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The Pragmatic Topography
of the Space of Reasons
Rebecca Kukla
Mark Lance
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2008
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Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kukla, Rebecca, 1969–

Yo! and Lo! : the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons /
Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03147-0 (alk. paper)
1. Pragmatics. 2. Speech acts (Linguistics) 3. Language and languages—
Philosophy. I. Lance, Mark Norris. II. Title.
P99.4.P72K85 2008
410—dc22 2008011161
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To Wilfrid Sellars
‘Lo, a rabbit!’
—W. V. O. Quine
Yo! Word up!

—Dead Prez
You talkin’ to me?

—Travis Bickle
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse: Mapping the Terrain 1

1.1 Varieties of Pragmatism 3
1.2 Two Distinctions among Normative Statuses 12
1.3 A Typology of Speech Acts 18
1.4 More about Agent-Relativity and Agent-Neutrality 23
1.5 Several Caveats 29
1.6 Entitlement and Epistemic Responsibility 34
1.7 Where We Go from Here 38
2 Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception 42

2.1 Observatives 45
2.2 Observatives and Occasion Sentences 51
2.3 Observing-That and the Declarative Fallacy 53
2.4 The Ineliminability of the First-Person Voice 59
3 The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity 66

3.1 Observatives, Observation, and Answerability to the World 66
3.2 Intersubjectivity 78
3.3 Objectivity 81
4 Anticlimactic Interlude: Why Performatives Are Not

That Important to Us 87
5 Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims 95 S

5.1 The Pragmatics of Prescriptives 97 R
5.2 Four Ways of Telling Someone What to Do 105 L
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Contents vii
5.3 Two Alternative Accounts 113

5.4 Reasons, Claims, and Addresses 122
5.5 Coda: Categorical Imperatives 128
6 Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the Pragmatics

of Recognition 134
6.1 Two Kinds of Recognitives 137
6.2 Vocatives 138
6.3 Acknowledgments 145
7 The Essential Second Person 153

7.1 Concrete Habitation of the Space of Reasons 155
7.2 Second-Person Speech 160
7.3 Tellings, Holdings, and Transcendental Vocatives 163
7.4 Speech as Communication and as Calling 171
8 Sharing a World 179

8.1 Interpellation and Induction into Normative Space 180
8.2 Membership in the Discursive Community 190
8.3 How Many Discursive Communities Are There? 195
8.4 Sharing a World and Learning to See 205
8.5 On the Equiprimordiality and Entanglement of
‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ 210
8.6 Fugue 212
Appendix: Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Normative

Statuses (with Greg Restall) 217
Index 235
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Acknowledgments
This book is the direct result of almost exactly five years of intensive
joint philosophical work. Prior to that, each of us had thought hard
about certain themes in this book for many years. Our shared discovery
of the possibilities for synthesizing the ideas that we had been pursuing
separately—occasioned by a graduate seminar at Georgetown Univer-
sity—dramatically transformed each of our thinking and created some-
thing wholly new. It would be hard to overstate the intellectual excite-
ment of those early conversations during which this book was born.
Finding someone who not only understands what you are up to, but
whose work immediately opens up new possibilities for the formulation
and development of your own, and with whom you can explore, chal-
lenge, deepen, and make that work more precise, all in a context that is
intellectually smooth, is a rare and treasured moment in a life.
Since those initial meetings, the work on this book has been utterly
collaborative. We talked through each major idea and argumentative
move in advance of any writing. Though initial drafts of chapters were
often undertaken by one of us, subsequent drafts always went to the
other, and later drafts were written and rewritten line by line as we sat
together in front of the monitor. There is no chance that any part of this
book could have existed in anything like its current form without that
collaboration. Not only could neither of us have found our way down
this road alone, but we are certain that neither of us could have done so
with any other companion.
But of course if we had talked only to each other along the way we
would have descended into madness. We have been supported and
joined by a magnificent intellectual community. Two people deserve spe-
cial mention for their essential, engaged, and generous help: Richard
Manning organized and participated in a day-long “jam session” on the S
book at Georgetown University when it was very much a work in prog- R
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x Acknowledgments
ress, and the conversations we had that day altered and enriched the
book. At least as important, he gave us detailed, line-by-line comments
on an early draft, and as always proved himself both a penetrating reader
and a maddeningly reliable bullshit detector. We overhauled much of
Chapters 1 and 2, in particular, in response to his comments. Margaret
Little has been a constant sounding-board for ideas, testing our intu-
itions, challenging underlying assumptions, directing us to relevant lit-
erature in moral philosophy, pushing us to formulate points more clearly,
and suggesting everything from clarifying examples to more perspicu-
ous formulations of views. Indeed, much of Maggie’s own work on deon-
tic pluralism and intimacy has tendrils that have penetrated our thought.
It is hard to imagine more supportive and stimulating colleagues and
friends than Maggie and Richard.
Sincere thanks go to our coauthor on the Appendix, Greg Restall, who
was kind enough to arrange a grant for Mark to visit Melbourne for two
months. During that time Mark and Greg worked out the basics of the
formal Appendix and discussed in detail how a formal perspective could
illuminate and refine the philosophical meat of the book. The three of us
developed later versions of the Appendix together, and we fully expect
the tripartite collaboration to continue.
Many people have helped us with their suggestions, objections, skep-
ticism, and sympathy. An undoubtedly partial list includes William
Blattner, Taylor Carman, Alan Gibbard, Mitch Green, John Haugeland,
Elisa Hurley, Paul Hurley, André Kukla, Coleen Macnamara, Chauncey
Maher, James Mattingly, John McDowell, Niklas Möller, Mark Okrent,
Terry Pinkard, Alex Pruss, Joseph Rouse, Charles Taylor, Michael Wil-
liams, and audiences at Queens University, Georgetown University, the
University of Virginia, the International Association for Phenomeno-
logical Studies, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Cape Town,
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Mel-
bourne, and the University of Cincinnati. Special thanks go to Colleen
Fulton, the world’s greatest R.A., who gave us invaluable comments on
the entire manuscript, and to Philip Kremer and Juliet Floyd, who pre-
pared wonderful critical responses to our work for the workshop that
Richard organized at Georgetown.
We have been exceptionally well supported by various institutions.
It is only because the Georgetown University philosophy department, S
through the efforts of its superlative chair, Wayne Davis, welcomed R
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Acknowledgments xi
Rebecca as a visitor for three years that the opportunity for this collab-
oration came to be. Carleton University awarded Rebecca a Marston
LaFrance Research Award, which gave her an entire paid year of release
from teaching to finish this book. Several trips between Ottawa, Wash-
ington, and Tampa for the purpose of writing together were funded
by Rebecca’s grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. Mark was able to work with Greg Restall in Mel-
bourne thanks to a grant from the University of Melbourne visiting
scholars program. Camille Smith did a superb job of editing the entire
manuscript, and Phoebe Kosman and Lindsay Waters of Harvard Uni-
versity Press helped us throughout the editing and publishing process.
Finally, as is standard but no less genuine for that, we thank our wise
spouses, Richard Manning (same person, different guise) and Amy Hub-
bard. They put up with long trips, extra parenting duties, late nights,
early mornings, grouchiness when the issues were particularly recalci-
trant, and excessive giddiness when the solutions came quickly. They
rolled their eyes only internally when we lapsed periodically into a
cryptic dialect comprehensible only to the two of us. Our children, Eli
Kukla-Manning and Emma Lance, inspired and forbore. Throughout,
much slack was taken up.
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Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and

Discourse: Mapping the Terrain
“In the beginning was the Word!” Here I’m stuck already! Who helps
me go further? The spirit helps me! All at once I see the answer. And
confidently write: “In the beginning was the Act!”
—Goethe
In this book we examine how speech acts alter and are enabled by the
normative structure of our concretely incarnated social world. In other
words, we examine language through the lens of pragmatism, in the
metaphysical sense that takes the phenomenon of language to be, in the
first instance, a concrete, embodied social practice whose purpose is
meaningful communication. We argue that, by beginning with our anal-
ysis of the normative functioning of speech acts, we can clarify the struc-
ture (and sometimes make progress toward a solution) of some key is-
sues in metaphysics and epistemology, including the role of perception
in grounding empirical knowledge, how we manage to engage in inter-
subjective inquiry with objective import, the nature of moral reasons,
and the capacity of subjects to be responsive and responsible to norms.
Using an image that would grip the imaginations of at least three
generations of philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars placed us—that is, us beings
capable of language, thought, intention, meaning, and normative ac-
countability—within a ‘space of reasons’, set over and against a space
of mere causes. For some close followers of Sellars, most emblemati-
cally Robert Brandom, this space is first and foremost a space of inferen-
tial relations between declarative propositions.1 John McDowell’s post-
S
1. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). R
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2 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Sellarsian space of reasons is a provocatively richer and perhaps more

ambiguous one. The relationship between the deliverances of experi-
ence and the space of reasons is complex rather than merely opposi-
tional for McDowell.2 But none of the authors who have developed and
philosophically mined the metaphor of the space of reasons have taken
particularly seriously what its overall pragmatic structure may be, nor
have they given detailed attention to how different normative pragmatic
relations might importantly inflect and constitute this space. We aim to
rectify this absence through an exploration of what we call the “prag-
matic topography” of the space of reasons. We develop a framework for
thinking about the normative pragmatic structure of discursive speech
acts, guided by the presumption that the pragmatic structure of the
space of reasons can be no less rich than that of discourse.
Like any beginning, this beginning in the concrete normative struc-
ture of discourse embodies two commitments: that the starting point ex-
ists, and that it is a good place to start. Existentially, we are committed to
the claim that language has systematic normative effects and functions,
that these essentially depend on the concrete ways in which speakers are
enmeshed in social communities and environments, and that discursive
performances systematically transform the normative statuses of speak-
ers and of those spoken to. Prescriptively, we are committed to the prin-
ciple that this dimension of language and discursive practice forms an
explanatorily useful entering point for thinking about larger questions
concerning our contact with the empirical world, with normative force,
and with one another.
We can afford to be quite liberal about what counts as a speech act; for
our purposes, a speech act is a communicative act that functions norma-
tively within a structured system of communication. We don’t much
care about nailing down the boundaries of the notion, but it is clear that
we can count many gestures, written signs, facial expressions, and more
as speech acts. Such acts may or may not have a determinate syntactic or
semantic structure, but it is an integral consequence of our account that
they have a rich and determinate pragmatic, communicative structure—
one that is of the right sort to let them participate in a discursive system
that lends itself to semantic and syntactic analysis, and of the right sort
2. See in particular John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University S
Press, 1994), and McDowell, “Having the World in View: Kant, Sellars, and Intentionality,” R
Journal of Philosophy 65 (1998): 431–450. Sellars’s own view of the relation between the spaces
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Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 3
to use for making claims about, and upon, the world and one another. A
crucial upshot of our analysis will be that meaningful speech acts are
fundamentally indexed to particular agents with particular stances, sub-
stantial relationships to other particular agents, and locations within
concrete social normative space that are ineliminably first- and second-
personally owned by this or that living, embodied subject who has a par-
ticular point of view and is capable of making and being bound by
claims.
Our central conceptual tool, introduced later in this chapter, is a
typology of speech acts—or, more precisely, of normative dimensions of
speech acts—that is orthogonal to the usual systems of pragmatic cate-
gorization (by performative force, etc.). We believe this typology has
surprisingly large philosophical payoffs. There is nothing uniquely priv-
ileged or architectonic about our typology; there are plenty of legitimate
ways of dividing up speech acts along pragmatic lines, and surely differ-
ent ways have different benefits and clarify different philosophical is-
sues. What we claim on behalf of our typology is, first, that the mere fact
that it is substantially different from the categorization systems used by
linguists and other philosophers of language serves to de-naturalize the
more traditional systems, and to broaden our philosophical imagination
and vision, and, second, that its use can make some seemingly impene-
trable philosophical questions appear quite straightforward.
1.1 Varieties of Pragmatism

