Abstract
An experimental paradigm that purports to test young children’s understanding of social norms is examined. The paradigm models norms on Searle’s notion of a constitutive rule. The experiments and the reasons provided for their design are discussed. It is argued that the experiments do not provide direct evidence about the development of social norms and that the concepts of a social norm and constitutive rule are distinct. The experimental data are re-interpreted, and suggestions for how to deal with the present criticism are presented that do not require abandoning the paradigm as such. Then the conception of normativity that underlies the experimental paradigm is rejected and an alternative view is put forward. It is argued that normativity emerges from interaction and engagement, and that learning to comply with social norms involves understanding the distinction between their content, enforcement, and acceptance. As opposed to rule-based accounts that picture the development of an understanding of social norms as one-directional and based in enforcement, the present view emphasizes that normativity is situated, reciprocal, and interactive.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
As Rakoczy (2007) notices, in everyday life usage and status functions tend to blend, and the distinction between constitutive and regulative rules sometimes is difficult to maintain. Most activities involve both instrumental and conventional elements and apparently occur on a continuum. For instance, board games are more strongly conventional, while pool also relies on causal usage functions, as the goal is to get the ball in the hole, and using the queue is the means to do so (Rakoczy et al. 2008).
One might say that rules prepare for normativity, directives are weakly or ‘proto’ normative because in proposing certain behaviour they also encourage the behaviour, and prescriptions are strongly normative in imposing certain behaving (”oughtness”).
Notice that the norms that pertain to daxing are not exclusive to daxing. As opposed to constitutive rules, social norms are not specific to a certain activity.
The players’ utterances are taken from the videos from the experiments and mirror how the children express themselves. I have replaced the word “daxing” by “scoring a goal” in one utterance. My interpretation of the force of the utterances is within […]. The fact that the children have not yet gained mastery of their maternal language illustrates the difficulty of using verbal data to determine whether they are making normative judgments or, say, are giving advice (cf. Brandl et al. this volume).
This does not mean that transgression of social norms inevitably leads to anger. As Nagel (1998) argues, relational conventions help us to restrain ourselves and enable civilized engagement with others. The point here is that the children direct their corrections at constitutive rules, not social norms.
Because this section concerns a particular experimental paradigm and how it might be improved, I do not discuss other ways of not respecting social norms than the abuse of arbitrary social facts.
Glüer’s and Pagin’s (1999) analysis indicates that rule following is more intricate than the account in terms of collective intentionality has it (cf. Rakoczy and Tomasello 2006; Tomasello et al. 2005). In collective intentionality, two or more subjects share an intentional “we” attitude that cannot be reduced to individual intentions, but essentially involves thinking of the activity in which one is involved as joint, as something that one does together. In spite of its complex cognitive structure (Rakoczy et al. 2009: 111), collective intentionality is supposed to develop during the second year of life. The notion of collective intentionality is too general to explain the complexity of social normativity. Unfortunately, space does not allow me to elaborate on this.
References
Alvestad, T. (2010). Pre-school Relationships ─ Young Children as Competent Participants in Negotiations. Göteborg Studies in Educational Sciences 294. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis. http://hdl.handle.net/2077/22228.
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bicchieri, C. (2006). The grammar of society. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Boghossian, P. (2008). Epistemic rules. Journal of Philosophy, 105(9), 472–500.
Brandl, J.L., Esken, F., Priewasser, B., & Rafetseder, E. (2015). Young children’s protest: What it can(not) tell us about early normative understanding. This volume.
Brinck, I. (2014). Developing an understanding of social norms and games: emotional engagement, nonverbal agreement, and conversation. Theory & Psychology, 24(6), 773–754.
Engel, P. (2011). Epistemic norms. In S. Bernecker & D. Pritchard (Eds.), The routledge companion to epistemology (pp. 47–57). New York: Routledge.
Glüer, K., & Pagin, P. (1999). Rules of meaning and practical reasoning. Synthese, 117(2), 207–227.
Glüer, K., & Wikforss, Å. (2009). Against content normativity. Mind, 118(469), 31–70.
Glüer, K., & Wikforss, Å. (2010). Es braucht die Regel nicht: Wittgenstein on rules and meaning. In D. Whiting (Ed.), The later Wittgenstein on meaning (pp. 148–166). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Glüer, K., & Wikforss, Å. (2009b). The normativity of meaning and content. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/meaning-normativity/.
Glüer, K., & Wikforss, Å. (2009c). Against normativity again: Reply to Whiting. http://people.su.se/~kgl/Reply%20to%20Whiting.pdf Accessed 4 February 2014.
Hamlin, J. K. (2013). Moral judgment and action in preverbal infants and toddlers. Evidence for an innate moral core. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 186–193.
