“Define Normal”: The Socrates Meme and Why Definitions Are So Hard

Last updated: October 20, 2026

The Socratic “what is X?” question asks for a definition that covers every case of X and only cases of X, and in Plato’s early and transitional dialogues Socrates asks it relentlessly: what is piety, what is courage, what is virtue. In the Euthyphro, he tells a man who has offered him an example that he did not want examples, he wanted “the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious” (Benjamin Jowett’s translation). Most of these conversations end without an agreed answer. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates says his questioning earned him “many enemies of the worst and most dangerous kind”, and he blames that resentment for the prejudice that brought him to trial in 399 BC.

Put that habit in a car and you get the meme. In the top panel, a woman at the wheel shouts “Why can’t you just be normal?” In the bottom panel, the boy in the back seat has the head of a marble Socrates with glowing eyes, and the caption reads “Screams DEFINE NORMAL”. The template is a still from the car scene in the 2014 horror film The Babadook, a meme since 2017 according to Know Your Meme. The Socrates version works because it is exactly what he would have said, minus the screaming.

Socrates Asked for One Thing and Got a Swarm

The Socratic method begins with a request for a definition and usually ends by showing that nobody in the room, Socrates included, can give one.

In the Meno, Socrates asks what virtue is, and Meno gives him a list: one virtue for men, another for women, others for children and slaves. Socrates replies that he asked for one virtue and got “a swarm of them”. If he asked what a bee is, he says, he would not want a list of bee varieties but the thing that makes them all bees. Meno tries again, fails again, and finally complains that talking to Socrates is like being stung by a torpedo fish, which numbs whatever it touches. Socrates accepts the comparison only if the fish is numb as well: he perplexes others, he says, because he is perplexed himself.

Most of the early dialogues run this way: a confident interlocutor, definitions that collapse, and a conversation that ends in aporia, the state of being stuck. The Meno goes a little further. In the episode with the slave boy who is asked to double a square, Plato presents being stuck as progress, because you cannot look for something while believing you already have it. Socrates’ line about the boy is roughly that he is better off now that he knows he does not know.

The Question That Still Bothers Theologians

The Euthyphro asks a question about definitions that outlived its setting: does a thing have its property because someone approves of it, or do they approve of it because it has the property?

Euthyphro, on his way to prosecute his own father, defines piety as what the gods love. Socrates asks whether the holy is “beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved”. If piety is just whatever the gods happen to love, it looks arbitrary. If the gods love it because it is pious, then piety must be something independent of their approval, and “what the gods love” names a feature of it rather than defining it. The same fork, now called the Euthyphro dilemma, turns up in debates about divine command ethics and, more quietly, in plenty of arguments about whether a category is discovered or decided. Ask it about “normal” and it gets practical fast: is a behaviour abnormal because experts classify it that way, or do they classify it that way because it is abnormal?

Try Defining a Chair

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy suggests that Socrates may have been asking for something many words do not have: a single feature shared by everything they apply to.

In the Philosophical Investigations (published 1953), Wittgenstein takes the word “game” and asks what board games, card games, ball games and children’s games all have in common. Don’t assume there must be something, he advises; look. When you look, you find “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (§66), which he calls “family resemblances” (§67), as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises. In the earlier Blue Book he had criticised the “craving for generality” and Socrates in particular, for brushing aside examples when he asked what knowledge is.

Try it with a chair. Four legs? Some have one, some have none and hang from the ceiling. Something to sit on? So is a rock, and a designer chair in a museum may never be sat on. We still use the word without trouble. Wittgenstein’s conclusion is that, for a large class of words, knowing the meaning is knowing the use, not being able to state an essence. Socrates would not have been satisfied, and philosophers still argue about whether Wittgenstein dissolved the problem or simply declined to solve it.

“Normal” Is One Word Doing Three Jobs

“Normal” can mean statistically common, healthy, or socially expected, and the senses slide into each other. Many arguments about being normal trade on the confusion.

The French philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem made this slide the subject of The Normal and the Pathological, first written as his 1943 medical thesis and reissued with new chapters in 1966, as a 2022 review in Philosophy of Medicine recounts. He criticised the nineteenth-century idea that disease is merely a quantitative deviation from a normal state. Health, for Canguilhem, is the capacity to cope with a changing environment and to follow new norms of life; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on concepts of health and disease summarises his view as health as flexibility, with abnormality defined only relative to a context. Left-handedness is statistically uncommon and harmless. Tooth decay is extremely widespread and still a disease, an example the SEP itself uses against purely statistical definitions. When the woman in the meme says “normal”, she most likely means “the way I expect you to behave”, which is neither average nor healthy, just familiar. No wonder Socrates screams.

The WHO Tried, and the Word “Complete” Became the Problem

Medicine needs a working definition of health, and the most quoted one, from the World Health Organization, is criticised for setting the bar so high that almost nobody clears it.

The WHO Constitution, adopted on 22 July 1946 and in force since 7 April 1948, describes health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being” and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The WHO meant this as a deliberate move away from defining health as the absence of illness, and the definition is still widely cited. In 2011, Machteld Huber and colleagues noted in the BMJ that the word “complete” is the trouble: taken literally, it would leave most people unhealthy most of the time, and it fits badly with ageing populations living with chronic conditions. They proposed thinking of health as the ability to adapt and self-manage in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges. Like Canguilhem, they define health by what a person can do rather than by a list of things that must be absent. Adapt to what, and by whose standard, is left as an exercise for the reader.

When a Definition Changed, a Diagnosis Disappeared

Definitions in medicine have consequences that philosophy seminars rarely do: whoever writes them decides who counts as ill, who gets treated and who gets paid for.

Philosophers of medicine split roughly into naturalists and normativists, with hybrids in between, as the SEP entry lays out. The naturalist Christopher Boorse defined disease in 1977 by biology: functioning more than a certain distance below the average for a reference class, such as age and sex. Normativists hold that calling something a disease is always partly a value judgement. Jerome Wakefield’s influential 1992 account combines the two: a disorder is a failure of a mechanism to do what natural selection designed it to do, and the failure must also be harmful.

The most cited test case is homosexuality. In December 1973 the board of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a decision upheld by a membership referendum, though a residual category for people distressed by their orientation survived until 1987, as the psychiatrist Jack Drescher documents in a 2015 review. Drescher names gay activism as the main catalyst, alongside sex research that psychiatry had long ignored. The definition moved, and with it the line between ill and well.

“Just Be Normal” Is a Preference Wearing a Lab Coat

“Just be normal” usually smuggles a preference in as if it were a fact, and the Socratic question exposes the smuggling. That does not make every definition arbitrary.

Diagnostic manuals are built precisely to stop diagnosis by gut feeling. The DSM-5 usually spells out criteria sets with minimum symptom counts and durations. The WHO’s ICD-11, by contrast, mostly avoids fixed cut-offs and leaves more to clinical judgement, as its developers explain in World Psychiatry. Two manuals, two ideas of how precise a definition should be, and both get revised as evidence and values shift. The useful lesson of the meme is narrower than “nothing is normal”. It is that “normal” names several different things, and an honest conversation says which one it means. Socrates didn’t get his definitions, at least not in those dialogues. He did get people to notice that they had been relying on words they could not explain, which is more than most seminars manage.

For what Socrates thought he actually knew, read our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge.