Hey, social scientists -- does "normal" have a scientific meaning that isn't a term of art in math or chemistry?
Wikipedia disambiguates the word to many things, but the only non-math/chem senses I can see that might remotely fall within the sphere of science are "social norms" and "normal behavior", neither of which appear to have precise descriptive definition (i.e. some objective way of determining whether someone's behavior falls within the definition or not).
Admittedly, I haven't read either article fully, but then again I'd probably want to go to the sources and read them, and at that point it seems like time to ask someone who is actually conversant with the, uh, norms in the field...
@woozle If you would consider psychiatry a science (many do not), then "normal" would mean "not showing symptoms of a mental illness as defined in the DSM ." Of course, diagnosis is more of an art than a science, but the whole business is based in a sort of consensus as to what constitutes normal behavior and mental process. In statistics, "normal" would usually mean a trait that appears within one standard deviation of the mean value in a typical bell curve distribution.