There are two large camps of philosophers who fly the banner of prag-
matism, plus an additional camp of those who do not necessarily iden-
tify as ‘pragmatists’ but who study the pragmatics of language. Although
we think that we are true to (what ought to be) the spirit of pragmatism,
and although we are centrally concerned with the pragmatics of lan-
guage, we depart substantially from all three camps. First, there are phi-
losophers who find their roots in the classic American Pragmatists such
as Dewey, James, and Pierce, and often also in the early work of Heideg-
ger and his French successors such as Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty.3 This group has productively focused on embodied prac-
tice as the ineliminable site of human meaning, and has worked to shift
S
3. Typical recent examples include Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins R
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), and Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). L
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epistemological attention to local and contextual epistemic practices,

and away from the quest for transcendent truths, universal principles,
and absolute certainty.
Second, there is what we might call “Pittsburgh School Pragmatism,”
represented paradigmatically by Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, Rich-
ard Rorty, Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, and John Haugeland,4
and characterized by anti-reductionism and anti-representationalism in
the philosophy of mind and epistemology with roots in Wittgenstein.
These philosophers are committed to the principle that the best place
from which to begin thinking about intentional phenomena such as
meaningful speech acts and contentful mental states is with our practi-
cal interactions with the world and with others, and their normative
structure. For example, in the preface to Making It Explicit, Brandom
writes:
The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of
social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in
order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider
what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on
states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable
ways.5
Finally, there are philosophers of language such as William Alston and
John Searle, who work in close collaboration with linguists and focus on
speech act theory, looking backwards to Austin and Grice.6 These phi-
losophers seek to develop a formal pragmatics that can sit alongside for-
mal theories of semantics and of syntax. In the imperfect tripartite divi-
sion of language into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, there is rough
agreement that syntax is the study of well-formedness, or grammatical-
ity, semantics is the study of meaning, and pragmatics is the study of the
way bits of language are used in the performance of speech acts. While
4. For example see Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Ob-
jective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); McDowell, Mind and World; and Brandom,
Making It Explicit.
5. Brandom, Making It Explicit, xiii.
6. See for example William Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000); John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language S
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and Wayne Davis, Meaning, Expression, and
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003). R
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many—though not all—philosophers who work on formal pragmatics

share with both camps of pragmatism an explanatory privileging of the
pragmatic dimensions of language, this last group departs from the first
two in generally treating syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as indepen-
dently analyzable, and taking mental meanings and representations as
given independently and in advance of performative utterances.7
We share some methodological commitments with each of the three
camps we have just described. The priority of the pragmatic in the order
of explanation is important to us; we shall return to this point in detail
below. We believe that meaning and normativity are phenomena that are
ineliminably grounded in socially located human bodies, that reduction-
ism and classical representationalism are bankrupt projects in philoso-
phy of mind and epistemology, and that there is an important place for
formal theories in attempts to understand the pragmatic structure of
language. On the other hand, we see each of these three orientations as
having serious limitations.
The first camp has tended to privilege embodied practice over concep-
tual discourse and thought, seeing the former as more fundamental and
more interesting than the latter.8 To do so is to assume that discourse
and thought are not themselves embodied practices,9 and it is also, we
think, to undervalue the philosophical centrality of language and dis-
cursive judgment in making possible our status as epistemic and moral
subjects and our receptivity to the claims and character of the empirical
world.
Our points of convergence with and divergence from the second and
third camps—the Pittsburgh School Pragmatists and the theorists of
formal pragmatics—deserve some detailed discussion right up front.
Sellars, Brandom, Davidson, and other anti-representationalists are
methodologically committed to a particular explanatory starting point
7. For instance, Kent Bach writes: “Different types of speech acts (statements, requests,
apologies, etc.) may be distinguished by the type of propositional attitude (belief, desire, regret,
etc.) being expressed by the speaker . . . Many philosophers would at least concede that mental
content is a more fundamental notion than linguistic meaning, and perhaps even that seman-
tics reduces to propositional attitude psychology” (online.sfsu.edu/ kbach/grice.htm, accessed
10/10/07).
8. Classic examples include Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of
Artificial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), and Todes, Body and World.
9. Joseph Rouse, in How Scientific Practices Matter: Explaining Philosophical Naturalism S
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), does an excellent job of systematically defending
a picture of discourse as continuous with, rather than derivative upon, embodied practice. R
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in philosophy of mind and language, namely an account of the role that

discursively formed encounters with the world and with one another
play in constituting the normative statuses of participants in a discursive
community—an account of the acts that form what Brandom (attribut-
ing the thought, if not the phrase, to Sellars) calls the “game of giving
and asking for reasons.” It is attention to the social practices of dis-
course, according to this approach, that is our best way into thinking
about how language manages to be suitably responsive to the world, and
hence how this responsiveness is codified in a semantics and a syntax.
Furthermore, Sellars tenaciously argued—following Hegel and Wittgen-
stein—that intentional mental states are best understood as derivative
and dependent upon meaningful discursive practice, and his philosoph-
ical descendents have championed this commitment. So on this picture,
philosophical explanation moves from discursive use, to content and
grammar, to mind.
We share a commitment to this order of explanation. In this book we
will not argue separately for the rectitude of this order, but we hope to
demonstrate its fecundity. We think that only by beginning with discur-
sive practices can we understand, on the one hand, how discourse comes
to be responsive to the world and capable of expressing and commu-
nicating content, and on the other hand, how any practices manage to
be practices of reason-giving, truth-telling, and responsibility-imputing,
rather than just elaborate conventional dances. In this sense, we are cer-
tainly continuing a project with its lineage in the work of (in particular)
Brandom, Sellars, and Hegel.
However, authors like Brandom think not only that pragmatics is
explanatorily prior to semantics and syntax, but also that the latter are re-
ducible to the former, that meaning just is a pragmatic feature of a speech
act, properly understood. The major project of Brandom’s Making It
Explicit is to spell out how semantics and syntax can be derived fully
from pragmatics. In contrast, we remain steadfastly agnostic on issues of
semantic-pragmatic reduction. It is consistent with all we say that se-
mantics retain significant forms of autonomy from pragmatics. Tempting
as it will surely be to some readers, we ask that our use of key Sellarsian
and Brandomian terms and ideas such as the ‘space of reasons’ and ‘com-
mitments and entitlements’ not be read as our implicit acceptance of this
reductive move. S
We assume that both mental states and speech acts are meaningful R
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only insofar as they are properly situated within a body of discursive

practices that is their constitutive precondition. Despite our agnosticism
about the reducibility of semantics to pragmatics, our acceptance of the
pragmatists’ order of explanation puts us at odds with most philoso-
phers working on speech act theory and formal pragmatics. Indeed, for
typical theorists of pragmatics, things go almost exactly the other way
around. Mental states, particularly intentions, are typically taken for
granted for the purposes of linguistic theory. Of course, philosophers
such as Searle have accounts of mind, but their theories of mental repre-
sentation cast it as independent of, and in important senses prior to, lan-
guage. The job of the theorist, on this view, is to characterize the range
of ways a person can then intentionally put a sentence—usually seen as
having an unproblematic syntax—to use. Accordingly, such philoso-
phers follow the linguists’ odd practice of treating categories of speech
acts that mark pragmatic function, such as declaratives, imperatives, and
interrogatives, as definitionally grammatical categories (namely moods),
and only secondarily as pragmatic categories. Thus, such categories ap-
ply to sentences in virtue of their grammar, and one asks questions such
as “what can a person do with a declarative?”10
But in keeping with our commitment to the explanatory priority of
pragmatics, we define such use-indicating categories in terms of their use
(which ought to seem quite a sensible approach, we think). Hence, for
us, the answer to the above question is that what one can do with a de-
clarative is—by definition—declare. This isn’t to deny that we can iden-
tify syntactic types as, for example, those that are typically or defeasibly
used to produce declaratival acts. But for us, this will be a secondary no-
tion. We always privilege pragmatic categories over grammatical catego-
ries when identifying the functional structure of a particular utterance.
Thus, rather than “What can one do with declaratives?”, a question for
us (though not a particularly interesting one) will be “Which syntactic
forms can function as declaratives in English?”
While our commitment to the pragmatist order of explanation puts
10. See H. P. Grice’s seminal paper, “Logic and Conversation,” in Donald Davidson and
Gilbert Harman, eds., The Logic of Grammar (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1975), 64–75. The as-
sumption that a “pragmatics first” approach to language should follow the lines of Grice is
common. See for example Peter Grundy, Doing Pragmatics (New York: Oxford University Press, S
2000), a fairly standard introductory linguistics text that adopts the Gricean framework with-
out discussion or argument. R
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us on the side of Sellars and Brandom over against most theorists of

pragmatics, our focus on the multiplicity of discursive functions puts
us at odds with Sellars and Brandom and the rest of the Pittsburgh
School Pragmatists. Given the Sellarsian/Brandomian order of explana-
tion, from pragmatics, through semantics and syntax, to mental states,
one would expect members of that group to begin their philosophical
accounts with comprehensive analyses of the entire terrain of discursive
practice—of the pragmatic topography of discourse, in all its richness
and complexity, including the whole variety of meaningful and commu-
nicative practices that make it up. That is, apart from the details of the-
ory and argument, we would expect such pragmatists to display a partic-
ular interest in pragmatic phenomena. Yet, in fact, among members of
this tradition, there is an odd disconnect between their commitment to a
pragmatist order of explanation and their interest in the pragmatic tex-
ture of discourse.
First, when authors such as Sellars and Brandom discuss practices, the
lived, acting body planted in a concrete environment does not remain in
view. These authors give pragmatic accounts of meaning and interpreta-
tion, but they are vastly more interested in language and theoretical rea-
son than in the rest of human bodily activity, and they care little about
how these two domains fit together. For Brandom, inferentially articu-
lated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while per-
ception and action serve as the ways in and out of this domain—that is,
as language-entry and language-exit conditions. Indeed, he makes the
remarkable claim that it is merely a contingent matter that discourse is
bounded by perception and action, and that it could in principle exist
without them.11 Although Brandom understands language as a system of
shifting commitments and entitlements, he has next to nothing to say
about what concrete events such as taking on a commitment or granting
an entitlement actually are like. He gives us no story about how to mate-
rially identify such events, and he often writes as though different speak-
ers’ respective commitments and entitlements may as well be abstract
scores that shift around in Platonic space.12 Both schools of pragma-
11. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 234.

12. In Making It Explicit he gives many pedagogically inspirational stories, such as the story
of the hut that one brings a sacred leaf to enter. But these are explicitly speculative stories about S
the causal origins of normativity, and they are not intended to give us insight into the real char-
acter of our current practices. R
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tism, ironically, at least implicitly agree that embodied and discursive

practices are separate domains making only peripheral contact—which
would seem to be a surprisingly unpragmatic conclusion. In this work
we aim to plant discursive practices firmly within the embodied material
terrain. For us, concrete action, centrally including the act of perceiving,
will form the substance of language and not just a means of entering or
exiting it.
Second, consider Brandom’s pragmatic account of language. Far from
starting with an articulated view of the whole terrain of discursive prac-
tices, he offers instead an account that focuses almost exclusively on as-
serting.13 On the basis of this account, he builds a semantically sig-
nificant notion of inference, and then proceeds to work out the semantic
content of semantically significant sub-sentential bits of syntax. He tells
us just enough, that is, about the pragmatics of one type of speech act to
define a notion of inference, and then he is off and running with his se-
mantic story, giving hardly a glance and certainly no systematic atten-
tion to the rest of pragmatic space.
We believe that this narrow focus on assertion is a serious error, and a
particularly surprising one for a self-declared pragmatist. We think that
it leads not only to missing out on philosophically important dimen-
sions of language, but to hopelessly distorting our understanding of lan-
guage as a normative phenomenon, including our understanding of as-
sertion and how it works.14 Brandom’s narrow use of assertion as the sole
13. In the introduction to Making It Explicit, Brandom says: “The first step in the project is
accordingly the elaboration of a pragmatics (a theory of the use of language) that is couched in
terms of practical scorekeeping . . . The pragmatic significance of performances—eventually
speech acts such as assertions—is then understood to consist in the difference those perfor-
mances make to the commitments and entitlements attributed by various scorekeepers . . . The
defining characteristic of discursive practice is the production and consumption of specifically
propositional contents” (xiv, first emphasis added).
The final sentence of this passage—not to mention the semantic inferentialism—is a clue
that assertions are more than an example of a speech act Brandom will analyze. Indeed, when
one turns to the first two chapters of Making It Explicit, in which the “elaboration of a prag-
matics” is carried out and the bridge between it and semantics developed, one searches in vain
for any discussion of any speech act other than assertions. Indeed, a search of the index under
“imperatives” yields “See commands,” which takes us to historical discussions of Pufendorf,
Wittgenstein, and Kant on normativity. “Interrogative” “performative,” etc., do not appear in
the index at all.
14. We develop these objections to Brandom, and argue in particular that his focus on S
declaratives precludes an adequate account of observation—material that will connect with the
discussion of Chapter 2—in Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla, “Perception, Language, and the R
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10 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
building block for his entire theory of the pragmatic and semantic struc-
ture of language and the connection between language and the world re-
creates and instantiates a failure of vision and methodology that is nearly
universal in analytic philosophy. To be specific, analytic philosophers, of
any stripe, act as though the most fundamental, important, and common
thing we do with language is use it to make propositionally structured
declarative assertions with truth-values.
Even though philosophers of language occasionally acknowledge and
discuss the structure of imperatives, interrogatives, etc., they virtually
always treat these as ‘special’ discursive phenomena that are marginal
and derivative in comparison with declaratives. McDowell and Sellars,
for instance, take it as an unshakable starting point that insofar as a state
has a discursive or a conceptual structure, it has, or is directly derivative
upon something that has, a declarative, propositional structure.15 David-
son shares a similar commitment, and he takes assertions—but not que-
ries, requests, evocations, or hails—as the necessary starting point for
interpretation.16 Even Austin, most famous for drawing the attention of
the philosophical world to the variety of “things we do with words,” and
Grice, who taught us the many “ways of words,” both take the declara-
tival assertion as the paradigm of ‘normal’ language and then examine
various marginal and quirky uses of language by way of their departure
from or permutation of this norm.17
First Person,” forthcoming in Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer, eds., Reading Brandom:
Making It Explicit (New York: Routledge, 2009).
15. See McDowell, Mind and World; Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
16. See the essays in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 2001), especially “Truth and Meaning” and “Radical Interpretation.” See
Rebecca Kukla, “How to Get an Interpretivist Committed,” Protosociology 14 (2000): 180–221,
for an extended argument that assertions are an insufficient basis for Davidsonian interpreta-
tion, and that Davidson needs to acknowledge a wider array of types of speech acts and varie-
ties of performative force from the start.
17. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1975). H. P. Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1967). Continental philosophers of language have shown less temptation to commit the declar-
ative fallacy. Authors such as Heidegger, Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Judith
Butler (who is American but in conversation with Continental texts) have given extended ac-
counts of language that begin elsewhere than with its declaratival functioning. See Heidegger,
Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Jacques Derrida, Limited
Inc, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, S
1988); Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Althusser, Lenin and
Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the R
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Nuel Belnap accused traditional philosophical semantics of commit-

