Episode 46: Frank Veltman discusses normality
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What is the central concept of “normality” that the episode explores?
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Thank you.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Amsterdam. With me today is Frank Veltman, professor of logic and philosophy at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, and he is here to talk to us about normality. Frank Veltman, welcome.
Thank you, Matt. I'm excited to be here.
So you were interested in the word normal. What is so interesting about that word?
Well, something quite interesting, if you see it, it brings a lot of problems, and in this case philosophical problems and logical problems. I think what got me into it was long ago, maybe even before I started doing philosophy, or maybe it was one of the reasons why I wanted to do philosophy, I was interested in prejudice. Prejudices come often with the word normal, right? If you think of really vicious prejudices, like racial or sexist prejudices, then it's always these people are abnormal.
Right. Why are you bullying this person? Well, because he's abnormal.
How does Frank Veltman connect normality to everyday prejudices and decision‑making?
He deserves it. It's a justification
for... Right, for mistreating people and, well, all kinds of stuff. I also was wondering why people stick to these prejudices and why it's so difficult to convince them that they're wrong in entertaining them. And gradually I discovered that basically our entire life is guided by prejudices, and everybody's life is guided by them, but usually they're not as vicious as the ones I started thinking about. But whatever you do, I mean, given that you have to act, usually in circumstances where your information is not complete, you have to take a decision, what shall I do? And usually you act using rules of the form, well, you know, in circumstances like this, what normally happens is that and that and that, therefore I will have to do this and this and this.
You see a car, you see that the traffic lights are red, so you feel safe, because cars normally stop before... a red traffic light and so you dare to cross the street. So at that point you are exploiting a prejudice. You're saying, oh yeah, cars normally stop before a red traffic light, so let me go. Or you see a mosquito, you don't give the poor animal a chance to say, listen, I'm not going to pick you. Because normally what these animals do is they bite you. So that's also an action that you take without being fully informed. But you think, okay, normally what these things do is bite and therefore I kill it. whereas the mosquito at issue could have been an exception to the rule because that's important you know to know that such sentences of the form a's normally have property b they allow for exceptions also in the case of vicious prejudices nowadays it's fashionable to say that the greeks are lazy but of course my best friends are greeks and they're not lazy at all you know so there are exceptions to the rule
And it works in the traffic light case as well, doesn't it? Because, sure, I mean, normally people stop when there's a red light, but every once in a while maybe a drunk driver will go right through the red light.
Yeah, so that's one of the reasons why it's so difficult to get hold of what these sentences exactly mean and how you can discuss with prejudiced people and...
Yeah, so you have an example of offensive ethnic prejudice. Greek people are lazy. And then you want to say, no, that's not true. That's a horrible thing to think about, Greek people. That's just a stereotype, and we shouldn't let stereotypes influence our thinking. But then, wait a minute, that seems too extreme, too, because sometimes we have to let stereotypes influence our thinking, as in the red light case. I mean, if you want to drive to work properly... you have to assume that people going the other direction are going to stop at the red light, right? So this is sort of the dilemma.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the central concept of “normality” that the episode explores?
0:00–1:50
2
How does Frank Veltman connect normality to everyday prejudices and decision‑making?
1:50–6:07
3
Why are traffic‑light rules considered a harmless normality statement while ethnic stereotypes are not?
6:07–11:19
4
What logical differences does Veltman identify between the words “most” and “normally”?
11:19–16:36
5
How does the moral or evaluative dimension affect the truth‑conditions of normality claims?
16:36–22:17
6
When can a normality statement be scientifically justified versus when it becomes a harmful stereotype?
22:17–26:03
7
What strategies does Veltman suggest for confronting false prejudicial normality statements?
26:03–27:21
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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