In many of its versions...

In many of its versions, it seeks as well to account for the “ normative ” dimension of language - in other words, for distinctions between correctness and incorrectness in linguistic usage - by reference to the existence or regularity of socially learned and inculcated standards, rules, or norms.

But as I shall argue, this appeal to practices, in most of its formulations, is simply another version of the characteristic and repeated attempt to comprehend language as a total structure, and the force of reason as the force of its rules in application to a human life.

In this final historically focused chapter, I shall consider three recent linguistically oriented projects that consider the longstanding question of the force of reason in relation to the forms of our access to the language we speak.

Despite superficial similarities, these projects diverge widely, I shall argue, in the ways they construe the force of the better reason as operating to determine thought and action; these divergences mark some of the different contemporary possibilities for taking up the analytic tradition’s ongoing critique of linguistic reason, or continuing it in the space of a broader history of critical thought.

I In his recent text Making it Explicit , Robert Brandom outlines a complex, far-ranging and innovative project of semantic and pragmatic analysis. One of his overriding aims is to make the practical foundation of reason and our practices of reasoning intelligible in a new way by showing how the norms that he sees as governing them can be socially instituted and maintained.

One of the most urgent aims of the*“* normative pragmatics*”* that Brandom develops is to provide an alternative to the “representationalist” view that construes propositional contents as fixed and determined in themselves, independent of their characteristic roles in inferential and communicative practices.