Comments on Von Wright’s ‘Logic and Ontology of Norms’

Abstract

As Professor von Wright’s title indicates, his paper is concerned with two distinguishable questions, the first having to do with formal logic, the second with the possibility of “fruitful applications to ethics or to legal theory or to the social scientists’ study of norms”. His discussion seems to make it quite clear to me, at any rate, that the two investigations are separable, though of course they do impinge upon each other, and I agree that a study of the relations between the two is worth the effort. But I would like to make a couple of remarks at the outset about how I conceive the distinction between the two topics to be drawn.