Drawing on readings of Kant...

Drawing on readings of Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, Brandom argues that the norms of reasoning and the contents of concepts are in fact wholly determined by these practices.[^380] Thus, instead of seeing conceptual norms, in the first instance, as rules, laws, or commandments represented explicitly in our description of them, we ought to see them as typically implicit in our actual social practices of making and attributing judgments and our practical attitudes of treating the judgments that others make as legitimate or illegitimate.[^381] Following the suggestion of some of Frege’s polemics against a psychologistic treatment of logic, Brandom distinguishes sharply between the merely causal consequences of linguistic performances and the distinctive normative significance that these exercises take on when they are understood as involving reasons and aiming at the truth .

For Brandom, the first sort of significance is describable from a naturalistic perspective, whereas the second sort is not. In particular, the normativity of reasoning comes into view whenever performances are legitimately assessable as correct or incorrect .[^382] Norms of reasoning do not, like natural laws, specify what will happen, but rather what ought to happen: which inferences, for example, it is correct to draw from some set of premises or assumptions.

This liability to assessments of correctness does not, Brandom argues, adhere to events described purely naturalistically, where what is at issue can be, at best, the regularity or normalcy of a performance, but there is no legitimate application of the concept of correctness. It is, moreover, distinctive of the peculiar “force” of normative rules in reasoning that we are bound, not by these rules directly, but by our conceptions of them.

Normative rules, as opposed to causal ones, have force in determining how we ought to reason only for beings capable of conceiving of them as having this force, and as so conceived. Brandom argues that this demarcates the realm of normativity from the realm of facts and phenomena accessible to explanation in purely naturalistic terms, thereby marking us as the particular kinds of beings we are, responsive not only to natural, but also to rational, force.