ABSTRACT
Neither meaning was imposed on a more normal one by a private, idiosyncratic interpretive act; both interpretations were a function of precisely the public and constituting norms invoked by Abrams. It is just that these norms are not embedded in the language but inhere in an institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals. Nevertheless, there is a distinction to be made between the two that allows people to say that, in a limited sense, one is more normal than the other: for while each is perfectly normal in the context in which their literalness is immediately obvious, as things stand now, one of those contexts is surely more available, and therefore more likely to be the perspective within which the utterance is heard, than the other. It is unassailable as general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm.
