Formal models of appearance and reality have proved fruitful for investigating structural properties of perceptual knowledge. This paper applies the same approach to epistemic justification. Our central goal is to give a simple account of The Preface, in which justified belief fails to agglomerate. Following recent work by a number of authors, we understand knowledge in terms of normality. An agent knows p iff p is true throughout all relevant normal worlds. To model The Preface, we appeal to the normality (...) of error. Sometimes, it is more normal for reality and appearance to diverge than to match. We show that this simple idea has dramatic consequences for the theory of knowledge and justification. Among other things, we argue that a proper treatment of The Preface requires a departure from the internalist idea that epistemic justification supervenes on the appearances and the widespread idea that one knows most when free from error. (shrink)

Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Mental Health is the first book to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. It is also the first book to take contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology to task for deeply flawed thinking when they accept the diagnostic system propounded by the DSM, which reifies syndromes into alleged “mental disorders.” Where Thomas Szasz argued that “mental disorders” are myths, Bartlett makes the much more (...) damaging charge that reifying mental disorders involves a provable form of fallacious thinking, producing a variety of epistemological nonsense. /// -/- -/- The author weighs the evidence, and with strict logic, compelling evidence, and careful analysis, challenges the current paradigm of mental health theorists and practitioners. Never has the case against the standard of psychological normality and against the non-scientific creation of “mental disorders” been made with such boldness, multidisciplinary knowledge, solid scholarship, and clarity of language. /// -/- -/- Normality Does Not Equal Mental HealthAlthough the need to question psychological normality as a satisfactory standard of good mental health has been staring us in the face for a long time, no one, clinical professional or scholar, has had the courage or the intellectual willingness to face with unflinching honesty the shortcomings and disappointments of psychological normality and to propose that we should look elsewhere for standards of good psychological health. /// -/- -/- Contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology, on the contrary, base their conception of mental health on the standard of psychological normality. This supposition has come to be accepted uncritically and without question, and yet it has become fundamental to current clinical theory and practice, and forms the core of the psychiatric classification system of the DSM, which has become today’s diagnostic authority. /// -/- -/- While touting today’s scientific gold standard of “evidence-based” research, DSM’s authoritative classification of “mental disorders” is itself hardly “evidence-based,” for it is recognized, but seldom emphasized, that the majority of DSM’s “mental disorders” have no known empirical, organic basis. /// -/- -/- Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health takes DSM to task not only for its failure to adhere to today’s evidence-based standard, but for its failure to rein in its highly speculative diagnostic labeling, in accordance with the modern paradigm of rigorous science, which repudiates metaphorical reifications whose alleged validity rests only on the voting preferences of a professional membership. /// -/- -/- The book is a carefully argued critique of the dominant assumption in current psychiatry and clinical psychology that psychological normality is fundamental to mental health and therefore good. In place of this unsatisfactory presumption, Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health proposes a positive and constructive revision in our understanding of mental health and of our conception of mental disorders. (shrink)

Normality judgements are frequently used in everyday communication as well as in biological and social science. Moreover they became increasingly relevant to formal logic as part of defeasible reasoning. This paper distinguishes different kinds of normality statements. It is argued that normality laws like “Birds can normally fly” should be understood essentially in a statistical way. The argument has basically two parts: firstly, a statistical semantic core is mandatory for a descriptive reading of normality in order to explain the logical (...) features of normality laws. Secondly, a statistical justification of normality statements can be derived by game theoretic considerations if the normality law is understood as communication convention. (shrink)

There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view (...) faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. These cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or too externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on *knowledge*, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification, that depends directly upon normality. (shrink)

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is (...) normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms. (shrink)

Cancer biologists ascribe normal functions to parts of cancer. Normal functions are activities that parts of systems are in some minimal sense supposed to perform. Cancer biologists’ finding normality within the abnormality of cancer pose difficulties for two main approaches to normal function. One approach claims that normal functions are activities that parts are selected for. However, some parts of cancers that have normal functions aren’t selected to perform them. The other approach claims that normal functions are part-activities typical for (...) the system and that contribute to survival/reproduction. However, cancers are too heterogeneous to establish what’s typical across a type. (shrink)

