Normal people

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by John Dupre

The idea that there are normal and abnormal ways for people to be and to behave is a very familiar one. So also is the idea that abnormality--or deviance--is something regrettable, deplorable, and even, in some cases, punishable. Here, however, my main concern will be to consider what might be meant by the claim that a person is, in some respect, normal. There is, no doubt, an unsophisticated usage according to which what is normal is what is familiar, and the unfamiliar is feared or condemned as abnormal. But since we are all sophisticated this need not detain us. Sophisticated philosophers, though, have often proposed conceptions of human nature, conceptions that presumably have implications for human normality. Currently, I am more concerned with scientific claims to provide universal accounts of human nature. Recently, I have been especially concerned with the claims of neoclassical economists and sociobiologists (or, as they now prefer to be called, evolutionary psychologists).

Both neoclassical economics and evolutionary psychology make broad claims about how we should think about human behavior, or at least very significant parts of human behavior. Science is on the whole concerned with generalizations, so these sciences are concerned with generalizations about human behavior. This immediately raises a problem: human behavior is, on the face of it, enormously diverse. Why should we expect there to be any very interesting generalizations about it at all. Economics--and a cluster of related scientific and philosophical approaches--offers an interesting answer to this question: its generalizations about people are purely formal. They say what people do given the things they want and what they believe. But they refuse to take any position on what people in fact want. This is most striking in the hostility shown by many economists toward the attempt to distinguish between mere desires and needs. Some people, perhaps many people, attach great importance to food, shelter, or medical care, others to jewellery, fast cars, and fine wine. For scientists or politicians to show a preference for one desire over another is insufferable paternalism. In its extreme version, perhaps only quite seriously entertained by economists of the Chicago school, the diversity of human behavior is fully explained by ultimately unexplained differences in preference: some choose the lives of playboys or film stars, others prefer to sleep under railway bridges and live in cardboard boxes. I shall not say a lot more about this problem later, though for the most part I shall be concerned with sciences such as evolutionary psychology that have something more substantial to say about what people, in general, are like. But first I want to discuss some more abstract philosophical issues about normality. This will also relate the question to the other official topic of this volume, taxonomy.

Philosophical Issues Concerning Normality

Judgements of normality are related in fundamental ways to the classification of things. Something cannot be normal without being a normal something or other. As J. L. Austin would have said, the word normal is substantive-hungry (Austin, 1962, pp. 68-70). I shall therefore approach the question of normality by way of some quite general remarks about the classification of things into kinds. My general thesis, finally, will be that the application of the term normal to people presupposes that people form a kind in a sense in which, I shall argue, they in fact do not. Since, moreover, the term normal almost invariably carries normative implications, its application to humans is not only a philosophical mistake, but potentially a dangerous one.

Two radically different ways of mapping the diversity of a domain of objects should be distinguished. First, there is the process generally associated with the term taxonomy, the process whereby the objects are assigned to a number of distinct kinds. If the properties of the objects tend to be grouped together in well-correlated clusters, the best way of carrying out this classificatory process will seem to be determined by the natures of the objects themselves, and we will be tempted to speak of the discovery of natural kinds. If, on the other hand, the respects of variation among the objects are little correlated, then it may be more natural to think of classification as the imposition of an arbitrary grid rather than the delineation of preexisting kinds. Extreme examples of such cases might be the classification of chemical elements according to the periodic table, and the classification of areas of the world by latitude and longitude. Although the difference between these visions of taxonomy, or the spectrum of kinds of diversity they delineate, is of great importance, and I shall return to it later, for the moment I want rather to contrast the whole range of such taxonomies with a quite different approach to the mapping of diversity. In this approach, the attempt is rather to define a standard or paradigmatic object, and characterize the remainder of the domain in terms of its deviations from this paradigm. In very rough analogy with the two familiar versions of coordinate geometry, we might refer to the first of these as Cartesian classification and the second as polar classification. We should note at once that these two modes of classification are incompatible with one another. We cannot provide a polar mapping of a domain that is acknowledged to comprise two or more Cartesian kinds, for this would presumably require two distinct paradigms. Thus it is natural to think of these mapping processes as sequential. A Cartesian classification provides us with a set of kinds, and a polar mapping provides us with a way to describe the variation within the kind.