ting the “declarative fallacy” insofar as it presumed that semantic con-
tent in general could be understood entirely in terms of declaratival con-
tent.18 We wish to adopt this term and broaden it beyond its original
semantic application, to encompass any philosophy of language, includ-
ing a pragmatic account, which takes the declarative as the privileged
and paradigmatic speech act. R. M. Hare identified something very close
to the declarative fallacy when he talked about the widespread feeling,
among philosophers, that the declarative (or indicative) “is somehow
above suspicion in a way that other sorts of sentence are not; and that
therefore, in order to put these other sorts of sentence above suspicion,
it is necessary to show that they are really indicatives.”19 In almost every
part of this book we will show how the declarative fallacy has distorted
understanding and clouded philosophical vision. Indeed, as we see it,
much of the potential explanatory benefit of the so-called linguistic turn
in philosophy—which was purportedly the turn to approaching classic
problems in metaphysics and epistemology by way of an analysis of
language20—has been thwarted by a pervasive assumption that the struc-
ture of declarative assertions is the privileged or sole dimension of lan-
guage to which we should attend in order to illuminate key questions in
metaphysics and epistemology. Or as Brandom baldly puts the commit-
ment, “Asserting is the fundamental speech act.”21
Of course it is contentious of Belnap, and of us, to speak of a fallacy
here. It isn’t that Brandom and others fail to notice the existence of im-
peratives, interrogatives, etc., but that they feel confident that these will
Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech
and Language in Psychoanalysis” and “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Rea-
son Since Freud,” in Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2004). Heidegger (for
instance in Being and Time, Division 1, chaps. 5 and 6) and Derrida (in Limited Inc in particu-
lar) launch explicit and rigorous attacks on the shortsightedness of and the philosophical dam-
age done by the declarative fallacy. Derrida’s subversive reading of Searle and Austin in Limited
Inc is especially amusing and perceptive.
18. Nuel Belnap, “Declaratives Are Not Enough,” Philosophical Studies 59 (1990): 1–30.
19. R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 8. J. O.
Urmson also pointed out the overemphasis on fact-stating language in analytic philosophy of
language in his Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956).
20. See, for instance, Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method S
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
21. Making It Explicit, 173. R
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12 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
fall into (their secondary) place once the account of declaratives is com-
pleted. But it is just this confidence that we, like Belnap, find philosophi-
cally reckless. Not only do we agree with Belnap that there are important
semantic phenomena that cannot be accounted for in terms of declara-
tival content, but we argue in what follows that there are deep metaphys-
ical and epistemological issues that are left mysterious on a pragmatist
account precisely because of the initial neglect of the full range of prag-
matic possibilities.
Thus, to recap, in the case of philosophical pragmatics, the very cate-
gorization of speech acts—paradigmatically in terms of performative
force—is motivated by philosophical starting points that we do not
share, and functions to preclude from the outset the sorts of explana-
tions of broader philosophical issues that we purport to provide. In the
case of Pittsburgh School Pragmatism, we find the apparent disconnect
between social pragmatist philosophy of mind and actual practical dis-
cursive phenomena troubling. We embrace pragmatist methodology not
because of a bevy of concrete arguments against competitors, but be-
cause of the elegance and power of the explanations one can muster
for a range of phenomena once one has, as a backdrop, an appropri-
ately spelled out account of the pragmatic structure of discursive perfor-
mances. In this, our work will “feel” far more akin to that of Brandom
than to that of Searle. But for all that, we believe that Brandomian social
pragmatism has been led seriously astray by a failure to begin by map-
ping the whole pragmatic topography of discourse.
1.2 Two Distinctions among Normative Statuses

In this book we loosely follow Brandom in understanding speech acts as
performances constitutive of changes in normative status among various
members of a discursive community. Thus, for instance, to assert that P
involves undertaking a commitment to P, taking up the role of one at
whom challenges of P may be directed, etc. To order someone to see to it
that P, by contrast, involves undertaking to incur upon her a prima facie
obligation to see to it that P. Further, the performance of any speech act
is the sort of thing one can be entitled to, or not. And so on.
All speech acts, we claim, strive to bring about certain normative
changes: for example, assertions strive to impart beliefs and grant in- S
ference licenses, orders strive to impute responsibilities for action, and R
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so forth. As already mentioned, we are not committing ourselves, here,

to any thesis about the systematic relationship between semantics and
pragmatics. Rather, what we want to adopt from this strand of thought is
the insight that speech acts can be productively analyzed in terms of the
normative statuses that enable them and the normative changes they ef-
fect through their performative structure.
Our primary conceptual tool in this work is a categorization of speech
acts insofar as they have a particular kind of functional design qua lin-
guistic performance within a discursive community. When we identify
types or dimensions of speech acts, we will be doing so by way of differ-
ences and similarities between such normative functions. For this rea-
son, we stipulate that our names for different types of speech acts—
declaratives, imperatives, interrogatives, and several other “ives” that we
will introduce along the way—demarcate pragmatic functional catego-
ries. When we speak of imperatives, for instance, we are directly speak-
ing of a pragmatic category of speech acts that strive to serve a particular
normative function within a discursive practice. It is usually, though not
always, the case that sentences in the imperatival mood are used to issue
imperatives, and vice versa. Typical sentences marked by linguists as im-
peratives—e.g., “Mark, revise this example!”—are such that, in typical
circumstances, their production amounts to the performance of an im-
perative. But there is no one-to-one correspondence between norma-
tive pragmatic structures of acts and grammatical forms of English. The
utterance “It’s cold in here” can function (at least) as an imperative or a
declarative, depending on context. By stipulation we insist that what
makes a speech act an imperative is its discursive function, rather than
its syntactic structure.
The function of a speech act should not be confused with either the
intention of the speaker in uttering it or the standard use of that string of
words in the community. Of course, it would be absurd to think that
there could be a whole system of discourse that had a normative struc-
ture completely divorced from either speakers’ intentions or conven-
tional uses; there has to be at least a defeasible concordance between
function, intention, and standard use, and it is patterns of intention and
use that serve to institute the contentful pragmatic structure of a lan-
guage in the first place. But, just as there are philosophers who wish to
reduce semantics to intentions or to conventional use and other philoso- S
phers who resist them, we recognize the possibility of philosophical at- R
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14 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tempts to reduce pragmatic function to intention or convention, and we

reject them. Along the way, we will have occasion to give examples of
speech acts that manifest a disconnect between actual pragmatic struc-
ture and intended or conventional effect. For now, we just want to make
clear that we reject any analytic identities between function, intention,
and convention, even while acknowledging that there is a constitutive,
defeasible connection between these things.22
Now once we understand speech acts in functional terms, it makes
sense to think of them, like any functions, as having inputs and outputs.
(Indeed, given the long tradition of thinking of discursive judgments as
functions that traces back to Kant, it is remarkable that no one has previ-
ously tried to carefully articulate the inputs and outputs of such func-
tions.) If speech acts function to bring about changes in normative sta-
tus, then they take normative statuses as inputs and produce them as
outputs. Specifically, we can distinguish between the norms governing
the proper production of a speech act, which give rise to statuses that
entitle its performance, and the changes in normative status that their
proper production strives to make. For instance, on the input end, asser-
tions are properly performed if they are, or can be, doxastically justified.
Orders, on the other hand, are properly performed only if the speaker
occupies the relevant sort of authoritative social position with respect to
the person(s) to whom the order is issued. On the output end, the pro-
duction of an entitled assertion is inferentially fecund; it entitles its
speaker and others to draw conclusions from the claim asserted. In the
case of an order, its proper production has normative effects such as a
prima facie responsibility, on the part of the one ordered, to carry out the
order.
So, for example, consider the case of an imperatival speech act,
22. In many places throughout this book we mention, and leave to one side, ideas that rely
on a notion of defeasibility. We say that various defeasible connections must exist, though the
corresponding universal connection does not. While we quite consciously leave the deep issues
regarding how to understand defeasibility for another time, we do not doubt that aspects of our
account depend upon how one understands this important notion. See Mark Norris Lance and
Margaret O. Little, “Defeasibility and the Normative Significance of Context,” Erkenntnis 61
(2004): 435–455; Lance and Little, “Defending Moral Particularism,” in James Dreier, ed., De-
bates in Moral Theory (London: Blackwell, 2005), 305–321; Lance and Little, “From Particu-
larism to Defeasibility,” in Mark Lance, Matjaz Portc, and Vojko Strahovnik, eds., Challenging
Moral Particularism (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Lance and Little, “Where the Laws Are,” S
in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007). R
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whereby Rebecca orders, “Mark, revise this example!” The normative

input here is Rebecca’s entitlement to issue this imperative, something
she has in virtue of facts such as that she and Mark are writing a book to-
gether, have agreed to collaborate in certain ways, etc. The primary out-
put, or the primary normative status resulting from the input, is a nor-
mative burden upon Mark to revise the example (or to defend his refusal
to do so). It is essential to the imperative being the sort of speech act that
it is that this kind of output follows from this kind of input—that Mark’s
obligation be consequent upon Rebecca’s entitlement.
Now consider a declaratival speech act. Sarah says, “Bakhtin is the
most important literary theorist of the twentieth century.” The input
here is Sarah’s entitlement to utter this declarative, which she has—if
she does have it—by way of her warrant for being committed to the con-
tent. What her declaration aims to do is to entitle beliefs, inferences, and
reassertions for both Sarah and others, and this is its output.23 Finally,
consider an Austinian example: the preacher pronounces a couple mar-
ried. Here the input is the preacher’s entitlement to marry people, in vir-
tue of her particular status in the community, the circumstances of the
event, etc., whereas the output is the normative status provided by the
marriage itself.
Throughout this book we make heavy use of this distinction between
input and output—that is, between the normative statuses constitutive of
entitlement to a given speech act and the normative changes (in the status of
the speaker, or of others in the discursive community) that the act strives to
produce.
Notice that what a speech act strives to accomplish, as part of its nor-
mative function, is not the same as what it does accomplish. Sarah’s as-
sertion that Bakhtin is the most important literary theorist of the twenti-
eth century may strive to impart beliefs or pass on inference licenses to
others, but it may fail to do so if Sarah is not heard, believed, or under-
stood. The department chair’s order that everyone in the department
sign up for service on a university committee may fail if the department
members do not acknowledge his authority to so order. To impute such
a notion of ‘striving’ to speech acts is not to attribute any kind of spooky
23. This is its output qua declarative. Sarah may also seek, with this speech act, to annoy
one of her poststructuralist colleagues, to help establish her status in the field, to baffle her S
mother, etc. The existence of multiple layers of normativity and function governing discourse
does not undermine our ability to distinguish between and isolate these layers. R
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16 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
agency to them, nor to plump for any particular metaphysics of striving,

but merely to play off of their having a functional structure in the first
place: anything—a machine, a policy, an action, a vital organ—that has a
function may be said to strive, by design, to fulfill this function. Like-
wise it might fail to perfectly fulfill what it strives to fulfill, and thereby
count as defective to that extent. (Whether such strivings can be ‘natural-
ized’, or fully explained in non-teleological language, is a question that
does not interest us here.)24
Crucially, then, the output of a speech act is the normative statuses the
speech act strives, as part of its function, to bring about—not what it ac-
tually manages to bring about. Meanwhile, the input is what would enti-
tle the performance of a speech act, if it were entitled, which of course it
may not be. Hence inputs and outputs are themselves normatively defined.
Our first key distinction among normative statuses—that between in-

puts and outputs—falls fairly automatically out of our casting of speech
acts in functional terms. Our second distinction regarding discursive
performances draws on a conceptual distinction and bit of terminology
that we borrow from moral philosophy. In that context, it is common to
distinguish between “agent-relative” and “agent-neutral” reasons—that
is, between reasons whose force is indexed to particular agents with par-
ticular positions in normative space, and reasons that are not targeted at
anyone in particular in this way. But although this language has up until
now had philosophical life primarily within ethics, it does not seem to
us that there is anything about this abstract distinction that should make
it specific to the moral domain. So, for example, if there is a clear enough
distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative moral entitlements
and obligations, we might well wonder whether there is a distinction be-
tween agent-neutral and agent-relative discursive or epistemic entitle-
ments and obligations. We believe that there is such a distinction. Once
we identify speech acts as functions on normative statuses, we can de-
scribe either the input or the output of these functions as agent-relative
or agent-neutral.
In general, when considering a normative status such as an entitle-
24. But for those who are interested, see Richard Manning, “Biological Function, Selection,
and Reduction,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48 (1997): 69–82, for a compelling
argument that they cannot be. S
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ment or a commitment, we can ask whether it is in virtue of its pragmatic

