Andreas,

You already know that I respect a lot your work in Squeak and your
will to help the community with your high skills in Smalltalk, most
people like me are very grateful for your support all these years.
Said that, I want to add I'm not happy of having to read some
sentences in this thread.

This is not the first time I see people appealing to Wikipedia
("authority") to support their claims, once I suffered listening to a
guy (a .NET developer) which have never read a single line of
Aristotle's work, reading me a Wikipedia excerpt of Metaphysics, where
any student of Philosophy knows it takes years to truly understand and
explain the work. Please do not take as if I'm comparing you with the
.NET developer, actually I think Smalltalk gurus are more receptive to
humanities, and that's why I take the time here to clarify some
things, like you take the time to answer technical questions about
Smalltalk. I feel many of you may take another view of things related
with humanities, not better but complementary. That's why you will see
me from time to time criticizing some texts too.

In a sense, most of our common words have their own worlds.
Normativity in the philosophical sense (for wikipedia readers, there
is another entry which you may read to understand my conception of
Normativity, although is incomplete and lacks of good references, it
is enough) is one of those specialities very hard to understand (I
should clarify I'm not expert in Normativity, but have assisted to
Conferences and read papers regularly). Now it would be really easy
for me to cite any book describing the theoretical principles of
critical analysis of discourse, where the concepts of discursive
process, fields, social identities, conditions of production,
circulation and reception of texts, etc. are all explained.
Normativity has a lot to do with discourses of power, forms of
individuation, disciplinary mechanisms, social structures and
rethorics. All enormous subjects. But instead of boring all the
comunity longer, I will offer to anyone that do not hesitate to ask me
for references privately, I will be very glad to see someone
interested in these topics, it would be nice to share a space for
discussing essays too.

Cheers,

Hernán

2010/5/12 Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de>:
> On 5/12/2010 1:29 PM, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
>>
>> 2010/5/12 Frank Shearar<frank.shearar at angband.za.org>:
>>>
>>> On 2010/05/11 19:30, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
>>>
>>>> @Bert, normative texts are never excellent.
>>>
>>> Isn't this a normative text? :)
>>>
>>
>> No. Why?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative
>
>        "Normative has specialized meanings in several academic disciplines.
> Generically, it means relating to an ideal standard or model. In practice,
> it has strong connotations of relating to a typical  standard or model (see
> also normality)."
>
> Your statement sounded pretty normative to me.
>
> Cheers,
>  - Andreas
>
>
>