There is a widespread and largely unchallenged assumption within philosophy that the word ‘normal’ is ambiguous: i.e., that it can mean different things in different contexts. This assumption appears in work within topics as varied as the philosophy of biology, medicine, justification, causation, and more. In this paper I argue that we currently lack any independent reason for adopting such an assumption. The reason that would most likely be offered in its favour requires us to ignore an alternative and equally plausible explanation for the seeming variety of different meanings that ‘normal’ is taken to have. Meanwhile, the well-known conjunction reduction test for ambiguity provides no evidence for the ambiguity of ‘normal’, and in fact suggests that maintaining this ambiguity claim is more difficult than has been initially supposed. Therefore, with the way things stand at present, it should not be assumed without argument that ‘normal’ is an ambiguous term.

中文翻译：

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为什么我们不应该假设“正常”是模棱两可的

哲学中有一个广泛且基本上没有受到挑战的假设，即“正常”一词是模棱两可的：即它在不同的背景下可能意味着不同的事物。这种假设出现在生物学、医学、论证、因果关系等各种主题的工作中。在本文中，我认为我们目前缺乏采用这种假设的任何独立理由。最有可能对其有利的原因要求我们忽略对“正常”看似具有多种不同含义的替代性且同样合理的解释。同时，众所周知的歧义合取减少测试没有提供“正常”歧义的证据，并且事实上表明维持这种歧义主张比最初假设的更加困难。所以，