True Norms

It is often maintained that norms are not capable of being true or false? But, in what sense of ‘true’, in what sense of ‘false’? In what sense, more generally, a sentence is “true”, and in what sense a tautological sentence is not “a true (a real) sentence”? The present paper starts from the distinction of two concepts of “truth”: de dicto truth, which is predicated of dicta (sentences, assertions, etc.), and de re truth, which is predicated of res (of any kind of object, of entity). Through this distinction, it is then investigated the problem of the truth of norms. Two different theories of de dicto truth of norms are taken into account, and a common de re presupposition of these two theories is elicited: the (debatable) presupposition that norms are dicta, sentences.