Sensorimotor Norms and Social Norms: A Pluralistic Proposal

The performance of complex motor and craft skills is a norm-governed process, reliant on an agent’s sensitivity to standards of correct and incorrect performance. Whilst norm-governed practical skills tend to be understood in terms of social norms, this paper proposes an alternative, pluralistic perspective, which recognises socially underdetermined normative dimensions in practical skills. Specifically, drawing on the enactive approach, we argue that sensorimotor norms, understood as situated patterns of sensorimotor organisation, constitute skill-guiding normative standards which are not fully captured by social rules and expectations. We demonstrate the value of this pluralistic perspective for the explanation of skill-related norms by showing how it delivers a better interpretation of a recent proposal about the skill-based evolution of social norms, namely Jonathan Birch’s ‘skill hypothesis’. Building on this discussion, we then elaborate on the explanatory benefits of our proposal for making sense of cases of norm change and innovation in the context of practical skills and highlight its potential to address challenges connected to the origins and development of social norms. We conclude that a pluralistic perspective which takes account of both sensorimotor and social norms is better suited to explain essential features of norm-governed motor and craft skills than a view which limits itself to the consideration of social norms.