Bicchieri, C. (2014). Norms, conventions, and the power of expectations. Philosophy of social science: A new introduction, 208.
What is the difference between a chair and a social norm? Both are human artefacts, existing for human use. Yet think for a moment what would happen if, like in an old episode of The Twilight Zone, all life on earth was wiped out. All life but one. You alone remain, wandering around in a world now horribly silent. You stumble on a broken chair, unusable. You may not look at it ever again, you will never sit on it, and will soon forget about that broken chair, but until time wipes it out, that chair will exist in its corner of the world. In your previous life, you were a student, a family member, a friend. Each group had its own norms, and some, like reciprocity or truth telling, were very general, spanning across all groups. You were a norm follower; not always, but most of the time. Now there are no norms to speak of. Truth telling makes no sense if there is nobody to talk to, and so it goes for every other norm you can think of. To exist at all, norms need people who collectively believe they exist. You suddenly realize you have followed norms because you thought other people were following them, and also trusted that all those people believed that everyone should obey those norms. You thought of norms as having an independent existence not unlike that broken chair, an existence in the world beyond what people thought and believed about them. You were wrong: these beliefs are no more, and all norms have therefore ceased to exist.
