Recensione di Rosaria Conte, Minding Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)

One of the most controversial issues about norms is whether mental mechanisms are involved at all in their emergence, and if so, which ones. Following its philo- sophical origins, the study of norms reveals a fundamental strabismus: on one hand, social scientists follow analytical philosophers in viewing norms as conventions possibly enforced by social expectations and sanctions; on the other hand, philoso- phers of law and logicians conceptualize norms as specific mental representations. Scholars following Hume and Wittgenstein see norms as behavioral regularities that emerge spontaneously from the bottom up, which means they see no reasons for a specific norm-related form of cognition. Scholars following Kant and Kelsen view instead norms as obligations deliberately issued from the top down by definite authorities, of which reason ranks as the highest. This book argues that norms undergo not only a social, but also a mental dyna- mics, as it is spelled out in the title: minding norms. It is about modelling of normative properties according to the paradigm of computational social science. It aims at clarifying to which level of reality norms belong, whether social or mental; what is their role, if any, in the mind; and finally whether norms represent a special kind of representation, or a special motivational factor, or both. More than a new quantita- tive, big-data driven social science, this book highlights the theory building poten- tial of computational social science. Hume had a clear understanding of the strategic structure of human interactions. He was aware that exchange tends to be risky because one or both parties may devi- ate from agreements, default on payment on delivery, or behave in other treacherous manner. Without reliable exchange, agents would be forced to solve all their prob- lems on their own and thus could not engage in division of labor and specialization (p. 68). Kelsen’s deontic philosophy and logic-based theory of action consider as basic normative beliefs, i.e., beliefs that at a given behavior, in a given scenario, for a give set of agents, is either forbidden, obligatory, or permitted (p. 83). Conte and her group propose a general notion of norms that is capable of sub- suming different types and domains of applications as «behaviors spreading over a society on the condition that the corresponding prescriptions and mental represen- tations (namely, sets of beliefs and goals concerning the norms) spread as well». They also display a dynamic model of norms, which is implemented experimen- tally, i.e., simulation-based in an operational version, which is tested on an agent platform that reproduces a different social scenario and makes it clear that norm internalization comes about as the emergence of a two-way dynamics of norm-de- tection and social conformity (p. 4). On the one side norms are emergent properties that collide with downward entities (p. 17), on the other side, social embeddedness comes to play, for there are many aspects of human life that cannot be satisfactorily modeled if one omits either the individual and his/her decision making or the sys- tem of groups and interactions that the individual is embedded in (p. 37).