Many of the most important social institutions—e.g., law and language—are thought to be normative in some sense. And philosophers have been puzzled by how this normativity can be explained in terms of the social, descriptive states of affairs that presumably constitute them. This paper attempts to solve this sort of puzzle by considering a simpler and less contentious normative social practice: table manners. Once we are clear on the exact sense in which a practice is normative, we see that some practices can be normative in an interesting and non-trivial sense, but also explicable with merely descriptive resources. In addition to arguing that it is possible to explain normative practices with descriptive resources, this paper presents and defends just such an explanation—an account of the nature of table manners that appeals only to descriptive states of affairs.

许多最重要的社会制度——例如法律和语言——在某种意义上被认为是规范的。哲学家们一直困惑于如何根据可能构成规范性的社会的、描述性的事态来解释这种规范性。本文试图通过考虑一种更简单且争议较少的规范社会实践来解决此类难题：餐桌礼仪。一旦我们明确了实践规范的确切含义，我们就会看到一些实践可以在有趣和非平凡的意义上成为规范，但也可以仅用描述性资源来解释。除了论证可以用描述性资源解释规范性实践之外，