Hamlin, J. K., & Wynn, K. (2011). Young infants prefer prosocial to antisocial others. Cognitive Development, 26(1), 30–39.
Kärtner, J., Keller, H., & Yovsi, R. (2010). Mother-infant interaction during the first 3 months: the emergence of culture-specific contingency patterns. Child Development, 81(2), 540–554.
Köymen, B., Lieven, E., Engemann, D. A., Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2014). Children's norm enforcement in their interactions with peers. Child Development, 85(3), 1108–1122.
Machado, A., & Silva, F. J. (2007). Toward a richer view of the scientific method. The role of conceptual analysis. American Psychologist, 62(7), 671–681.
Millikan, R. (2014). What do thoughts do to the world? Deflating socially constituted objects. In M. Gallotti & J. Michael (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of sociality (Vol. I, pp. 27–39). Heidelberg: Springer.
Nagel, T. (1998). Concealment and exposure. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27(1), 3–30.
Paglieri, F. (2005). Playing by and with the rules: norms and morality in play development. Topoi, 24(2), 149–167.
Pettit, P. (2002). Rules, reasons, and norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rakoczy, H. (2007). Play, games, and the development of collective intentionality. In C. Kalish & M. Sabbagh (Eds.), Conventionality in cognitive development: How children acquire representations in language, thought and action. New directions in child and adolescent development, No. 115 (pp. 53–67). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Two-year-olds’ grasp the intentional structure of pretense acts. Developmental Science, 9(6), 558–565.
Rakoczy, H., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2008). The sources of normativity: young children’s awareness of the normative structure of games. Developmental Psychology, 44(3), 875–81.
Rakoczy, H., Brosche, N., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Young children’s understanding of the context relativity of normative rules in conventional games. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27(2), 445–456.
Rawls, J. (1955). Two concepts of rules. The Philosophical Review, 64(1), 3–32.
Reddy, V. (2003). On being the object of attention: implications for self–other consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(9), 397–402.
Reddy, V. (2008). How infants know minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Reddy, V. (2010). Cultures and minds. In M. Payne & J. Rae Barbera (Eds.), A dictionary of cultural and critical theory (2nd ed., pp. 172–176). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Reddy, V., Liebal, K., Hicks, K., Jonnalagadda, S., & Chintalapuri, B. (2013). The emergent practice of infant compliance: an exploration in two cultures. Developmental Psychology, 49(9), 1754–62.
Rietveld, E., & Kiverstein, J. (2014). A rich landscape of affordances. Ecological Psychology, 26(4), 325–352.
Rochat, P. (2013). Self-consciousness and the origins of the ethical stance. In B. Rastogi Kar (Ed.), Cognition and brain development (pp. 157–171). Washington: American Psychological Association Publisher.
Rochat, P., Passos-Ferreira, C., & Salem, P. (2009). Three levels of intersubjectivity in early development. In A. Carassa, F. Morganti, & G. Riva (Eds.), Enacting intersubjectivity. Paving the way for a dialogue between cognitive science, social cognition and neuroscience (pp. 173–190). Lugano: Università della Svizzera Italiana, da Larioprint.
Rossano, M. J. (2012). The essential role of ritual in the transmission and reinforcement of social norms. Psychological Bulletin, 138(3), 529–549.
Schmidt, M. F. H., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Young children enforce social norms selectively depending on the violator’s group affiliation. Cognition, 124(3), 325–333.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay on the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.
Searle, J. R. (2008). Language and social ontology. Theory and Society, 37(5), 443–459.
Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sloane, S., Baillargeon, R., & Premack, D. (2012). Do infants have a sense of fairness? Psychological Science, 23(2), 196–204.
Tomasello, M., & Carpenter, M. (2007). Shared intentionality. Developmental Science, 10(1), 121–12.
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(5), 675–691.
von Wright, G. H. (1963). Norm and action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Winther-Lindqvist, D. (2009). Game playing: negotiating rules and identities. American Journal of Play, 2(1), 60–85.
Wyman, E., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2009a). Young children understand multiple pretend identities in their object play. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27(2), 385–404.
Wyman, E., Rakoczy, H., & Tomasello, M. (2009b). Normativity and context in young children’s pretend play. Cognitive Development, 24(2), 146–155.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the members of NORMCON for constructive suggestions. I also wish to thank the members of DRUST, CCCOM and the Cog Com Lab as well as Neil Roughley, two anonymous referees, and the editor of this volume for valuable recommendations. This work was supported by The European Science Foundation via the Swedish Research Council (grant number 429-2010-7181).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brinck, I. Understanding social norms and constitutive rules: Perspectives from developmental psychology and philosophy. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 699–718 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9426-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9426-y