Normative Standards

To quote from Cantwell Smith's 'On the Origin of Objects':

"Normative virtue - Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this entire picture of life in the middle, even more than the shifting patterns of connection and disconnection and of sameness and difference that sustain a configuration of subjects and objects, has to do with the normative standards that govern the whole process...with what notions of truth or beauty or goodness or virtue or fidelity are appropriate to this mediate...way of life." (p. 304)

He continues...

"the ability to register - the ability to make the world present, and to be present in the world, which is after all what this is a thoery of - requires that one inhabit one's particular place in the deictic flux, and participate appropriately in the enmeshing web of practices, so as to sustain the kinds of coordination that make the world come into focus with at least a degree of stability and clarity." (p. 305-6)

This echoes a lot of the stuff I've been interested in recently. I'm excited about doing this factor analysis of normative values, making good use of Osgood's Measurement of Meaning.