Comments on: norm!

By: carlyconfused

carlyconfused — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:42:21 +0000

I’m a sociology grad student with a poli sci undergrad degree, and I’m more inclined to use the first definition.

And here I thought I had rid myself of all that poli sci stuff.

By: Belle Lettre

Belle Lettre — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:26:28 +0000

It’s either recursive, or meta, or both!

I especially like the drawing hands one.

By: tina

tina — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:45:22 +0000

Am I the only one who finds it amusing that we are having a discussion about the normative use of normative? It’s like Goffman meets M.C. Escher.

By: Belle Lettre

Belle Lettre — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:58:15 +0000

Actually by “law school” I mean legal theory, jurisprudence, and of course political theory.

I can’t remember seeing it much in literary criticism or theory though, and I did that too.

By: Belle Lettre

Belle Lettre — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:54:15 +0000

The other sense of the word is really, really common in political science (my undergraduate major) and law school (technically I’m a lawyer) and it is used _all the time_ in Law and Society (the PhD stuff I’m doing).

By: Anomie

Anomie — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:46:32 +0000

I was not aware of this first definition, either. This may explain why some of my students were confused when I used the term “normative” in class.

By: Belle Lettre

Belle Lettre — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:22:25 +0000

Thanks! This really cleared that up! I had no idea about the common definition for sociology.

By: jamybarab

jamybarab — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:05:00 +0000

Um, yeah, I didn’t know it had a different definition. Guess I’m really a sociologist.

By: JimPanzee

JimPanzee — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:43:57 +0000

Oddly enough I feel like I grew up with this second definition of normative, the one meaning “related to norms.” I remember reading about “normative philosophies” and “normative theories” later and remember having to look up the word to discover that those were theories that prescribed (and proscribed) certain behaviors. Now that I’ve been studying poli sci for three years I’d actually forgotten I ever knew a different definition.

The “related to norms” definition seems more intuitive now that I remember it exists.