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Normality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Peter Alexander
Peter Alexander
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Extract

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 (for any value of ‘I’).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 48 , Issue 184 , April 1973 , pp. 137 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1973

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References

1 I have been greatly helped in the preparation of this lecture by discussions with colleagues in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati. I am especially grateful to Dr Harvey Mullane (Philosophy) and Dr Paul Ornstein (Psychiatry).

2 Körner, S., The Philosophy of Mathematics (London, 1960)Google Scholar and What is Philosophy? (London, 1969).Google Scholar

3 For a summary see Offer, D. & Sabshin, M.Normality, (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Levine, Maurice, Psychotherapy in Medical Practice (New York, 1942).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 London, P., ‘The Sources of Therapeutic Morality’, Columbia University Forum, 1962, 3, 45–46.Google Scholar

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8 Koos, E. L., The Health of Regionville (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).Google Scholar

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10 Walsh, McDermott et al. , ‘Introducing Modern Medicine in a Navajo Community’, Science, 1960, 131, 197–205, 280–287.Google Scholar

11 Topley, Marjorie, ‘Chinese Traditional Ideas and Treatment of Disease’, Man, 1970, 5, 421–437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Freud, S., ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 1917.Google Scholar

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17 Op. cit., 99.Google Scholar