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to (...) be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal. (shrink)

In this paper, we approach the problem of classical recapture for LP and K3 by using normality operators. These generalize the consistency and determinedness operators from Logics of Formal Inconsistency and Underterminedness, by expressing, in any many-valued logic, that a given formula has a classical truth value (0 or 1). In particular, in the rst part of the paper we introduce the logics LPe and Ke3 , which extends LP and K3 with normality operators, and we establish a classical recapture (...) result based on the two logics. In the second part of the paper, we compare the approach in terms of normality operators with an established approach to classical recapture, namely minimal inconsistency. Finally, we discuss technical issues connecting LPe and Ke3 to the tradition of Logics of Formal Inconsistency and Underterminedness. (shrink)

In this paper, we extend the expressive power of the logics K3, LP and FDE with anormality operator, which is able to express whether a for-mula is assigned a classical truth value or not. We then establish classical recapture theorems for the resulting logics. Finally, we compare the approach via normality operator with the classical collapse approach devisedby Jc Beall.

Consider how we evaluate how normal an object is. On the dual-nature hypothesis, a normality evaluation depends on the object’s goodness and frequency. On the single-nature hypothesis, the evaluation depends solely on either frequency or goodness. To assess these hypotheses, I ran four experiments. Study 1 shows that normality evaluations vary with both the goodness and the frequency assessment of the object. Study 2 shows that manipulating the goodness and the frequency dimension changes the normality evaluation. Yet, neither experiment rules (...) out that some people evaluate normality solely based on frequency, and the rest evaluate normality solely based on goodness. Whence two more experiments. Study 3 reveals that when scenarios are contrasted—presented one after another—only frequency matters. But, as study 4 shows, when scenarios are evaluated alone, both frequency and goodness influence normality evaluations in a single person, although the more a person is sensitive to one dimension, the less she’s sensitive to the other. The dual-nature hypothesis seems thus true of uncontrasted applications of the concept of normality, whereas the single-nature hypothesis seems true of contrasted applications. (shrink)

The biological sciences employ a concept of normality that must be distinguished from statistical or value concepts. The concept of normality is presupposed in the standard explications of biological functions, and it is crucial to the strategy of explanation by approximations in, for example, physiology. Nevertheless, this concept of normality does not seem to be captured in the language of physics. Thus attempts at explaining the methodological relationship between the biological sciences and the physical sciences by concentrating only on the (...) concept of biological function cannot go very far. An analysis of the concept of normality is also necessary. (shrink)

Although an invasive medical intervention, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has been regarded as an efficient and safe treatment of Parkinson’s disease for the last 20 years. In terms of clinical ethics, it is worth asking whether the use of DBS may have unanticipated negative effects similar to those associated with other types of psychosurgery. Clinical studies of epileptic patients who have undergone an anterior temporal lobectomy have identified a range of side effects and complications in a number of domains: psychological, (...) behavioural, affective and social. In many cases, patients express difficulty adjusting from being chronically ill to their new status as ‘treated’ or ‘seizure free’. This postoperative response adjustment has been described in the literature on epilepsy as the ‘Burden of Normality’ (BoN) syndrome. Most of the discussion about DBS postoperative changes to self is focused on abnormal side effects caused by the intervention (ie, hypersexuality, hypomania, etc). By contrast, relatively little attention is paid to the idea that successfully ‘treated’ individuals might experience difficulties in adjusting to becoming ‘normal’. The purpose of this paper is (1) to articulate the postoperative DBS psychosocial adjustment process in terms of the BoN syndrome, (2) to address whether the BoN syndrome illustrates that DBS treatment poses a threat to the patient’s identity, and (3) to examine whether the current framework for rehabilitation after DBS procedures should be updated and take into account the BoN syndrome as a postoperative self-change response. (shrink)

According to human enhancement advocates, it is morally permissible (and sometimes obligatory) to use biomedical means to modulate or select certain biological traits in order to increase people’s welfare, even when there is no pathology to be treated or prevented. Some authors have recently proposed to extend the use of biomedical means to modulate lust, attraction, and attachment. I focus on some conceptual implications of this proposal, particularly with regard to bioconservatives’ understanding of the notions of therapy and enhancement I (...) first explain what makes the proposal of medicalizing love interesting and unique, compared to the other forms of bioenhancement usually advocated. I then discuss how the medicalization of love bears on the more general debate on human enhancement, particularly with regard to the key notion of “normality” that is commonly used to define the therapy–enhancement distinction. This analysis suggests that the medicalization of love, in virtue of its peculiarity, requires bioconservatives to reconsider their way of understanding and applying the notions of “therapy” and “enhancement.” More in particular, I show that, because a non-arbitrary and value-free notion of “therapy” cannot be applied to the case of love, bioconservatives have the burden of either providing some new criterion that could be used for drawing a line between permissible and impermissible medicalization, or demonstrating that under no circumstances—including the cases in which love is already acknowledged to require medical intervention—can love fall within the domain of medicine. (shrink)

In this paper, I will investigate the potential of what I term Merleau-Ponty’s ‘situated phenomenology’ for an investigation of normality from within and from without. First, I will argue that the concept of situation in the Phenomenology of Perception demarcates Merleau-Ponty’s turn from a mere epistemological to a concrete critical phenomenology. Second, I will apply Merleau-Ponty’s concept of situation as being situated and as being in situation to an investigation of normality. In doing so, I endeavor to differentiate between lived (...) and represented normality, a difference which in turn corresponds to an operative and established normativity. A situated account of normality thereby combines a phenomenological and a genealogical perspective. My aim is to provide a toolkit to investigate the intertwinement of represented and lived normality, that is, of being situated and being in situation. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has seen a striking rise in interest in the notion of normality, including in the analysis of justified belief, defeasible reasoning, and knowledge. In the analysis of knowledge in particular, normality has been used to support modal analyses of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safely true belief. In this paper, I sound a note of caution regarding this proposal. As I will argue, the counterexamples that originally seemed to threaten the safety analysis of knowledge in its more (...) traditional formulations have natural counterparts that continue to threaten the newer, normality-based formulations. Moreover, these reformulated counterexamples seem to exploit structural features of the notion of normality itself, rather than one or another particular conception of normality. (shrink)

There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., “enhancement”—for example, use of a psychostimulant as a “study drug”), people often express greater hesitation. (...) Building on prior research in moral philosophy and cognitive science, in this work, we ask why people draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement. In two experiments, we provide evidence that the accessibility of health-related interventions determines their perceived descriptive or statistical normality (Experiment 1), and that gains in descriptive normality for such interventions weaken the moral distinction between treatment and enhancement (Experiment 2). In short, our findings suggest that the tendency to draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement is driven, in part, by assumptions about descriptive abnormality; and raise the possibility that normalizing novel biomedical interventions by promoting access could undermine people’s selective opposition toward enhancement, rendering it morally comparable to treatment. (shrink)

Husserl and Foucault appear to have little in common when it comes to the question of normality. Husserl often discusses the emergence or constitution of norms from a subjective perspective whereas Foucault targets norms as a coercive problem. But if we recognize that the body is the locus of concern for both thinkers, then we can see that Husserl's interest in norm optimization is at home with Foucault's genealogical critique of bio-power . The essay draws a line of comparison between (...) Husserl and Foucault around the idea of an optimizing practice. (shrink)

This article draws on Husserl’s manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s (especially on the as-yet unpublished D-manuscripts), arguing that each concrete experience is governed by an irreducible tension between two intersecting normative dimensions: primordial and intersubjective. Husserl’s ideas of normality and normativity have gained a lot of attention in recent years, but the normative aspects of primordial constitution have not been properly taken into account. By arguing for the “normative tension” between the primordial and the intersubjective, this article contributes to (...) filling in this lack. By doing so, it sheds new light on the debate concerning the relationship between genetic and generative phenomenology, challenging interpretations that exclusively render either the genetic-primordial or the generative-intersubjective as the constitutive absolute. (shrink)

What is considered normal determines clinical practice in medicine and has implications at an individual level, doctor-patient relationship and health care policies. With the increase in medical information and technical abilities it is urgent to have a clear concept of normality in medicine so that crucial discussions can be held with unequivocal terms.The different meanings for normality were analyzed throughout the literature and grouped according to their relevance in the academic community in models, namely the Biostatistical Theory (BST), Health, Ideal, (...) Process and Biological advantage. The BST is the most established naturalistic approach, however normal variability can arguably constitute a problem. Health is similar and raises the question of setting the boundaries of pathology. Normality as an Ideal is an useful tool but is naturally unrealistic. As a Process it is comprehensible but is hard to frame for practical purposes. If considered as a Biological Advantage, seems intuitive but abnormality should tend to disappear.After, three examples were presented to discuss these models. They were Anemia, Psychiatric diseases and Psychopathy. In the case of Anemia the BST was applied and the arbitrary boundaries but with social impact were exposed. Psychiatric diseases was discussed under the process of self-organization and non-suffering ideal. With Psychopathy the boundaries of biological advantage are questioned.This review appeals to the importance of redesigning of the concept of normality in medicine according to current times and stresses the importance of integrating concepts such as variability and autonomy. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work draws our attention to how the body is always our way of having a world and never merely a thing in the world. Our conception of the body must take account of our cultures, our historically located sciences, and our interpersonal relations and cannot reduce the body to a biological given. Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty takes up Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body to explore the ideas of normality, abnormality, and pathology. Focusing on the lived experiences (...) of various styles of embodiment, the book challenges our usual conceptions of normality and abnormality and shows how seemingly objective scientific research, such as the study of pathological symptoms, is inadequate to the phenomena it purports to comprehend. The book offers new insights into our understandings of health and illness, ability and disability, and the scientific and cultural practices that both enable and limit our capacity for diverse experiences. (shrink)

In this paper, we use a ‘normality operator’ in order to generate logics of formal inconsistency and logics of formal undeterminedness from any subclassical many-valued logic that enjoys a truth-functional semantics. Normality operators express, in any many-valued logic, that a given formula has a classical truth value. In the first part of the paper we provide some setup and focus on many-valued logics that satisfy some of the three properties, namely subclassicality and two properties that we call fixed-point negation property (...) and conservativeness. In the second part of the paper, we introduce normality operators and explore their formal behaviour. In the third and final part of the paper, we establish a number of classical recapture results for systems of formal inconsistency and formal undeterminedness that satisfy some or all the properties above. These are the main formal results of the paper. Also, we illustrate concrete cases of recapture by discussing the logics $\mathsf{K}^{\circledast }_{3}$, $\mathsf{LP}^{\circledast }$, $\mathsf{K}^{w\circledast }_{3}$, $\mathsf{PWK}^{\circledast }$ and $\mathsf{E_{fde}}^{\circledast }$, that are in turn extensions of $\mathsf{{K}_{3}}$, $\mathsf{LP}$, $\mathsf{K}^{w}_{3}$, $\mathsf{PWK}$ and $\mathsf{E_{fde}}$, respectively. (shrink)

Taking the visual appeal of the ‘bell curve’ as an example, this paper discusses in how far the availability of quantitative approaches (here: statistics) that comes along with representational standards immediately affects qualitative concepts of scientific reasoning (here: normality). Within the realm of this paper I shall focus on the relationship between normality, as defined by scientific enterprise, and normativity, that result out of the very processes of standardisation itself. Two hypotheses are guiding this analysis: (1) normality, as it is (...) defined by the natural and the life sciences, must be regarded as an ontological, but epistemological important fiction and (2) standardised, canonical visualisations (such as the ‘bell curve’) impact on scientific thinking and reasoning to a significant degree. I restrict my analysis to the epistemological function of scientific representations of data: This means identifying key strategies of producing graphs and images in scientific practice. As a starting point, it is crucial to evaluate to what degree graphs and images could be seen as guiding scientific reasoning itself, for instance in attributing to them a certain epistemological function within a given field of research. (shrink)

Normality, for Husserl, is said in many ways. While the most detailed treatments of this technical Husserlian concept are usually found in discussions concerning the constitutive dimension of the lived body and intersubjectivity, little attention has been paid to the notion of normality understood as the tacit regularity of nature. Indeed, the normal can also be understood as the causal background which is presupposed, tentatively, in the anticipation of uniform processes of change, as well as in poieticinstrumental experiences, that is, (...) in experiences involving the production and use of objects. The subject that elaborates, manipulates or uses objects is installed in nature. Hence, in our productive-instrumental confrontation with objects in the world, we operate under the assumption that the potentially mutable causal scene surrounding our acting life will retain its style. This assumption of normality is the world, in one of the many ways in which Husserl characterizes this concept. The world qua background of normality becomes thematic, retrospectively, precisely when it ceases to cooperate with the agent’s initiatives. This, on my view, is what lies behind Husserl’s assertion that the world is a “super-object” or “higher-level theme”. (shrink)

One of the debated issues regarding Residual Normality (RN) is frequency sensitivity in Williams syndrome (WS). We present some data on frequency sensitivity in Hungarian WS subjects. Based on vocabulary measures, we suggest that instead of the across-the-board frequency insensitivity proposed by some, a higher frequency threshold characterizes these subjects’performance. Results from a category fluency task show that whereas frequency sensitivity in WS is in line with controls, error patterns imply a qualitatively distinct, looser categorical organization. Regarding the much-debated issue (...) of morphological overgeneralizations, our data suggest that frequency sensitivity cuts across the divisions proposed by dual-process theories. In general, some of the frequency effects are the same as in typically developing populations, but with a delayed pattern. Frequency may be interpreted as supporting RN, but in WS it operates with higher thresholds that might be a general processing feature of WS individuals. (shrink)

Response to commentary. We are grateful to Crockett and Craigie for their interesting remarks on our paper. We accept Crockett’s claim that there is a need for caution in drawing inferences about patient groups from work on healthy volunteers in the laboratory. However, we believe that the evidence we cited established a strong presumption that many of the patients who are routinely taking a medication, including many people properly prescribed the medication for a medical condition, have morally significant aspects of (...) their cognition and behavior modified in a way that is unintended and may sometimes be unwelcome. Crockett notes that in some cases the effects of long-term drug use may differ, sometimes markedly, from the effects of short-term use. However, if acute use of a drug affects a neural system involved in mediating moral cognition or behavior, this nevertheless provides some evidence that chronic use of the drug may affect that same system and thus have morally significant effects. It is also plausible, in some cases, that an acute moral effect would give rise to a chronic moral effect via cognitive mechanisms. ... (shrink)

Shocks from disasters challenge the normality of everyday life. Emotional and political reactions include anxiety and blame, but these must come together with knowledge through shared discourse to formulate responses, often immediate. The study draws on a phenomenological analysis of personal experience and discursive reactions to fires and the pandemic. It is informed by ethical and social approaches to epistemology and discourse, drawing on sociology of knowledge and studies of rhetoric. From this it is concluded that facts are agreed elements (...) for debate, as in the legal tradition, rather than guarantees of certainty. Knowledge relevant to disaster discourse arises through shared experience and robust communicative institutions, from the local to the scientific, and including the wisdom of First Nations. Disasters are uncanny because they defy everyday know-how. In disrupting the relationship of people to their milieu, they require a new accommodation among and between human and non-human actors. (shrink)

I wish to ask what it is for something to be normal, what ‘normal’ means. In one sense we all know, since we freely use conceptions of normality in our everyday talk about things and people. Normality is what the conservative hopes to return to and the progressive hopes to establish. Normal weather is what we usually get at a given season; a normal day is one that is unrelieved by great strokes of either good or ill fortune. In some (...) contexts, to be normal is to be upright; in others to be average or mean. A normal person is one who is not diseased or crooked or mad, can learn and may forget, sleeps well, performs some job of work adequately, is not unbearably sensitive or thick-skinned, and so on. Sometimes a normal person is one who doesn't stand out from the crowd. Often, normal is what I am, and what you are if you are lucky enough to resemble me in certain respects. (shrink)

