What is normal

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Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Read More Previous. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Subscribe Now You may cancel at any time. Most people in the U. Average household size in the UK in was 2. So… is there such a thing as normal? Leave a Reply Cancel reply.

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Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Are standards of normality culturally relevant? Who decides what is normal? These questions guide this edition of Philosophy Talk, with guest Charles E.

Scott, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. John and Ken open the discussion by distinguishing between the meaning of normal in a statistical sense and in a normative sense. Statistically, normal is the average or median of a set of data. In a normative sense, norms are the standards by which our behavior is measured, such as morality and reason. Ken suggests that what people generally do becomes what they ought to do; in other words, statistically normal behavior becomes the social norm for behavior.

Alternatively the common habits and strategies that successful people use those on the leading edge of the statistical bell curve often become social norms to which others are expected to conform. Professor Charles Scott joins the conversation and begins by tracing the origins of the word normal. The ancient Greek roots of normal mean well-known. In English, normal was first used to describe the conjugation of regular and irregular verbs.

How did normal attain its contemporary usage? Scott questions the value of normalcy, particularly in religion, mental health, and morality—why is normal better than abnormal? Normal was first used outside a mathematical context in the mids by a group of men gender pronoun alert—everyone in this history of normalcy is a man in the academic disciplines of comparative anatomy and physiology.

These two fields, by the 19th century, had professional dominion over the human body. Maybe they found the conflation of the factual with the value-driven useful. Maybe there was a professional advantage in appropriating a term associated with mathematical rigor. Or maybe they just liked the way it sounded. The historical record is unclear.

But use it they did—with great abundance and little rigor—sort of like I do with all words in my ambitious pursuit of creative spelling. So many words. So little time. I think they just got lazy, said screw it, normal will do. One word is better than five. The anatomists and physiologists, however, never did find or define the normal state.

Instead they studied and defined its opposite—the pathological state. They defined normal as what is not abnormal. Where did this statistic come from?

Well, the 0. The 0. What is average, however, is often called normal—and what is called normal becomes the norm. The idea of the average as normal goes way back to to a Swiss mathematician named Jakob Bernoulli, who many consider to be the founder of modern day calculus and statistics. He was obsessed with renaissance games of chance i. To figure this out, Bernoulli created an equation known as the calculus of probabilities, which became the foundation of all statistics.

This was a big deal.