This article strives to provide an original conceptual frame- work that should open a way to clarification of general philosophical debates on rules and norms . It makes a clear distinction between rules (and norms) understood as social facts grounded on specific relation- ships between social subjects and rules (norms) understood as linguistic entities. Norms are taken as specific social rules and divided into three different types: social constitutive norms, particular constitutive norms, and institutional norms . Attention is also devoted to relation between normality and normativity, to the role of permissions and to specific features of technological ‘rules’ . In the last part of the article the outlined conceptual apparatus is employed for analysis of two passages from Wittgenstein’s Investigations.