Norms
You Can’t Always Get What You Want … but You Can Get What You Need
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Abstract
In Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer (2018), Stephen Turner provides a head-spinning catalog of difficulties confronting those working within a wide range of disciplines. The difficulties arise from the ways in which what is emerging from thinking about what is really going on at the level of underlying cognitive (or cognitive-ish) processes seems not to mesh with much that has been supposed in a standard (dominant and venerable) framework for work in the social sciences (or with much that has gone on in standard cognitive science). The picture Turner provides is, admittedly, murky—as the recent work Turner surveys is diverse and developing, having cross-cutting currents. In this paper, we focus on a narrow range of work in the social sciences—work on social norms. This would seem a fitting focus, as it deploys intentional psychology in ways that Turner argues are crucially problematic: invoking shared rules and expectations within communities. We take to heart some of the trends in cognitive science to which Turner rightly calls attention. We argue that, properly understood, many important themes in work such as Bicchieri’s (and Guala’s, and Pettit’s) can be recast in ways that are not problematic in light of emerging cognitive science. When it comes to understanding social norms, we likely will not get what one might have traditionally wanted, but we will get what we need—social norms.