structure (as opposed to in virtue of its content, for instance) indexed to
specific people inhabiting specific normative positions, or whether it is
‘for everyone’, that is, structurally blind to distinctions among agents.
This distinction will need a lot of clarification, but in rough terms, the
distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral normative statuses
is one between those that by their very structure are ‘personalized’, and
those that are ‘structurally public’—that is, inherently available to who-
ever is perceptive or lucky or interested enough to be in a position to oc-
cupy them. A pretty reliable ordinary-language test of agent-neutrality is
whether the normative status can be ascribed to a generalized “we,” as in
“we know that P,” or “we ought to treat one another with respect”—or as
Heidegger would say, to Das Man.
Agent-neutral commitments and entitlements need not be universally
held; indeed it is almost never the case that everyone is in a position to
take up every commitment and entitlement that she or he could or
should take up in ideal circumstances. An agent-neutral reason will not
grip everyone. But we can say that agent-neutral normative statuses are
universal as a regulative ideal. It is only through ignorance or other de-
fect—albeit, perhaps, a completely routine and exculpable defect—that
anyone fails to have an agent-neutral normative status, since there is
nothing about this status that is specific to anyone in particular.
So far, this is highly abstract. To concretize and clarify, consider the
difference between the imperative, “Drop and give me ten push-ups!”
and the declarative, “Paris is the capital of France.” It is in virtue of one’s
position within a structure of authority (as a teacher or foreman or colo-
nel, say) that she is entitled to issue the imperative. In its normative
pragmatic structure, the legitimacy it has is personal; it is the colonel who
is entitled to give the order to the lieutenant. And while there may be
lots of colonels, the entitlement is still inherently colonel-entitlement.
Nothing about this entitlement even suggests a similar entitlement on
the part of a private to issue the order to a lieutenant. Hence this entitle-
ment is agent-relative. The declarative, on the other hand, has an agent-
neutral input—in virtue of the objective purport of the sentence, it is
a speech act that finds grounding in the world in a way that is not spe-
cific to who is asserting it. In rough and ready terms, the input is agent-
neutral in the sense that what entitles it is “true for everyone”; it is im- S
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18 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
personally available, even if (though) not everyone will be in a position

to take advantage of this availability, because of ignorance, conflicting
false beliefs, inferential ineptitude, and the like.
Our imperative also has an agent-relative output: it changes the nor-
mative status of those people to whom the order is directed. The imperative
targets a specific, personalized audience. In reality, it may be that not ev-
eryone at whom the order is directed obeys it, or that some passerby
‘obeys’ the order inappropriately for fun, or because she misunderstood
it as aimed at her. But regardless of how smoothly the concrete norma-
tive uptake of the order goes, it is part of the functional design of the
speech act that it target specific people upon whom it makes a norma-
tive claim. There is always someone (or several someones) at whom the
speaker is directing her order; the order has no ordering force whatsoever
when it comes to those who are not targeted by it, even if they happen to
overhear it, and—interestingly—even if they agree that the order was
perfectly legitimate.
In contrast, our declarative has an agent-neutral output: the assertion
“Paris is the capital of France” seeks to impute the entitlement to assert
this claim to the discursive community in general, and demands that
others allow its content to constrain their inferences and beliefs. Regard-
less of who concretely hears it, believes it, or takes it up (which will typi-
cally be less than everyone), the pragmatic normative purport of the ut-
terance does not in any way personalize its effects or demands. We
recognize that this last claim is complex, and we will be expanding upon
and defending it at length below.
1.3 A Typology of Speech Acts

At this point, we have drawn two distinctions among normative sta-
tuses—between inputs and outputs, and between agent-relative and
agent-neutral statuses—and thus we have the resources to categorize
speech acts according to a two-by-two grid, as shown in Figure 1.
Thus the colonel’s imperative, “Drop and give me ten push-ups!” be-
longs in box 4 of the grid, as it has both an agent-relative input and
an agent-relative output. And the declarative, “Paris is the capital of
France,” belongs in box 1, as it has both an agent-neutral input and an
agent-neutral output. Indeed, we argue that imperatives always belong S
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in box 4, and that declaratives, properly understood and restricted, al-

ways belong in box 1 (keeping in mind that for us these mark out prag-
matic rather than grammatical categories).
The case of imperatives seems uncontentious: they are speech acts
that are entitled by specific facts about a speaker’s normative position
and relationship to the target of the imperative, and they serve to make a
demand upon the specific person or persons at whom they are targeted.
Hence they always belong in box 4. On the other hand, not all box-4
speech acts are imperatives. When we make a claim based in our partic-
ular normative position, upon another person insofar as she occupies a
Input
Agent-neutral Agent-relative
Output
1 2
Neutral input Relative input
Agent-neutral
Neutral output Neutral output
3 4
Agent-relative
Relative output Relative output
Figure 1 S
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20 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
particular normative position, we perform a box-4 speech act. One way

to do this is to issue an order, using an imperative. But we can also im-
plore, apologize, promise, invite, and reproach, all of which are box-4
speech acts.
Insofar as a declarative makes a claim about a public, democratically
accessible truth, seeking thereby to make an entitlement to reassertion
and inference generally available for public use, it will belong in box 1.
Most of the everyday speech acts with a declarative surface grammar—
“Cats like to sleep on mats,” “There are no analytic a posteriori truths,”
etc.—function as box-1 declaratives in this sense. However, we will ar-
gue that not all truth-claims belong in box 1, and also (again) that sur-
face grammar can never be a perfect indicator or guarantor of prag-
matic structure (including location on the grid). We will reserve the
term ‘declarative’ for sentences that have this thoroughly agent-neutral
structure. Thus it is in effect an analytic truth, within our system, that
declaratives belong in box 1—albeit an analytic truth that has its genesis
in a substantive insight about the functioning of a broad class of speech
acts. At the same time, it is not an analytic truth that all box-1 speech
acts are declaratives. In Chapters 5 and 8, we tentatively suggest an al-
ternative type of box-1 speech act. In general, each box will be inhabited
by a variety of types of speech act.
Although the examples we have given so far might suggest as much,
we cannot in general assume that agent-relative outputs are require-
ments to act whereas agent-neutral outputs express general truths. The
output of a speech act, for our purposes, is neither an act nor a truth, but
a set of normative statuses. What makes the output of a speech act
agent-neutral is that it applies, de jure, to everyone, in a way that is not
indexed to particular features of anyone’s normative position. The right
to assert a truth is just one such change, with no special pragmatic privi-
lege at this level of analysis. So, consider a marriage ceremony: part of
the very structure of the act conferring the status of marriage is that
what is conferred is a status that demands universal recognition—now
we must treat you as married, not (primarily) in the sense of asserting
that it is the case, but in the sense of acting as if the status obtains
(for purposes of taxes, dinner invitations, deathbed privileges, and the
like). It is in fact insulting to take a marriage ceremony as having only
agent-relative rather than agent-neutral significance. In normal, well- S
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functioning cases, then, the speech acts that constitute a marriage have
some agent-neutral outputs (in addition to the blatantly agent-relative
outputs that they have for the new spouses).25
On the other hand, the normative status of entitlement to a truth-
claim is always agent-neutral.26 We will come back to this important fact
at length below. For now, note that the shared and public character of
truths—the fact that they are democratically available and hold in a way
that is essentially not conditioned by our personal normative relation-
ship to them—is part of what we mean by calling them truths. Missing
this point is what is wrong with the undergraduate’s chant that some-
thing is “true for you, but not for me.” While we all are in different posi-
tions of epistemic access to the truth, a truth-claim, by its very structure,
is not a claim for me or for you but for all of us. As Lynn Hankinson Nel-
son puts it, “I can only know what we know.”27
We do not mean to suggest that discursive performances will always
exhibit only one normative transitional structure. Indeed, were we to be
maximally precise, we would continually insist that our grid provides
a system for categorizing normative functions that speech acts instan-
tiate—always recognizing that any actual utterance will perform multi-
ple functions—rather than a system for categorizing utterances. In later
chapters we argue that speech acts necessarily incarnate multiple func-
tions that belong in different boxes. Although for pedagogical reasons
we tend to focus, in the beginning, on speech acts insofar as they cen-
trally exemplify one or another of the normative patterns, this is a delib-
erate oversimplification. Not only do speech acts incarnate multiple
functions, but further, once one has a range of acts instituted within a
25. Given its insufficient clarity in drawing this distinction, together with its tendency to
run together issues of the normative source of entitlement with features of the nature of that
entitlement, the discussion of these matters in chapter 3 of The Grammar of Meaning by Mark
Norris Lance and John O’Leary-Hawthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
should be seen merely as a suggestive precursor of the typology presented here. Not only is that
account radically incomplete, at least one of its authors now considers it confused in important
respects.
26. Some sentences that make truth-claims can only coherently be uttered by specific peo-
ple, such as the sentence “I am the father of Emma.” But “I am the father of Emma,” spoken by
Mark, declares exactly the same truth-claim as “Mark is the father of Emma,” spoken by any-
one else. Hence the entitlement to the truth-claim is agent-neutral. See Chapter 2, section 4.
27. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows? From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1992). S
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22 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
discursive community, one will be able to combine them in complex

ways. A declarative may also be an imperative (“It’s still cold in here!”).
When we call it a declarative, we are focusing on a particular normative
function that it serves—specifically one that takes an agent-neutral in-
put and yields an agent-neutral output, by stating a public truth. When
we call it an imperative, we are focusing on its function as an order to do
something about the temperature, targeted at a specific person from
someone in a specific position of authority.
We leave this section, then, having provisionally offered examples of
types, or dimensions, of speech acts that fit into two of our four boxes,
as shown in Figure 2.
Input
Output
1 2
Agent-neutral Neutral output Neutral output
Declaratives
3 4
Agent-relative Imperatives
(promises,
invitations,
reproaches...)
S
Figure 2 R
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1.4 More about Agent-Relativity and Agent-Neutrality

The notions of agent-neutrality and agent-relativity we employ here are
complex and utterly essential to our project, so it is worth spending time
clarifying and exploring them.
The distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality is not
simply one of extensional scope. An agent-relative output, for example,
could apply de facto to everyone. This might be because of its semantic
structure (“Everyone raise your right hand”) or because of empirical
facts that determine its extension (“Those of you under nine feet tall,
wear this badge”). The output of these orders is agent-relative, even
though they in fact target everyone. The universality of their target is in
neither case a function of their pragmatic structure.
By the same token, we have not defined agent-neutrality in such a way
that every being on the planet, or every Kantian agent, must be con-
tained in the scope of an agent-neutral status. We have left open the size
of ‘the’ discursive community, as well as its boundaries and its ontol-
ogy, although we take up these issues in detail in Chapter 8. We have
said nothing so far that determines whether ‘the’ discursive community,
which provides the ‘we’ across which discursive functions may range, is
singular or whether there might be different discursive communities in
different contexts, bounded by lines of nation, language, expertise, or
whatever else. If discursive communities are multiple, then someone
outside the scope of the community to which a speech act is referenced
is not part its functional universe of discourse.
We can draw a distinction between two species of agent-relative nor-
mative statuses. On the one hand, there are “kind-relative” statuses.
These are statuses that apply to people in virtue of their membership in
some general kind. On the input end, these are kind-relative entitle-
ments: all colonels have certain entitlements to issue orders to privates;
Martha’s entitlement to officiate at marriage ceremonies issues from her
status as a justice of the peace in a particular jurisdiction; and so forth.
On the output end, these are kind-relative claims: a community might
prohibit all felons from voting, or call upon all civilians to evacuate an
area in the path of a hurricane. In each of these cases, the normative en-
titlement or claim attaches to the kind or property. If a law is passed that
prohibits convicted felons from voting, this is an act that has, as an out- S
put consequence, an imposition of a prohibition on members of a kind. R
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24 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
By contrast, some normative statuses are “agent-specific.” Such sta-

