INTRODUCTION. NORMATIVITY: APPROACHES, POLEMICS, PROBLEMS
INTRODUCTION. NORMATIVITY: APPROACHES, POLEMICS, PROBLEMS

Summary/Abstract: The current issue of Human Affairs is devoted to normativity. The topic brings more questions than answers, more polemics than consensus, more antagonisms than understanding. In terms of developing, enforcing, observing, violating, controlling and upholding social norms, normativity is a topic so extensive that it has become an explicit interest to several scientific disciplines and has been included at least implicitly in some others. Philosophy had been the classic domain of the investigation of normativity since time immemorial but the topic has gradually penetrated into anthropology, history, sociology, political sciences, psychology, economics, and law and has also become intertwined with biology, particularly in the Darwinian view of the world from an evolutionary perspective. Normativity is also interlinked with linguistics, not only because of the fact that many social norms are expressed in language but also because the language itself, through its structure and means of expression, is normative to some extent and its use is controlled by norms.

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