventions and the age-old problem of circularity: how could such conventions be essential to language, given that the latter appears prerequisite for establishing and communicating conventions in the first place?

The Development of Domains of Moral and Conventional Norms, Coordination in Decision-Making, and the Implications of Social Opposition

This chapter discusses norms in the domains of morality, social convention, and personal jurisdiction from the perspective of psychological development. Many studies have documented that by a young age children think in different ways about each of these domains and that each represents a different developmental pathway. Reasoning about the moral domain, which is a main focus of the chapter, is connected with emotions, and the development of moral judgments stems from individuals’ reciprocal social interactions in direct and everyday experiences. Whereas the domains of norms are distinct, many social situations include considerations from different domains and, therefore, social decisions often involve processes of coordination of weighing those differing and sometimes conflicting considerations. After discussion of processes of coordination, the chapter considers ways that individuals reflect upon the fairness of systems of social organization and coordinate acceptance of norms and opposition to norms through their moral judgments.

The Evolution of Human Normativity

Normative behavior is a human universal that is intimately linked to morality. Morality is an adaptation to the specifically human subsistence niche of hunting and gathering, which is skill-intensive and therefore relies on transmission of opaque knowledge and involves critical interdependence, reliance on coordinated division of labor, and synchronized collective action. This lifestyle requires the presence of a variety of emotions that coevolved with it as the proximate mechanisms enabling this adaptive function. The high-urgency feel to many of these emotions reflects their functional importance: it serves to give them priority over other motivations. It is also what, to contemporary humans, makes them recognizable as moral. The key components of human morality are (1) prosocial emotions, and (2) an urge to conform. Together, they produce the urge to comply with moral norms. Normativity is thus an integral part of human morality. It evolved when two preferences came together. Strong informational conformity, needed to enable the transmission of opaque knowledge, was already present in the anthropoid primate ancestors of hominids and hominins. The added component evolved with the evolution of strong interdependence: a strong concern for one’s reputation and fear of punishment, and thus strongly prosocial emotions. Thus, the emergence of normativity in our ancestors does not require a special explanation: it was an automatic byproduct of the emergence of moral behavior in our ancestors.

There Ought to Be Roots

This chapter explores the notion that the behavioural and cognitive constituents of human social norms have equivalents or precursors in humans’ closest living relatives, the non-human primates. Scrutiny of the definitions of various forms of conformity revealed, on the one hand, that some key features defining social norms are essentially impossible to infer in animals so that from a purist perspective, homologous equivalents of social norms cannot be demonstrated. On the other hand, this review revealed that functional equivalents or precursors of behavioural, emotional, and cognitive mechanisms constituting normative conformity are present and ubiquitous among (group-living haplorhine) non-human primates and that social patterns reflecting normative conformity have been described, hence supporting the authors’ main thesis that this salient aspect of human sociality, even though it may depend upon some uniquely derived features, has strong and long roots in the evolutionary history shared with other primates.

Can There Be Linguistic Norms?

This chapter discusses the existence of linguistic norms (defined as socially determined and commonly shared criteria for correctness of action specific to language). It considers linguistic structure and semantic compositionality, lexical semantics, speech acts, and implicit communication and concludes that there are no linguistic norms stricto sensu at any of these levels. However, social norms constraining communication in the intimate societies in which language evolved have left traces in contemporary languages, notably in the universal existence of implicit communication. Key words: linguistic norm, linguistic structure, semantic compositionality, lexical semantics, speech act, implicit communication, Grice, principle of cooperation, society of intimates, evolution of language.

On the Uniqueness of Human Normative Attitudes

Humans are normative beings through and through. This capacity for normativity lies at the core of uniquely human forms of understanding and regulating socio-cultural group life. Plausibly, therefore, the hominin lineage evolved specialized social-cognitive, motivational, and affective abilities that helped create, transmit, preserve, and amend shared social practices. In turn, these shared normative attitudes and practices shaped subsequent human phylogeny, constituted new forms of group life, and hence structured human ontogeny, too. An essential aspect of human ontogeny is therefore its reciprocal nature regarding normativity. This chapter reviews recent evidence from developmental psychology suggesting that, from early on, human children take a normative attitude toward others’ conduct in social interactions, and thus a collectivistic and impersonal perspective on norms. The chapter discusses to what extent humans’ closest living primate relatives lack normative attitudes and therefore live in a non-normative socio-causal world structured by individual preferences, power relationships, and regularities.

On the Identification and Analysis of Social Norms and the Heuristic Relevance of Deviant Behaviour

The chapter shows that a conceptual and phenomenologically grounded approach to social norms provides useful insights into the question of whether normativity is an exclusively human phenomenon. Social norms are to be distinguished from social rules like conventions, customs, moral norms, and institutional norms. The exact character of social norms is revealed most clearly in cases of transgression, i.e. by considering social reactions to persons disobeying or violating what is requested on a normative level. In these contexts, it also becomes clear that one becomes explicitly aware of pre-existing social norms through sanctions against norm-deviant behaviour. Since sanctions need not be verbal, they make it possible to consider cases of social normativity also in the area of animal behaviour. In its analysis of norm-deviant behaviour, the chapter integrates both holistic and individualistic methodologies.

The Normative Nature of Language

This chapter examines the normative nature of language, focusing on the idea that there are socially determined and commonly shared criteria for accountably appropriate action specific to language. We define norms in terms of three key properties: if a pattern of behavior is supported by a norm, it is subliminal (the behavior is not noticed when present), ablinimal (the behavior is noticed when absent), and inference-vulnerable (absence of, or deviation from, the behavior generates inferences). In exploring the normative nature of language, this chapter first considers people’s orientation to norms in the use of language in social interaction, and then turns to people’s orientation to norms in the appropriate use of words. The chapter makes the case not only that word meanings are regulated by norms but that people are motivated to enforce such norms even in the most mundane and informal of settings. This is the result of a general tyranny of accountability, which pertains to language, and to other forms of behavior that are grounded in human intersubjectivity.

Joint Activities and Moral Obligation

This chapter explores the close connection between “dyadic” moral obligations and joint activities that are essential for the social life of human beings. Against Margaret Gilbert’s well-known claim, the chapter argues that joint activities are not inherently laden with obligations and entitlements. However, it shows that there is a smooth transition from joint activities to a form of morality. In this transition, reactive attitudes like resentment play an important role. Full-blown moral normativity presupposes a group of more than two people, but the normative structure of a moral community mirrors the way in which people relate to each other in typical joint activities.

On Social, Moral, and Linguistic Norms

This chapter summarises the contributions to the volume The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral and Linguistic Norms. The contributions are divided into three sections in line with the tripartite division of the types of norms discussed in the volume. The key claims of the individual chapters are presented and set into relation to one another, and a number of issues raised by competition between the claims are highlighted. This prepares the ground for an assessment of the normative animal thesis in the light of the varying accounts both of specific deontic phenomena and of normativity in general. Central issues concern the concepts of social norms and conventions, the relative importance of coordination and cooperation, the nature and role of collective intentionality, the place of norms in evolutionary explanations, and the structure of normative action guidance. Decisive for the normative animal thesis are the questions as to whether moral principles and linguistic rules are correctly characterised as both real and deontic in the same senses in which these characterisations apply to social norms.