The sense in which a norm is said to exist

In continuing with our effort to identify the things to be described, and the suppositions required for the intelligibility of the talk about those things, we shall keep before us the quotation cited earlier as Knight's allusion to the fundamental peculiarities of economics as a descriptive science (1947d: 182–3). He there stated the problem – which I shall take to be that of specifying those idealized states of things to which such names as full employment, price stability, equitable income distribution, and the like are given–to be an intellectual but not scientific one. I think these two terms do not express clearly the contrast that he intended to place emphasis upon. He indicated his usage of scientific by observing that “medicine itself is ‘scientific’ only to the extent that men agree on the meaning of health and disease,” that “in this field, the degree of agreement which is practically requisite may be taken for granted,” but that “in ‘social medicine,’ the case is distinctly to the contrary,” that “the main problem” facing persons jointly responsible for “realizing social health is that of defining it” – that is, of agreeing upon a description of it-but that it is to misconstrue the facts of the situation for one to regard a legislative discussion of what a “healthy state of things”