ABSTRACT
The ecological analysis of agency postulates three capacities: attunement to the environment, recognition of affordances, and a meta-cognitive capacity for linguistically mediated direction of the ongoing action processes. The social sciences have been largely responsible for shifting our view of ourselves toward a naturalistic self-understanding. Turner treats all talk of normativity in terms of an error theory. Cristina Bicchieri's Grammar of Society is interesting for its attempt to provide an account of social norms that gives them explanatory power. The somatic components of these expectations provide positive and negative valences in virtue of which agents regard possibilities as right or wrong even in the absence of any threat of sanction. Social scientific accounts appeal to a wide range of normative phenomena: rules of ritual purity and religious practice, norms of appropriate role behavior, institutional rules and regulations, and so on. However, full recovery will require the bridging of two apparent gaps between Bicchieri's project and normative practice theory.
