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Norms and communities

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A bit of a courtroom's place grammar

We do stop at red lights. There are norms about where in the courtroom the press can and cannot go. We have habits and we avow them as norms.

It won't do to make social grammars be only retrospective systematizations of preexisting behavioral regularities.

Wilfrid Sellars is right that norms should be seen as more than alternate axiomatic descriptions of pre-existing behavioral regularities, since norms are involved in forming a community that exists, in part, because it avows them.

(Much recent Hegel-influenced thinking extends this lesson: Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, among others).