BackgroundNormality is both a descriptive and a normative concept. Undoubtedly, the normal often operates normatively as an exclusionary tool of cultural authority. While it has prominently found its way into the field of medicine, it remains rather unclear in what sense it is used. Thus, our study sought to elucidate people’s understanding of normality in medicine and to identify concepts that are linked to it.MethodsUsing convenient sampling, we carried out a cross-sectional survey. Since the survey was advertised through social media, (...) we employed an online survey. We performed descriptive and inferential analyses. Predictors were chosen in a theory-driven manner.ResultsIn total, 323 persons from 21 countries completed the survey. Analysis revealed that the overall acceptance of normality in medicine was associated with notions of injustice, authority, discrimination, and with having a medical profession. More precisely, for the field of mental health, injustice insensitivity, genderism and transphobia, and authority were positively associated with a person’s acceptance of normality; and, for the field of physical health, injustice insensitivity and having a medical profession were positively associated with a person’s acceptance of normality. Finally, participants’ acceptance of the use of normality in the area of mental health was lower than in the area of physical health.ConclusionsWhat is considered normal has implications for clinical practice, both at an individual and at a policy-level. Acknowledging its normalistic condition, the discipline of medicine has to confront itself with its own contribution to the augmentation of social inequalities through the excessive reliance on the concept of normality. Research that centers the lived experiences of those who are being systematically marginalized because they are deemed abnormal is needed. By empirically elucidating the conceptual relationships between normality in medicine and other variables, we provide points of leverage to deprive normality of its normative power. For medicine, this is needed to first do no harm. (shrink)

This article introduces a collection of articles written in response to a recently published intellectual and cultural history of normality by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens. It points to the fact that this special issue considerably extends and enriches the topical range of the book. The articles that follow discuss, in order, schooling in France at the time of the Revolution, phrenology in Europe and the US from 1840 to 1940, relations between commercial practice and scientific craniometry in 19th-century Britain (...) and France, psychology in late 19th-century France, case studies in sexology and psychoanalysis in Central Europe, and biotypology in Southern Europe and Latin America. (shrink)

The linear model often serves as a starting point for applying statistics in psychology. Often, formal training beyond the linear model is limited, creating a potential pedagogical gap because of the pervasiveness of data non-normality. We reviewed 61 recently published undergraduate and graduate textbooks on introductory statistics and the linear model, focusing on their treatment of non-normality. This review identified at least eight distinct methods suggested to address non-normality, which we organize into a new taxonomy according to whether the approach: (...) (a) remains within the linear model, (b) changes the data, and (c) treats normality as informative or as a nuisance. Because textbook coverage of these methods was often cursory, and methodological papers introducing these approaches are usually inaccessible to non-statisticians, this review is designed to be the happy medium. For the purpose of promoting best practice in the application of the linear model, we provide a relatively non-technical review of advanced methods which can address non-normality. We also present three empirical examples to highlight distinctions between these methods' motivations and results. It is anticipated that our taxonomy will provide a useful overview and starting place for researchers interested in extending their knowledge in approaches developed to address non-normality from the perspective of the linear model. (shrink)

The article is the text of a lecture given at the Faculty of the Humanities, March 2001. It argues that one implication of recent advances in the sciences of life may be that the binary opposition of the normal and the pathological is put into question. Canguilheim’s distinction between vital and social norms is challenged and superseded by a Foucauldian genealogical approach to programs for the government of individuals, and the norms of life that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth (...) centuries are argued to be fundamentally social. Viewing genetics, biopsychiatry, and the commercialisation of drug development and biomedicine, the author argues that the logic of normalisation is loosing its hold, and being replaced by strategies for the continuous molecular management of variation, the modulation of susceptibilities, and the capitalisation of life itself. (shrink)

In response to our target article, many of the commentators concentrated on our notion of Residual Normality. In our response, we focus on the questions raised by this idea. However, we also examine broader issues concerning the importance of incorporating a realistic theory of the process of development into explanations of developmental deficits.

This article takes issue with the practical and the cognitive roles of normality within political life and its relevance to the constitution of the groups that comprise a political community. From a practical viewpoint, normality fosters standards of correctness; from a cognitive viewpoint, these standards are what allows individuals to perceive themselves, and to be recognized, as group members. To achieve this aim, the article delves into Carl Schmitt’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of how politics is a field where semantic (...) struggles take place that are meant to impose alternative visions of the social world. Different types of connections and relationships among individuals and groups (which rule out alternative connections and relationships) shore up a specific vision of the social world (which rules out alternative visions). The article concludes by saying that awareness of the normalizing effects of politics is key to producing a counter-politics meant to defy the naturalization and de-historicization that every political representation furthers. (shrink)

This paper concerns the apparent fact — discussed by Sinan Dogramaci and Brian Weatherson — that inductive reasoning often interacts in disastrous ways with patterns of reasoning that seem perfectly fine in the deductive case. In contrast to Dogramaci's and Weatherson's own suggestions, I argue that these cases show that we cannot reason inductively about arbitrary objects. Moreover, as I argue, this prohibition is neatly explained by a certain hypothesis about the rational basis of inductive reasoning — namely, the hypothesis (...) that inductive reasoning is fundamentally reasoning about what normally happens. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a detailed proof-theoretical analysis of a natural deduction system for classical propositional logic that (i) represents classical proofs in a more natural way than standard Gentzen-style natural deduction, (ii) admits of a simple normalization procedure such that normal proofs enjoy the Weak Subformula Property, (iii) provides the means to prove a Non-contamination Property of normal proofs that is not satisfied by normal proofs in the Gentzen tradition and is useful for applications, especially in formal argumentation, (...) (iv) naturally leads to defining a notion of depth of a proof, to the effect that, for every fixed natural k, normal k-depth deducibility is a tractable problem and converges to classical deducibility as k tends to infinity. (shrink)

This paper concerns the apparent fact — discussed by Sinan Dogramaci and Brian Weatherson — that inductive reasoning often interacts in disastrous ways with patterns of reasoning that seem perfectly fine in the deductive case. In contrast to Dogramaci's and Weatherson's own suggestions, I argue that these cases show that we cannot reason inductively about arbitrary objects. Moreover, as I argue, this prohibition is neatly explained by a certain hypothesis about the rational basis of inductive reasoning — namely, the hypothesis (...) that inductive reasoning is fundamentally reasoning about what normally happens. (shrink)

Describing someone as disabled means evaluating their relationship with their environment, body, and self. Such descriptions pivot on the person’s perceived limitations due to their atypical embodiment. However, impairments are not inherently pathological, nor are disabilities necessarily deviations from biological normality, a discrepancy often articulated in science fiction via the presentation of radically altered environments. In such settings, non-impaired individuals can be shown to be unsuited to the world they find themselves in. One prime example of this comes courtesy of (...) H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind.” This paper demonstrates science fiction’s capacity to decouple disability’s normative quality from classical medical models stemming from the medical Enlightenment movement by challenging the idea of the biologically normal. It first provides a brief account of disability before exploring the concept of medical normality. It then problematizes the biologically consistent being, arguing that health is only understandable when environmentally situated. Next, the paper provides an overview of “The Country of the Blind” before analyzing how it challenges the idea of biological normality, framing it as a social product rather than a universal constant. Finally, the paper concludes that science fiction narratives effectively interrogate our world’s seemingly consistent trends by envisioning (un)desirable alternatives. (shrink)

The paper begins with a conceptual discussion of Michael Dummett's proof-theoretic justification of deduction or proof-theoretic semantics, which is based on what we might call Gentzen's thesis: 'the introductions constitute, so to speak, the "definitions" of the symbols concerned, and the eliminations are in the end only consequences thereof, which could be expressed thus: In the elimination of a symbol, the formula in question, whose outer symbol it concerns, may only "be used as that which it means on the basis (...) of the introduction of this symbol".' The intuitive philosophical content of Dummett's notions of harmony and stability is that harmony obtains if the grounds for asserting a proposition match the consequences of accepting it, and stability obtains if the converse also holds. Rules of inference define the meanings of a logical constant they govern if and only if they are stable. Gentzen observed that 'it should be possible to establish on the basis of certain requirements that the elimination rules are functions of the corresponding introduction rules.' One of the objectives of this paper is to specify such a function: I will specify a process by which it is possible to determine the elimination rules of logical constants from their introduction rules, and conversely, to determine the introduction rules from the elimination rules. I'll give the general forms of rules of inference and generalised reduction procedures for the normalisation of deduction. I'll give a formally precise characterisations of harmony and stability and show that deductions in logics that contain only constants governed by stable rules always normalise. (shrink)

