Two Semiotic Shifts in the Philosophy of Norms: Meaning Shift and Referent Shift

Abstract

In this introductory paper the guest editors (Paolo Di Lucia and Lorenzo Passerini Glazel) of the special issue “Norm: What Is It? Ontological and Pragmatical Perspectives” maintain that the word norm is subject to two kinds of semiotic shifts: shifts in the meaning and shifts in the referents. Philosophical research on norms and on the normative has, indeed, broadened its dominion of investigation in both directions. The phenomena of norms and normativity, intersecting different orders of phenomena, are investigated by different disciplines from different methodological perspectives.

Keywords

• norm
• normativity
• ontology of norms
• pragmatics