It is only because our acting on normative rules is...

It is only because our acting on normative rules is dependent upon our recognition or conception of them, our accepting or grasping them, implicitly or explicitly, that we are “denizens of the realm of freedom,” rational agents, at all.[^383] This description of the basis of normativity has its roots in Kant, and has more recently played a central role in a variety of analytic projects that have discussed our “responsiveness to reasons” or the possibility of characterizing our social and linguistic “reasoning practices” as involving commitments to “norms” in a fundamental way.[^384] For these projects, normative entities such as standards or rules are to be distinguished from non-normative ones in that their force in determining what we do depends on our recognition of them as such.

By contrast with natural laws or regularities, they are not binding “in themselves,” but only insofar as we can recognize them as binding, or (equivalently) recognize ourselves as bound by them.

Their force is not, then, that of the natural laws that compel the movements of bodies, but a categorically distinct kind of rational force that depends on our recognition of it as binding, a recognition that, we may further suppose, is experienced and negotiated primarily in linguistic and social practices of justification, explanation, and evaluation. Its paradigm is the “game of giving and asking for reasons” in which we offer, accept or reject…