The main result of this paper is that if $\kappa$ is not a weakly Mahlo cardinal, then the following two conditions are equivalent: 1. $\mathscr{P}(\kappa)/ \mathscr{J}$ is $\kappa^+$-complete. 2. $\mathscr{J}$ is a prenormal ideal. Our result is a generalization of an announcement made in [Z]. We say that $\mathscr{J}$ is selective iff for every $\mathscr{J}$-function $f: \kappa \rightarrow \kappa$ there is a set $X \in \mathscr{J}$ such that $f\mid(\kappa - X)$ is one-to-one. Our theorem provides a positive partial answer to (...) a question of B. Weglorz from [BTW, p. 90], viz.: is every selective ideal $\mathscr{J}$, with $\mathscr{P}(\kappa)/\mathscr{J} \kappa^+$-complete, isomorphic to a normal ideal? The theorem is also true for fine ideals on $\lbrack\lambda\rbrack^{<\kappa}$ for any $\kappa \leq \lambda$, i.e. if $\kappa$ is not a weakly Mahlo cardinal then the Boolean algebra $\mathscr{P} (\lbrack\lambda\rbrack^{<\kappa})/\mathscr{J}$ is $\lambda^+$-complete iff $\mathscr{J}$ is a prenormal ideal (in the sense of $\lbrack\lambda\rbrack^{<\kappa})$. (shrink)

The vagueness or imprecision of ‘the normal’ allows it to be exploited for various purposes and political ends. It is conspicuous in both medicine and athletics; I am going to try to say something about the normal in each of these areas. In medicine the idea of the normal is often deployed in understanding what constitutes disease and hence, as some see it, in determining the role of physicians, in determining what is or ought to be covered by insurance, and (...) in underwriting certain views on social justice. In athletics the use of performance enhancing substances raises different sorts of questions about the normal, especially when it comes to deciding what constitutes an enhancement and which enhancements, if any, are acceptable. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that a phenomenological concept of normality can be helpful to understand the experiential side of post-truth phenomena. How is one’s longing for, or sense of, normality related to what we deem as real, true, or objective? And to what extent is the sense for “what (really) is” related to our beliefs of what should be? To investigate this, I combine a phenomenological approach to lived normality with a genealogical account of represented normality that sheds light (...) on the social and historical contingency of definitions of normality and their intertwinement with structures of power. It is my contention that such an approach to normality is well-suited to investigate how is and ought are interrelated within subjective experience and practice. This might in turn help overcoming one-sided debates on post-truth, which rely on the strict opposition of objectivity versus subjectivity, universal truth versus subjective experience, facticity versus meaning, or reason versus stupidity. It also sheds light on the ambivalent or contested status of experience within debates of post-truth and feminist theory. I will conclude that post-truth is related to what Hannah Arendt has termed the lack of a common world (i.e., normality), arguing that a plurality of experiences is needed to let the “real world” stand its ground again. (shrink)

The main result of this paper is that if κ is not a weakly Mahlo cardinal, then the following two conditions are equivalent: 1. P(κ)/ J is κ+-complete. 2. J is a prenormal ideal. Our result is a generalization of an announcement made in [Z]. We say that J is selective iff for every J-function f: κ → κ there is a set X ∈ J such that f∣(κ - X) is one-to-one. Our theorem provides a positive partial answer to (...) a question of B. Weglorz from [BTW, p. 90], viz.: is every selective ideal J, with P(κ)/J κ+-complete, isomorphic to a normal ideal? The theorem is also true for fine ideals on $\lbrack\lambda\rbrack^{<\kappa}$ for any κ ≤ λ, i.e. if κ is not a weakly Mahlo cardinal then the Boolean algebra $\mathscr{P} (\lbrack\lambda\rbrack^{<\kappa})/\mathscr{J}$ is λ+-complete iff J is a prenormal ideal (in the sense of $\lbrack\lambda\rbrack^{<\kappa})$. (shrink)