tuses apply to a particular agent (or some particular agents) in light of
concrete, particularized facts about her normative position, and have no
implications even in the ideal for others. When Martha pronounces Bob
and Jerry married, her entitlement to do so is agent-relative and kind-
relative, but Bob and Jerry’s new status as married is agent-relative and
agent-specific: the ceremony alters the normative statuses of Bob and
Jerry, qua concrete individuals, rather than qua fungible instances of a
larger category. If Mark promises Rebecca that he will revise their paper,
this generates an entitlement on the part of Rebecca to expect him to re-
vise the paper and a commitment on the part of Mark to do so. More
generally, promising is an act that creates agent-specific obligations on
the part of the promiser. There is no impetus in the pragmatic structure
of promising that this normative status be inheritable by others in virtue
of their sharing properties or kind memberships with the promiser.
Agent-specific normative statuses need not be singular; they can be
held by several concrete, particular people. (In the next chapter, we will
see examples of statuses that must be singular.) I may make a promise to
more than one person with a single speech act, for instance, in which
case each of them will have a special claim on me.28 But since the differ-
ence between agent-specific and kind-relative statuses does not concern
the number of people with the status, we must have some other means
for telling the two types of status apart. Notice that kind-relative sta-
tuses have counterfactual import. If one passes a law that forbids fel-
ons to vote, it applies to all felons, and if additional felons were to exist,
it would apply to them as well. Kind-relative statuses do not distin-
guish between actual and possible instances of the kind. Agent-specific
statuses are different. One cannot make a promise to merely possible
agents. One can use a kind externally to designate the range of people to
which a promise applies—“Attention citizens of Gotham: I promise to
rid your city of masked super-villains!”—but this is a promise to the ac-
tual people of Gotham. This restriction to actual rather than counterfac-
tual marks a normative transaction as agent-specific rather than kind-
relative.
Agent-neutrality raises its own specter of especially tricky issues and
28. Though this book is a collaborative work, and though we undertake joint commitment S
to all the claims made throughout, the nature of much of what we discuss requires the use of
the first-person singular. We trust that our shifts in this regard will not lead to confusion. R
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possible misunderstandings. To begin with, when we say that the input

of a declarative is agent-neutral, the point is that there is nothing about
the entitlement to a declarative speech act that structurally indexes that
entitlement to any particular agent or agents with specific normative po-
sitions. Rather, what entitles a declarative speech act is the character of
our shared, public world.29 Now in fact, it will rarely, if ever, be the case
that everyone has an entitlement to perform a declarative. Contingencies
of expertise, location, access to testimony, etc., will determine who can
actually take up an agent-neutral entitlement and properly utter a de-
clarative. If Jones justifiably declares, “Mitosis is a form of reproduc-
tion,” then Smith might still not be in a position to declare this—either
in virtue of having committed himself to the Stork Theory of Reproduc-
tion, or because of simple ignorance of this fact.
Indeed, surely there are properly performed declaratives that express
knowledge that only a few people, or maybe even only one person, have
the epistemic skills to discern. A particularly gifted physician, for in-
stance, might be able to diagnose a rare disorder on the basis of an exam-
ination, and might be genuinely warranted in declaring that a patient
suffers from this disorder. This might be so even though no one else
would be entitled to make this declaration, even with access to the very
same facts and sensory inputs. And yet, we want to claim, the input enti-
tlement in these cases remains agent-neutral, because it purports to ex-
press entitlement to facts that are public and in no way agent-specific,
even if the epistemic conditions that allow these facts to be used to war-
rant claims are themselves agent-specific.30 That is, the agent-neutrality
or agent-relativity of an input is based on the nature of the entitlement
itself, wherever it came from.31
29. Does this mean that we cannot declare anything about ‘private’ entities such as mental
states? We accept a basically Wittgensteinian line here. We think that we do, in fact, have ac-
cess to one another’s mental states. We can see and know that other people have various emo-
tions, beliefs, etc. To the extent that there is some truly private element to our mental life—if
such an idea is coherent—that would be just the kind of thing that we could not talk about in
language. As we progress through this book, it will become clearer why such Wittgensteinian
sympathies are required and justified by our project.
30. Most people—though not all!—are particularly gifted at discerning their own mental
states. But this does not mean that what is true about a person’s mental states for that person is
not true about that person for someone else.
31. Thus, our distinction does not align with Dummett’s distinction between the criteria S
and consequences of application, discussed, among many other places, in his Frege: Philosophy
of Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). R
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26 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Furthermore, along with the agent-neutrality of the inputs, in such

cases, goes the universality of these inputs as a regulative ideal. That is to
say, to the extent that someone does not have access to an agent-neutral
entitlement, he is defective, albeit perhaps in an extremely common and
blameless way. If everyone had all the epistemic skills and evidence
available to them that anyone had (as well as the same antecedent com-
mitments, biases, level of effort, etc.), then everyone would be entitled
to utter the same declaratives as everyone else (subject to some interest-
ing qualifications and precisifications we discuss below). There is noth-
ing about the entitlement that indexes it to any particular kind of agent.
This is not true of imperatives, which have agent-relative inputs. It is in
no sense a defect in a concert pianist, for instance, that she is not also a
colonel, and hence not entitled to issue certain sorts of imperatives to
privates that colonels are entitled to issue.
Analogous points can be made about declaratives on the output end.
When one puts forward a claim as a declarative—as a claim about the
way things objectively are—one professes that the claim is true, not sim-
ply “true for me,” or some such. In Brandomian lingo, Jones’s entitled
declaration, “Mitosis is a form of reproduction,” issues reassertion and
inference licenses that are not indexed to any specific agent or kind of
agents. The output of her declaration is agent-neutral, in the sense that
nothing about Jones’s speech act, insofar as it is serving a declarative
function, targets any particular kind of agent.
Brandom would say that it issues such licenses universally, but this
language is quite misleading. Because of ignorance of Jones’s claim, ig-
norance of enough about Jones to make trust in her word rational, in-
compatible beliefs, or any of a number of other reasons, many people—
most people—are not suddenly entitled to reassert Jones’s claim and use
it in inference just in virtue of her having made it. Thus the issuing of a
“universal” reassertion license cannot mean that everyone will be in a
position to make use of it. Rather, the actual agent-neutrality of the out-
put goes along with its universality as a regulative ideal. It is, as it were, a
claim for everyone, which strives to contribute to the bank of public
knowledge shared by the discursive community. There is a practical
point to uttering a declarative, qua declarative, as long as there is anyone
left who has not yet taken up the agent-neutral entitlement it offers.
Again, the contrast with imperatives is instructive. When the colonel is- S
sues an order to the private, her order is specifically targeted at that per- R
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son. Others are not bound by it, not because her order was defective, or
because they are defective in the uptake of the act, but because they were
not its structural targets, even in the ideal.
Notice that in ordinary language we speak both of what ‘is known’, or
what ‘we know’, as well as of what Jones knows or what I know. That is,
when keeping track of what we know, we seem to keep two sets of
books, as it were: those governing particular people, and those agent-
neutral facts about what is known. There is an important sense in which
once Daniel Mazia discovered that mitosis is a form of reproduction, or
once our skillful doctor discovered that Mr. Brown had rare disease x, it
became true that we know these facts, even though not everyone in the
community knows them. As a textbook might put it, “We have known
since 1951 that mitosis is a form of reproduction” (a statement most as-
suredly not true of the authors of this book).
Consider a useful analogy for these two sets of books. In typical team
sports, we can look at a goal either from the point of view of its effect on
the score of the game, or in terms of its effect on individual players’ sta-
tistics. In the latter sense, we can intelligibly say that the midfielder
scored a goal in the eighty-ninth minute. In that sense, the accomplish-
ment was agent-relative; it was her goal and not anyone else’s. But in the
former sense, the team scored the goal. In terms of the primary scoring
regime of soccer, it is quite incoherent to attribute a goal to any particu-
lar player. Indeed, the sense in which the goal is the midfielder’s is the
sense in which we give the midfielder some sort of special credit for
bringing it about that the team scored a goal. The midfielder (with or
without help) accomplished or brought about the scoring of a goal-for-
Real-Madrid. The analogous point applies to declarative speech acts.
When a logician proves that R has 3,088 Ackerman constants, she per-
sonally brings it about that we know this, that it is known, and the ac-
complishment has an agent-neutral status. In both cases, an individual
makes a normative achievement for all of us, as a representative, as it
were, of the whole.
Agent-neutral inputs are ideally universal, in the sense that were all
people to live up to all the normative ideals—including all the epistemic
norms—that apply to them, they would all have access to all the agent-
neutral input entitlements. They would be able to know and do every-
thing whose entitlement is not structurally agent-relative. Whereas it is S
a defect in an agent that he fail to be entitled to an agent-neutral entitle- R
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28 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ment, it is a defect in the functioning of a speech act that it fail to impute

its agent-neutral entitlement universally. Normally, both are unremark-
able, thoroughly exculpable defects. A declarative speech act may fall
short of being a successful performance because of problems with the
speaker (not everyone trusts her, or she wasn’t in fact entitled to say
what she said), the audience (some people were not bright enough to get
the point, or have a false belief that is incompatible with her claim), or,
most commonly, the performance itself (not everyone heard it, as is vir-
tually always the case). All or almost all declaratives will be at least
somewhat defective. There is nothing spooky about this virtually uni-
versal defectiveness: no one ever shoots a perfect game of golf either.
There is a trivial sense in which simply not knowing something that is
true is a defect. One is less than omniscient any time one fails to know
something true. And yet, we want to claim that the proper performance
of a declarative, at least the first time it is uttered, turns failure to be enti-
tled to that declarative into a defect in a different and stronger sense. Oth-
erwise, there would be no reason for us to claim that such an entitlement
is part of the agent-neutral output of a declarative speech act, given that
not everyone will be in a position to take up the entitlement. In uttering
a justified declarative, a speaker offers a truth-claim up for public con-
sumption, or adds it to the public bank of knowledge—her claim is now
part of what we know, in the agent-neutral sense we described. An indi-
vidual’s failure to know what her discursive community knows puts her
in a position of discursive deficiency—susceptibility to legitimate cor-
rection by others—that is concretely different from a mere failure of om-
niscience.
While the mere fact that P can never constitute someone’s grounds to
correct your belief that not-P, our agent-neutral entitlement to P always
does.32 Before ‘we’ discovered that there were planets orbiting stars other
32. Often, the one who achieves this agent-neutral status will also achieve personal jus-
tification, but this is not essential. Imagine a scientist asking her diligent but relatively unedu-
cated research assistant to run a test in the lab and to report back to her, telling her ‘A’ if the test
comes out one way and ‘B’ if it comes out another way. After properly running the test, the RA
receives the result that she knows is to be reported as ‘A’, and hence she declares ‘A’ to her su-
pervisor. Now in fact, ‘A’ might be a scientific result that is proven by the test results. Hence we
now know that A. But the research assistant might not understand that ‘A’ describes a truth
proven by the test. (For all she knows, the test just provides incremental evidence that A). S
Hence she would not be justified, personally, in believing what she declares at the time that she
declares it. R
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than our sun, for instance, we were all in some sense defective for not
knowing this fact; however, no one had a proper entitlement to demand
that others believe it. But once ‘we’ discover these planets, anyone who
claims that there are no such planets can properly be corrected. Thus the
proper performance of a declarative has implications for the normative
status of everyone in a discursive community—for example by turning
some epistemic statuses into new sorts of social defects—even though it
is unlikely to fulfill its ideal discursive function of passing on a universal
reassertion and inference license. The achievement of an agent-neutral
entitlement always precludes entitlement by anyone else to any claim in-
compatible with the claim in question: once we discover planets orbiting
other stars, it can never be the case that anyone can be properly entitled
to the belief that there are no such planets (although, given incomplete
knowledge, someone may still have good reasons for such a belief).
To summarize: in the case of a declarative, the entitlement that fol-
lows from its performance is the agent-neutral entitlement “our know-
ing that P.” An immediate normative upshot of this idea is that the
achievement of the entitlement constitutes anyone’s failure to know as a
socially significant sort of defect—ignorance or unjustified incompatible
belief. On the other hand, no such agent-neutrality is built into an im-
perative, such as the colonel’s imperative “Raise your hand when your
name is called.” Nothing in the structure of the colonel’s entitlement to
issue this order suggests that everyone ought to be able to issue this or-
der, or that everyone ought to respond to the order, even in the ideal. It
is no defect, no matter how exculpable, not to follow the colonel’s order,
if you are not the one to whom the order was issued.
1.5 Several Caveats

Speech acts are embedded and embroiled within the elaborate normative
structure of human practices, and as such, it is often tricky to focus our
attention on a single dimension of their discursive normative structure.
Here are some warnings concerning how our attention can be led astray.
The function of a speech act insofar as it transforms discursive nor-
mative statuses needs to be distinguished from the various other nor-
mative functions and effects it might have. Just as a football player
can perform actions that uphold or violate the rules of football reason- S
ably independently from whether those same actions uphold or violate R
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30 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
norms of etiquette, morality, aesthetics, or good grammar, the norms

governing communication are multilayered and not all of them spe-
cifically concern discursive pragmatics. An order may be designed not
only to impute an obligation but also to insult, praise, humiliate, re-
mind, collude, display power, etc., and it has such normative effects
within a whole network of norms that are not particularly discursive—
norms of etiquette, institutional structure, morality, and so on. Some-
one who interrupts a mathematics colloquium to snidely interject a
counterexample is violating norms, but not necessarily mathematical
norms. Someone who makes a dumb point in a meeting is violating
norms of rationality, but not necessarily Robert’s Rules of Order. The
norms of keeping secrets, being polite, sticking to parliamentary meet-
ing or debating rules, etc., are all norms governing discourse that are
independent from the layer of narrowly discursive normative function-
ing that we are isolating here. An order may fulfill its pragmatic dis-
cursive function perfectly while violating a myriad of other kinds of
norms (including, perhaps, other narrowly linguistic norms: “You give
that book to her and I right now!”). But we can still isolate (or do a rea-
sonably good job of isolating) its pragmatic discursive function and its
place in a network of discursive norms.33 It is perhaps impossible—and
certainly beyond our capacity—to offer a clean definition demarcating
which parts of the normative structure of a speech act properly belong to
its discursive functional structure. However, we hope that the notion has
intuitive appeal and will become clearer as we progress.
Not only do we need to separate the norms governing the pragmatic
discursive function of a speech act from the other norms that govern it,
but we must also differentiate between the accidental, circumstantial ef-
fects of a speech act and those that are essential to its proper function-
ing. In the domain of semantics, at least some mild form of meaning ho-
33. This is not to say that such discursive norms and other social norms governing lan-
guage won’t have a complex, mutually constitutive, intertwined relationship to one another.
For instance, that a speech act occurs in the context of a meeting governed by Robert’s Rules
might well have everything to do with the proper reading of its pragmatic structure and func-
tioning as a speech act. Speech acts performed by the chair, for instance, are likely to have a dif-
ferent performative structure and force from behaviorally similar acts by the other meeting at-
tendees, or from those by the person who comes in during the meeting to refill the coffee urn.
That the functioning of a speech act within Robert’s Rules helps constitute its functioning S
within discursive communication proper does not mean that there is no distinction between
these. R
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lism is accepted by the majority of philosophers; most would admit that

the contours of the meaning of a sentence or concept are in some sense
shaped by or subject to an elaborate and extensive network of semantic
relationships. At the same time, only the most harebrained holistic ex-
tremist believes that every one of the meanings in this extended net-
work is relevantly part of the meaning of any one term.34 We acknowl-
edge that our beliefs about evolution, pet shop ethics, carrots, and good-
luck charms are, in some sense, relevant to the contours of the mean-
ing of ‘rabbit’, but at the same time we are (most of us) comfortable
saying that nothing about pet shop ethics or good-luck charms is inte-
grally part of what we mean when we talk about rabbits. In these post-
Wittgensteinian days, it would be foolish to think that we could draw a
hard and fast line of this sort or specify in advance a litmus test for some-
thing’s being integral to a meaning, but we negotiate the distinction
mostly without difficulty all the same.
In just the same way, we need to hold on to an intuitive, reasonably
robust, yet not fully specifiable distinction between the normative ef-
fects that are integral to a given pragmatic structure and those that are its
external normative fallout, as it were. When Rebecca orders Mark to re-
vise his example, many changes in normative status occur: Maggie, who
overheard the comment, now believes that Mark will change his exam-
ple; Karen, who also overheard, now is entitled to order both Rebecca
and Mark to close the door to keep the noise down; Mark, who is tired
of Rebecca criticizing his examples, now feels slighted and irritated;
Rebecca is now entitled to believe that she will find the example in its
final form more compelling than it is in its current form; and so forth.
But the change in normative status that Mark undergoes—namely, his
new prima facie responsibility to revise the example—is integral to the
imperatival structure of the original speech act in a way that the rest of
this normative fallout is not. Similarly, any speech act with an agent-
neutral output—one that changes everyone’s status impersonally—will
have all sorts of agent-relative fallout: Rebecca’s claim “Mark’s dog is
hungry,” uttered within earshot of Mark, functions to make an imper-
sonal truth-claim, even though, along the way, it also serves to give Mark
the agent-relative commitment to feed his dog, and so forth. (But here is
34. For one non-harebrained interpretation of holism, see Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne, S
The Grammar of Meaning, chapter 2, which also makes out a normative notion of the analytic/
synthetic distinction that we take to mesh rather nicely with what we say here. R
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32 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
an example of why surface grammar can at best be a guide to pragmatic

structure; Rebecca might utter these very same words for the express
and primary purpose of ordering Mark to feed his dog.)
It is important to keep in mind the distinction between effects that are
essential and those that are accidental to the discursive function of a
speech act, lest every speech act look like just a messy mixture of agent-
neutral and agent-relative inputs and outputs. As this work progresses,
it will become increasingly clear that most and perhaps all speech acts do
have both agent-neutral and agent-relative inputs and outputs, and not
only as a matter of accidental fallout, but essentially as a condition of
their functioning at all. But the terrain of inputs and outputs that any
speech act engages is not a jumble but a prioritized structure.
We have seen that speech acts are embedded within layers of norms of
various sorts, not all of which concern their essential discursive func-
tion. We have also seen that output statuses function as regulative ideals
that a given speech act, qua discursive act, strives to—but may not—
achieve. It follows that we cannot determine the agent-neutrality or
agent-relativity of the output of a speech act by looking at whether it in
fact has the same normative impact on everyone. Indeed, because of the
intersection of competing layers of norms, we cannot even assume that a
speech act with an agent-neutral output ideally or by intention affects ev-
eryone the same way. Consider the analogy of gift giving.35 Suppose that
Mark makes a statue and presents it as a gift. Imagine three different
ways in which he might offer this gift.
• He makes it for his mother, Helen, as a Mother’s Day gift. It is for

her, properly having the agent-relative status of belonging to Helen,
a status it would have even if she died, rejected it, destroyed it, or
in any other way became unable to help realize this constitutive
purpose. In this case Mark’s gift-giving performance has an agent-
relative output.
• He makes a public statue, as a gift to the community. In this case,
the statue is for everyone, in the agent-neutral sense. It will be for
everyone, in this sense, even if not everyone will see it, not every-
one wants it, not everyone even knows that it exists. This gift-
giving performance has an agent-neutral output.
S
35. With thanks to Maggie Little for suggesting the analogy. R
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• He makes a public statue, as a gift to the community. However,

since his work happens to be an aesthetically stunning representa-
tion of a naked homosexual couple, the city decides that it would
not be appropriate to mount the statue on the public square in
front of the local nursing home. Instead it is placed in a park in the
midst of the bohemian district, where conservatives and the elderly
rarely travel. In this case, the gift is still offered to the public and the
act of gift giving still has an agent-neutral output. But there are so-
cial proprieties that determine that the statue will end up in a place
where only some people will be in a position to take advantage of
this gift. The statue belongs to the community, but because of norms
external to those of gift giving, only some members of the commu-
nity will make use of it—and appropriately so.
Likewise, if someone utters a declarative by telling a secret, or in

the context of a closed meeting, this does not detract from the agent-
neutrality of the output of this declarative. Other social norms will gov-
ern who is in a position to hear and use the claim. In that sense, the de-
clarative will fall short of living up to the discursive regulative ideal of
universality, because of the conflict between this ideal and other social
norms. Though only some will receive the claim, nonetheless qua de-
clarative—qua knowledge claim—it is for everyone. Like the statue, it is
public property, even though only some will have practical access to this
property. Though there may be good non-epistemic reasons for those
not in on the secret not to know the truth, they are nonetheless ignorant,
which is an epistemic defect.
It is true that for a secret telling to function as such, it must not fully
succeed in executing its declaratival function. But this should neither be
puzzling nor lead one to doubt that it still has this declaratival function.
Consider an intentional walk in baseball. Here, the pitcher is trying to
pitch balls, so as to, for example, load the bases. But the idea of an inten-
tional walk is essentially derivative on the basic idea of a pitch, the con-
stitutive goal of which is to throw a strike. It would not be a pitch at all
without participating in that goal, and this despite the fact that its deriv-
ative function requires that it partially fail in its more fundamental one.
This same tension between fundamental and derivative structure is op-
erative in such linguistic phenomena as secret telling, sarcasm, rhetori- S
cal questions, etc. There is no conceptual puzzle built into the fact that R
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34 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
acts of speaking are determined by multiple systems of norms, which are

often not fully consistent with one another.
1.6 Entitlement and Epistemic Responsibility

We have argued that any properly performed speech act with an agent-
neutral output transforms anyone’s failure to have access to entitlement
to that output into a kind of a defect. Once it is known that P, then any-
one who doesn’t know P is substantively ignorant, by the standards of
the discursive community, and one who believes not-P is unjustified,
and in a status of disagreeing with something known.
However, as we mentioned, there is an important sense in which the
mere fact that something is the case is sufficient to make failure to know
it—and hence failure to be entitled to declare it—into a defect, namely
the defect of non-omniscience. But this might lead us to wonder: What
difference does it make, normatively speaking, if someone actually per-
forms an observative or a declarative, from the point of view of the nor-
mative status of everyone else? If it was already a defect not to know
something true, how does the fact that this truth has now been declared
make any agent-neutral normative difference? We argued that the decla-
ration puts the claim into social space in a new way. But one might ob-
ject that there could be nothing agent-neutral about this achievement.
Uttering a claim, including a properly entitled one, isn’t going to make
all the ignorant people know it, so the most such an utterance can do is
create some new beliefs in some people, and this effect is a matter of de-
gree. Some declaratives are taken up by nearly everyone, some by a spe-
cial few who are in the know, and some by nobody. Presumably, the
claim expresses something that was already, agent-neutrally true, and
the effect of the claim seems to be to help some people know this truth,
rather than to change everyone’s status agent-neutrally.36
Taking up this important challenge in detail will allow us to explore
some of the contours and complexities of epistemic responsibility. On
the one hand, we are not responsible for knowing everything that is true,
even though we are in some sense defective in virtue of our lack of om-
niscience. None of us can be held accountable for knowing the number
S
36. We are grateful to Richard Manning for raising this worry, in his “Comments on Kukla
and Lance,” presented at Georgetown University, April 2005. R
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of rocks on Neptune or what Julius Caesar had for breakfast the morn-
ing before the Ides of March. Even more strongly, there are many things
that we perfectly well could find out if we wanted to, but in which no one
has a stake, nor any reason why she should have one, and we’re not an-
swerable for these things either. We are not responsible for knowing
how many leaves are on the birch tree behind the old schoolhouse, al-
though we could become responsible for knowing such a thing if it came
to matter for some reason (and one can always dream up such reasons).
In other words, there seems to be a special class of epistemic defects that
matter to us, insofar as we are actually situated within a concrete episte-
mic community, in which members have concrete epistemic positions
and concrete concerns.
While we are not responsible for knowing everything, we are—singly
and collectively—always responsible for knowing more than we actually
do know. The mere fact that we haven’t bothered to notice something or
find something out doesn’t mean that we are not epistemically responsible
for doing so. It is indeed an epistemic failure, on my part, if I don’t notice
that my son is afraid to go to school, and it is a failure on our part, as a
community, that we don’t know how to dose various life-saving drugs
for female patients because we have only tested them on male subjects. I
am also responsible for knowing commonly cited facts, noticing the
brute features of my environment, and drawing straightforward infer-
ences; if I don’t do these things, I am not living up to the epistemic
norms that bind me. Though there is less that plays a role in the space of
reasons than all that is the case, there is nonetheless more than all that
has been recognized or justified. When we are defective in the sense of
failing to live up to our epistemic responsibilities (as we all always are to
some extent), we are defective in a stronger sense than that of mere fail-
ure of omniscience. We have positive duties to observe, investigate, and
think—positive duties that imply that there is such a thing as culpable
epistemic negligence. While you may be afraid to find out what your
child is doing with her evenings, you may nonetheless be responsible for
recognizing the fact that she is a drug addict. Though scientists may not
have bothered to put women in their clinical drug trials, they are none-
theless unjustified in drawing generalizations that fly in the face of the
relevant (unknown) facts about the effects of the drugs on women, be-
cause they are responsible for knowing these facts. Some events in the S
world, given how they are positioned within a social world of epistemic R
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36 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
agents with concerns and stakes in how things are, have the normative
significance of being such that you ought to attend to them.37 So the
boundaries around what we are responsible for knowing carve out an
area larger than the known and smaller than the knowable. How exactly
these boundaries should be drawn depends on an endlessly complex
cocktail of our collective capacities, skills, projects, interests, values, and
environment.
If we did not have epistemic responsibilities to know that could out-
strip our actual knowledge, then the notion of failing in our epistemic
responsibilities would be meaningless, and inquiry would cease to be a
normative activity. There has to be a possible gap between what we are
responsible for knowing and what we know. And if we had epistemic re-
sponsibilities only for drawing inferences from what was already known,
rather than for seeking out and attending to new empirical facts through
skilled observation, then the empirical world would not serve as a tribu-
nal to which we hold ourselves accountable in inquiry. This means not
only that we can exercise our receptive capacities, but that we are under
an epistemic injunction to do so in specific ways.38
Now of course some kinds of epistemic responsibilities are agent-
relative. I am responsible for noticing my son’s fear in a way that you are
not. This is a moral difference between us. But there is also a sense in
which we can talk about agent-neutral epistemic responsibilities. Insofar
as a fact is or should be something that ‘we’ know, to that extent we are all
answerable to it, and we each fail to meet our individual epistemic re-
sponsibilities, however minimally or exculpably, if we don’t know it.
While it may not be morally required that you know about my son’s fear,
if you don’t know about it, you don’t know something that matters. No
one can blame me for not knowing arcane facts about muons published
in specialized physics journals. But clearly this lack of knowledge is an
epistemic defect in me in a way that my lack of knowledge of the num-
ber of rocks on Neptune is not. We know about muons because muons
matter to us, and I know less than is known.
Further, the fact that something is known, while it may not provide a
37. We take our account of normative accountability in this section to be deeply sympa-
thetic with that given, in much more detail, in Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter, from
which we have inherited the language of ‘stakes’ in particular. S
38. Many epistemological theories ignore this requirement, explaining at most why the em- R
pirical beliefs we do have can be justified, but leaving one the option of defending one’s beliefs
by simply locking oneself in a sound- and light-proof room. L
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positive duty for me to find it out, most certainly does provide a positive
prohibition against my denying it. Were I to deny something that is
known, I would be subject to social correction; that is, I would be liable
to being held to the epistemic norms by others in the community. And
even though it is clearly not my personal social responsibility (given my
training and expertise) to find out how heart medication should be
dosed for women, it is our failing, in which I participate, that we don’t
know this. In this broad sense, anything that either is or should be
known by anyone is something that ‘we’ should know, precisely because
of the agent-neutral outputs of our epistemic activities. This is part of
what is special about epistemic responsibilities as opposed to other sorts:
the fact that truth itself is agent-neutral goes tightly hand in hand with
the fact that our narrowly epistemic responsibilities to it are shared.
In light of all this, let us return to the question of the difference that
the performance of declaratives actually makes to the status of other
members of a discursive community. Some declaratives create new epi-
stemic responsibilities by adding to the body of collective knowledge;
they report on a new piece of knowledge—be it an empirical truth-claim
justified by an observation, or a complex inference, or whatever—for the
first time and thereby enter it into social epistemic space. In this case
their agent-neutral import seems clear.
The real question, then, is what to do with those declaratives that re-
assert what is already known, most paradigmatically by telling it to
someone who did not yet know it. Such declaratives can seem to have no
agent-neutral outputs. The truth-claims they assert are already known
‘by us’, so they do not enter those claims into agent-neutral social space
or create new agent-neutral epistemic responsibilities. Their pragmatic
function is specifically to tell some people who don’t already know about
something. How can this involve an agent-neutral output?
The answer turns on remembering that speech acts, on our account,
are normative functions that strive to accomplish something but will of-
ten fall short of doing so. We have argued that the agent-neutrality of the
output of a declarative (or an observative, for that matter) goes along
with an ideal of universal uptake. Such speech acts seek uptake from ev-
eryone, although they will rarely achieve this. Thus, when we offer up
new knowledge in an observative or a declarative, that knowledge is for
everyone but will only be taken up by some people. Universal uptake is S
part of the telos of these speech acts, but not part of what they typically R
accomplish. But this means that there is still a performative point to ut- L
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38 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tering a declarative that states something that has already been stated, in
a new context, at a new time, to new listeners, etc.
It is true—and important—that such repetitive declaratives which
anaphorically pick up on the content of a prior speech act do not in any
way change the ideal normative statuses of anyone in the community, for
the prior speech act already established that ideal, and turned failure to
live up to that ideal into a social epistemic defect. Rather, they normally
change the facts about who lives up to that ideal by actually taking up
the claim. But this means that the output of the declarative—qua declara-
tive—is agent-neutral, even though the practical point of uttering it is
only to change the normative status of specific (formerly ignorant) peo-
ple. Like its anaphoric predecessor, its output is a truth-claim on every-
one. Indeed, it calls upon those who did not already accept the claim
to do so, not in virtue of specific agent-relative facts about them, but
agent-neutrally, as mere members of the discursive epistemic commu-
nity. There is an important sense in which the first utterance of a declara-
tive can effect a normative transformation that is different from what the
subsequent utterances will accomplish. But this does not take away the
practical point to reasserting declaratives, or the agent-neutrality of their
output.
And again, utterances will never be purely declarative—they will en-
act multiple functions and have multiple inputs and outputs, many of
them agent-relative, and they will also be caught up in various levels of
social and ethical normativity that do not directly concern their func-
tioning as truth-claims. So, of course, there will be times when I spe-
cifically want you to hear and accept a particular claim. In this case, my
speech act strives for an agent-relative effect. (For detailed discussion of
such tellings, see Chapter 7.) But insofar as I want you to accept my
claim as a warranted truth (and not, for instance, as something that I am
demanding that you say because I am your boss), I want you to accept it
as making an agent-neutral claim on you and giving you an agent-neutral
entitlement. I want you to accept it not as true for you and me, but as true
tout court.
1.7 Where We Go from Here

In this introductory chapter we have focused on two types of speech S
acts, namely declaratives and imperatives. We have done so both be- R
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cause their structure, with respect to our typology, is relatively straight-

forward, and, perhaps more to the point, because these are the pragmatic
categories of speech acts most familiar to philosophers. However, the at-
tention we so far have paid to speech acts that fall into boxes 1 and 4 of
our grid naturally raises the question of what sorts of speech acts might
fit into boxes 2 and 3.
A speech act in box 2 would be one with an agent-relative input and
an agent-neutral output. Thus, its entitlement would be indexed to a
specific kind of agent, or a particular agent, but it would offer up an
agent-neutral normative status that is not so indexed. Although we will
argue in Chapter 4 that Austinian performatives are not the best example
of box-2 speech acts, some Austinian performatives provide relatively
clear and philosophically familiar examples of how a box-2 speech act
would work. Consider an old philosophical favorite, namely a baptism:
“I name this ship the Queen Gizelba.” This speech act has an agent-
relative input: only someone with a specific authoritative position, not
even ideally extendable to everyone, can baptize a ship. But the output
of the baptism is agent-neutral: its main effect is to make it true for ev-
eryone that this is now the ship’s proper name, and to create a public en-
titlement to use this name, in conversations, legal documents, or what-
ever else.
A box-3 speech act would primarily function to draw upon an agent-
neutral entitlement in order to impute an agent-relative status. That is, it
would use publicly available features of the world in order to target a
particular agent or kind of agent for special normative entitlements or
commitments. In Chapter 5 we will argue that many deontic claims—
those we will call ‘prescriptives’—are examples of speech acts with this
structure. A claim such as “Jim ought to do a better job of taking care of
his dog” does not have its performance entitlement indexed to any par-
ticular kind of agent. If it is properly performed by anyone, it is because
it reflects agent-neutral (moral and empirical) features of a public world.
On the other hand, the claim has special, nonfungible normative impli-
cations for Jim.
So far we have defended or provisionally suggested the categoriza-
tions of speech acts shown in Figure 3.
In Chapters 2 and 3 we will examine the contents of box 2 in de-
tail. Chapter 4 provides a brief interlude in which we consider the sta- S
tus of Austinian performatives. Chapter 5 will be devoted to box 3. In R
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40 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Chapters 6 and 7 we will turn to a different—and in our view fundamen-

tal—category of box-4 speech acts. Chapter 8 concerns the character
and constitution of discursive communities and the agents that inhabit
them.
Our special concern with declaratives in this first chapter should not
be read as another inscription of the primacy of the declarative, which
would amount to an instance of the declarative fallacy. By the end of
the book we will have argued that at least two other pragmatic func-
tions of language are as fundamental as its declaratival function. These
are (1) giving expression and calling attention to a speaker’s receptive
recognition of an empirical state of affairs (“Lo, a rabbit!”) and (2) call-
Input
Output
1 2
Agent-neutral Neutral output Neutral output
Declaratives Baptisms
3 4
Agent-relative Prescriptives Imperatives
(i.e. ought-claims) (promises,
invitations,
reproaches...)
S
Figure 3 R
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ing or hailing another person (“Yo, Fiona!”). In distinctively different

ways, our abilities to perform Lo-utterances and Yo-utterances are tran-
scendental conditions upon the possibility of speaking a language with
which we communicate with one another about a shared objective
world.
S
R
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Observatives and the

Pragmatics of Perception
Among categories of speech acts, declaratives and imperatives have re-

ceived the lion’s share of attention from philosophers of language, and
indeed we upheld this trend in Chapter 1. Declaratives and imperatives
share a significant feature: the pragmatic scope of their input matches
that of their output. That is, where declaratives are agent-neutral in both
input and output, imperatives are agent-relative in both input and out-
put. Historically, focusing on these two types of speech acts has, not sur-
prisingly, obscured the whole distinction between inputs and outputs:
philosophers are used to thinking in terms of agent-neutrality or agent-
relativity, tout court, but they have not noticed that the question of the
scope of a norm, reason, or speech act has to be asked separately with re-
spect to its input and its output. However, some of the most philosophi-
cally interesting work that we do, as members of discursive communi-
ties, gets done by actions that instantiate ‘mixed’ normative functions,
belonging in boxes 2 and 3 of our grid (that is, with agent-neutral in-
puts and agent-relative outputs, or with agent-relative inputs and agent-
neutral outputs). Our purpose in this chapter is to explore some inhabi-
tants of box 2 and their philosophical significance.
A successful box-2 speech act must be one that, as a matter of its prag-
matic structure, has an agent-relative input. As in the case of an imper-
ative, entitlement to its performance must be structurally indexed to
an agent (or agents) with a particular normative position that is not gen-
eralizable even in the ideal. At the same time, it must have an agent-
neutral output. As in the case of a declarative, it must pass on entitle- S
ments and commitments that are not indexed to particular agents, but R
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Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception 43
are rather public, whether or not everyone manages to take them up. It
must make a claim that is not for anyone in particular, but rather has
‘universal validity’, as Kant would say.
What might such speech acts be? Near the end of Chapter 1, we sug-
gested that certain Austinian performatives, such as baptisms, seem to
belong to box 2: only someone with a specific normative position can
perform a baptism—taking a stroll through a neonatal nursery and shout-
ing names at other people’s babies does not constitute baptizing them—
but a successful baptism makes it the case for everyone that this thing or
person has this name. In Chapter 4, however, we will argue that while
such examples may be helpful for initial clarificatory purposes, most
Austinian performatives are not the most compelling, paradigmatic, or
philosophically interesting or important examples of box-2 speech acts
as such.
Kant is perhaps the only figure in the history of philosophy who has
identified a type of speech act that belongs in box 2—that is, one with
agent-relative input and agent-neutral output. In his discussion of the
structure of aesthetic judgments of taste in the Third Critique, Kant ar-
gues that judgments of taste are essentially singular, by which he means
not only that they are about a single, concrete particular rather than a
category of objects (though this follows immediately from his analysis),
but also that they require a personal encounter with the object of judg-
ment. He writes: “There can . . . be no rule in accordance with which
someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful . . .
No one allows himself to be talked into his judgment about that by
means of any grounds or fundamental principles. One wants to submit the
object to his own eyes.”1 The point here is not that no generally valid rules
can predict with perfect accuracy which objects will be beautiful, though
this is likely to be true too, but that even if we had such rules, inferring
the beauty of an object on their basis wouldn’t count as an aesthetic
judgment of taste at all—what it is to make an aesthetic judgment is to
aesthetically respond to a concrete, sensuous encounter with an object.
As such, only my inherently agent-relative encounter with an object can
be the ground for my judgment of taste, regardless of how confident I am
on the basis of general principles that I would or wouldn’t find this ob-
S
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 215–216. R
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44 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ject beautiful once I encountered it. A judgment of taste, therefore, does

not pass on a reassertion license—or better, a rejudgment license.
“One wants to submit the object to his own eyes,” Kant says, “and yet,
if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a univer-
sal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone.” Kant argues at
length that even though my judgment of taste requires a personal en-
counter, in so judging I impute this judgment agent-neutrally, to every-
one. I cannot pass on an entitlement to the same judgment as mine, but
in judging I demand universal agreement. Even though I am well aware
that in fact not everyone may judge as I do, in judging beauty I judge
that the object is beautiful for everyone, in the sense that it is a defect in
others if they fail to judge as I do. The judge “does not count on the
agreement of others with his judgment of satisfaction because he has fre-
quently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it
from them [and] rebukes them if they judge otherwise.” Although they
cannot pass on universal reassertion licenses, they make a universal de-
mand upon others to judge for themselves as I judge should they en-
counter the same object. In other words, my singular judgment of taste
has an agent-neutral output, and it makes the normative claim that oth-
ers are in error if they disagree with me, thereby ‘laying claim’ to univer-
sal agreement. Judgments of taste are not objective truth-claims, because
of the agent-relativity of their input, but they have, as Kant puts it, sub-
jective universal validity. Kantian judgments of taste are structurally
agent-neutral in the validity they claim, even as they are structurally
agent-relative in their entitlement; hence they belong in box 2.2
Kant’s claim is stronger than that the inputs of judgments of taste are
agent-relative. For one thing—in the lingo of Chapter 1—he is claiming
that these inputs are agent-specific. It is not merely some particular social
category of person to whom the entitlement of an aesthetic judgment
2. Ibid., 215–216, 212–213. Because philosophers have not, in the past, distinguished be-
tween the inputs and outputs of judgments—which in retrospect is surprising, since Kant him-
self provided the framework for thinking of judgments as normative functions—interpreters
have struggled to make sense of Kant’s talk of “singular judgments.” Indeed, Kant himself
changes the meaning of the term over the course of the critical philosophy. In the first critique,
the ‘singularity’ of a judgment concerns the extensional scope of its content—it is a judgment
about only one thing. But in the third critique, the ‘singularity’ of a judgment is a feature of how
the judgment is made—it is entitled only by a personal encounter. In the past, philosophers S
have not had good language available for making clear that this later Kantian singularity is a
pragmatic category—it identifies a structural feature of the input of the judgment. R
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applies. Though entitlement to give orders to privates may attach to

