ABSTRACT
Cultures are lived first and described later, often by people who do not have a lived experience of being a member of the culture under scrutiny. The status of the propositions that are used in such descriptions is a matter of philosophical interest and practical importance. Clearly people do not draw on explicit formulations of local norms to conduct their lives in an orderly fashion. The simplest way to express the relation between explicit and lived norms is in terms of some kind of necessity. In this paper, we examine several ways in which this status has been investigated. Expressing the norms of a culture propositionally as presuppositions discloses two types – existential, what we must hold to exist for our discourse to make sense – absolute; Collingwood’s term for those presuppositions which terminate any sense making questioning of a claim to have disclosed a norm. By linking the enquiry to the Kantian "synthetic a priori proposition" Shweder proposes "contingent universal" for a norm that holds only with a community, that is expresses an aspect of a culture. This is similar to Polanyi’s tacit knowledge – we know how to proceed without formulating any rules for so doing. But we can if pressed. Finally, we turn to a brief examination of Wittgenstein’s notion of a hinge, expressed in a pair of unexamined propositions and taken for granted procedures. Hinge propositions turn on matters of fact and hinge practices on matters of practical efficacy.
With these diverse proposals, we chart some of the ways that the concept of a culture could have a place in an investigation of what is normative about this or that way of life; that is what it is to be a culture.
