This description indeed does nothing to distinguish between different norms like “keeping promises” or “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” (or, in fact, other, stupider norms such as “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day”)
Okay, I think I’m reading a lot more into Sullyj3′s use of the phrase “seemingly arbitrarily” than you are.
Very specific things like “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” or “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day” are the kind of cognitive content that we expect to come with attached justifications: depending on the game and the community, I could see either of “Take this game seriously; it’s a ritual” or “Don’t take this game seriously; it’s just a game” being the norm. On encountering a community with such a norm, I would expect to be able to ask why they do things that way and receive a non-circular answer other than an appeal to “the way things are” (here).
In contrast, the very concept of a “promise” seems to have an inherent asymmetry to it; I’m not sure what making a “promise” would mean in a world where the norm is “You shouldn’t keep promises.” (This feels like the enactive analogue of the asymmetry between truth and lies, where you need a convention grounding the “true” meaning of a signal in order to even contemplate sending the signal “falsely”.)
Okay, I think I’m reading a lot more into Sullyj3′s use of the phrase “seemingly arbitrarily” than you are.
Very specific things like “taking the Petrov Day game seriously” or “giving yourself electric shocks eight hours a day” are the kind of cognitive content that we expect to come with attached justifications: depending on the game and the community, I could see either of “Take this game seriously; it’s a ritual” or “Don’t take this game seriously; it’s just a game” being the norm. On encountering a community with such a norm, I would expect to be able to ask why they do things that way and receive a non-circular answer other than an appeal to “the way things are” (here).
In contrast, the very concept of a “promise” seems to have an inherent asymmetry to it; I’m not sure what making a “promise” would mean in a world where the norm is “You shouldn’t keep promises.” (This feels like the enactive analogue of the asymmetry between truth and lies, where you need a convention grounding the “true” meaning of a signal in order to even contemplate sending the signal “falsely”.)