Abstract

The article draws attention to the fact that normative utterances do not describe fragments of the world but due to the fact that they are formulated in certain norm-giving acts they are symptoms of some concurring phenomena. It is quite natural that hearing norms which are proposed by other people we think of them as forms of rational behaviour which are determined by the knowledge and the drives of the people who produce them. This assumption suggests that the fact of enactment of such-and-such a norm is determined by knowledge of the person who proposes the norm. Hence, normative utterances may be considered, without running the risk of a serious fault, symptoms of certain state of affairs or, at least, symptoms of certain conceptions that the norm giver has concerning the states of affairs.