lieutenants, and entitlement to name a child to any of its parents, aes-
thetic entitlement of this sort applies not to a specific category of person
but to a specific person. But Kant’s claim is even stronger than that: for
him, the input of a judgment of taste is essentially first-personal: it is es-
sential to a judgment of taste that what I give expression to, in judg-
ment, is my own response to the object I encounter. I can make no judg-
ment of taste on behalf of another, no matter what our relationship or
our similarities.
While some have argued that aesthetic judgment in fact plays an es-
sential role as a moment in regular objective assertion, for Kant, at least
on the surface, Kantian judgments of taste form an esoteric category cut
off from the main concerns of epistemology.3 His discussion of them pro-
vides us with a beautiful historical precedent, but we will not focus on
them as our paradigm of box-2 speech acts. Rather, in the rest of this
chapter we turn to a category of speech acts that we believe share impor-
tant structural similarities with Kant’s judgments of taste. We argue that
these speech acts play a pivotal role in discourse about and knowledge
of an objective empirical world.
2.1 Observatives
Consider the difference between two speech acts:
• When my friend asks why I am crouching near a bush with a car-
rot, I declare, “There’s a rabbit in the bush.”
• As I see a rabbit dart into a bush I call out, “Lo, a rabbit!”
We claim that while both speech acts directly imply the presence of a
rabbit in the bush—both would be misspoken if there were no rabbit in
the bush—they differ crucially in pragmatic structure, in such a way as
to make the latter, a speech act of a type we will call the ‘observative’, in-
habit box 2 instead of box 1.
First let us introduce the term ‘recognitive’ for any speech act a func-
tion of which is to give expression to a speaker’s recognition of something.
A recognitive does not, as such, assert a proposition about the content of
3. For further citations, see Rebecca Kukla, “Introduction: Placing the Aesthetic in Kant’s S
Critical Epistemology,” in Kukla, ed., Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–34. R
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46 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
what the speaker recognizes—although many recognitives will also be

declaratives and do this as well. Rather, the pragmatic function of the
recognitive is to discursively mark and communicate the event of recog-
nition itself. English contains a few words and constructions that are
specifically designed to mark this recognitive function, although most of
them sound rather archaic: ‘Lo!’, ‘Ho!’, and, as we will discuss in detail
in Chapter 6, ‘Yo!’ and other hails (e.g. ‘Ahoy!’). Most often, however, we
issue recognitives using utterances whose surface grammar is not dis-
tinctive. “There’s a rabbit in the bush!” can either be a mere declarative
statement of a truth (for instance, a truth we already knew or were told
by someone else), or it can be an expressive response to actually seeing a
rabbit.
Because recognitives are not routinely marked by their surface gram-
mar, we will, as a matter of notational convention, follow what seems to
be the loose ordinary-language practice of using exclamation points to
indicate the recognitive function of an utterance. So “I see a rabbit.” is
our way of writing a declarative statement about an observational state,
whereas “I see a rabbit!” indicates that this utterance centrally gives ex-
pression to a recognitive event. Observatives, by stipulation, are those
recognitives that give expression to our recognition of an empirical fact,
object, or state of affairs in observation, and most paradigmatically in
perception. (For more about other kinds of recognitives, see Chapters 6
and 7.) That is to say, observatives are much like what philosophers have
called observation reports, except that the latter term does not distin-
guish between mere declarative reports on the content of observation
and expressions of the event of observational recognition. The impor-
tance of this pragmatic distinction is a major thesis of this chapter.
Opinions will differ as to the scope of the notion of observation. There
are varieties of skillful recognition that will seem to many not to be in-
stances of observation. We might think, for example, that someone can
be in a position to ‘see’ that Rebecca is uncomfortable at parties with
people she doesn’t know well, or perhaps that a particular mathematical
proof is inelegant. That is, philosophers will differ with respect to how
narrowly they wish to tie the notion of observation to sensation. We
want to remain neutral on this issue, and to avoid taking a stance con-
cerning the boundaries of the empirical, the co-extension of perception
and observation, and so forth. Our concern is with observatives insofar S
as they give expression to recognitive episodes that provide direct, non- R
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inferential, receptive knowledge of the empirical world, regardless of

disagreements over the scope of such knowledge.
The output of an observative is agent-neutral. My epistemic accom-
plishment in expressing my observation of a rabbit establishes a public
fact—indeed, it establishes a set of public facts, such as that there is a
rabbit present, and that I see it. Again, if there were no rabbit present, I
would have misspoken (although we shall argue below that it’s not quite
right to say I would have spoken falsely). Accordingly, my warranted
speech act provides anyone who accepts my entitlement to it with enti-
tlement to the claim that there is a rabbit present (and that I see it, etc.).
In virtue of a successful observative—“Lo, a rabbit!” for example—“we”
now know (or “one knows”) that there is a rabbit nearby. My observative
directly and agent-neutrally licenses beliefs, inferences, and declarative
speech acts concerning the presence of a rabbit (among other beliefs and
declarations).
Yet my observative does not seek, even as an ideal, to bring it about
that anyone else has observed the rabbit, nor likewise that anyone else is
entitled to utter “Lo, a rabbit!” Entitlement to the observative (the ‘Lo!’
speech act) is inherently one’s own. In uttering this speech act, I express
my receptive recognition of a rabbit. This speech act does not merely
make the declarative claim that a rabbit is present. Nor does it merely
make the declarative claim that I see a rabbit. Rather, it serves a special
recognitive function: it marks or expresses my detection of a rabbit. It is
the recognizing, and not just what is recognized or who is recognizing,
that is given expression in such a claim, and since what is expressed is
the indexed recognition itself, this entitlement is not generalizable, even
in the ideal. In this sense, observatives have a pragmatic structure analo-
gous to Kantian judgments of taste.
In this chapter’s discussion of observatives, we sometimes focus on
Lo-utterances because our most familiar examples of observatives in the
philosophical literature come from Quine, who was fond of the locution.
However, Lo-utterances actually form only a proper subset of observa-
tives, and indeed one that has an additional distinctive pragmatic func-
tion. Notice that Lo-claims do more than just express recognition; they
also ostend. That is to say, they call upon some others to attend to and
recognize that which I am currently recognizing. If I see a rabbit that no
one else is in a position to see—perhaps everyone but me is in another S
room of the house—I might call out an observative: “A rabbit!”; or R
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48 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
“There goes a rabbit!” But it would be inappropriate for me to utter “Lo,

a rabbit!” The ‘Lo!’ both expresses my observation and calls upon spe-
cific others to share in my attention and thereby to observe the same
thing for themselves. Since this ostensive function is directed only at
those around us who are in a position to re-create our receptive encoun-
ter, it is an agent-relative output of the Lo-utterance. This means that
Lo-claims have a complex structure, involving both a box-2 observative
function and a box-4 ostensive function. We will take up the importance
of such special ostensive observatives in the next chapter, and again in
our final chapter.
Observatives—unlike declaratives—do not issue reassertion licenses.
To perceive is to be uniquely placed, indexically, with respect to what I
see. Perceptual episodes are inherently particular and non-fungible in
just the way that the inferential and assertional entitlements to which
they give rise are not. The inference and assertion licenses I ‘pass on’
when I express what I perceive meaningfully maintain their identity
through their different incarnations in different speakers, but the origi-
nal perceptual episodes do not. My utterance, “Lo, a rabbit!,” may com-
mit you to the belief that there is a rabbit present. You may even declare
that the rabbit is present on the basis of this belief, without having man-
aged to see it: imagine, for example, that you are peering into a bush try-
ing to see the rabbit that I have authoritatively sworn is in there, and
when a passerby asks you why you are staring at the bush, you declare,
“There is a rabbit in the bush.” But unless you see the bunny yourself you
are not entitled to utter “Lo, a rabbit!” Indeed, it would be deceptive for
you to do so. And if you do see it, the source of your entitlement is this
recognition—your recognition—not your acceptance of my entitlement
to my own observative. Even if we insist that you see the very same thing
as I do on a given occasion—you see the bunny also—we have two per-
ceptual episodes grounding two different receptive entitlements, and not
one. Just as only taking aesthetic pleasure in an object yourself can con-
stitute an aesthetic judgment of beauty, likewise only seeing the rabbit
yourself entitles you to this speech act—as opposed to, for instance,
making a warranted inferential claim that there is a rabbit present.
Observatives, that is, are licensed only for a concrete individual, from
her particular, first-personal point of view. Perception paradigmatically
yields new entitlements. But Rebecca’s perception yields entitlements for S
her only insofar as she recognizes that she has perceived the bunny her- R
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self, whereas Mark earns his entitlements through learning that someone
else has perceived the bunny. These are not interchangeable sources of
entitlement: my perception will only yield new entitlements for anyone if
they originate with me—no one else but me can be the first to pass on
my perceptual entitlements.
To perceive, then—as opposed to just inheriting entitlement to a be-
lief—is to be first-personally claimed by what I see. To express this first-
personal episode in language is to take on a singular responsibility for
correct observation in a way that is not an expression of any kind of
shared, agent-neutral commitment. The receptivity of perception is one
of the essential means by which my commitments and entitlements do
not merely accrue to me, but make a claim on me. The perspectivally
owned character of perception is not just a phenomenological fact that
needs separate accommodation, but rather it is essential to the cash
value of the game of giving and asking for reasons. This is a Kantian
commitment on our part. Part of the point of Kant’s transcendental
synthesis of apperception in the ‘I think’ is just this necessarily first-
personal ownership of objective representations. Kant himself may well
be caught in the declarative fallacy here, insofar as he tries to capture
this first-personality by adding an extra bit of propositionally structured
representational content—the judgment that one is thinking the repre-
sentation—to the original representation. For us, this first-personality is
an irreducible feature of the pragmatic structure of the receptive event
itself.4
There are three distinct claims here. First, and most simply, the input
entitlement to an observative is agent-relative. Second, just as with Kant’s
aesthetic judgments, it is agent-specific: I am entitled to my observative
utterances, not insofar as I am a fungible instantiation of some category
of agents, but because they give expression to my unique and fully con-
4. This leaves open the interesting question of whether one must be able to make explicit
one’s own first-personal ownership of a receptive episode in order to count as a genuine
perceiver. An anonymous referee pointed out that it is dubious that animals, for instance, could
have such an explicit grasp of their own relationship to their perceptual states, while at the
same time it is hard to deny that they are perceivers. Everyone will agree that there is some im-
portant sense in which animals perceive; the open question here is whether there is some richer
epistemic practice that those of us who can explicitly recognize our first-personal states are en-
gaging in when we perceive. So, for instance, Sellars and McDowell deny that animals are S
perceivers in the full-blooded sense in which we are, for this reason, whereas Brandom and
Haugeland have less strict prerequisites for such perception. R
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50 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
crete encounter with the world. Third, the observative expresses my

first-personal uptake of this agent-specific entitlement.
Any speech act, including a declarative speech act, calls for a first-
personal uptake of entitlement. Knowing that Mark is entitled to en-
dorse the Kondo-Addison theorem provides me with no inferential guid-
ance unless I know that I am Mark, and hence that I am entitled to
endorse the theorem. But it does not follow from this that all speech
acts—or even all speech acts with agent-specific entitlements—serve to
express this first-personal uptake. When Rebecca says, “You are Eli,” in
the right context, she does so out of an agent-specific entitlement to
baptize her child (and her speech act falls into box 2). But there is noth-
ing in this sort of baptizing speech act that expresses her first-personal
uptake of this entitlement.5 In contrast, observatives have the essential
function of giving expression to this first-personal uptake, and hence
the first-person voice is a structural feature of their defining pragmatic
function.
At this point we can make explicit a final feature of the input ent-
itlements of observatives: since they are both agent-specific and first-
personal, they are also—like Kantian judgments of taste—essentially
unshareable. That is, they express a first-person singular perspective, and
never a first-person plural perspective. We come to be entitled to a belief
on the basis of observation because we encounter the world in a certain
way. But such events of receptive encountering are essentially individuat-
ing, in a very specific sense. As Heidegger would put it, they are in each
case mine. The point is that such concrete receptive encounters by their
very nature build in essentially singular first-personal ownership of that
encounter; observational episodes cannot even conceptually be under-
stood as floating free of being someone’s observational episode in particu-
lar. Whatever our metaphysics of subjectivity happens to be, and wher-
ever we think that the boundaries of the individual may lie, it is built
into the structure of certain events that only individuals can be the sub-
jects of such events. Heidegger argued that only I can die my death: this
5. Conversely, it seems that there are speech acts that do serve—as part of their pragmatic
structure—to express first-personal uptake of agent-neutral entitlements. Imagine that I claim
to understand a well-known but difficult theorem. You doubt it. I respond by saying “Watch!”
and then writing down the proof. Here, it seems, I am expressing my first-personal uptake of S
agent-neutral entitlement to the theorem. If the term were not already a name for a grammati-
cal type, we would be happy to label such performances “demonstratives.” R
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death cannot be shared and no one can die for me (though someone
might die herself in order to spare my life, which is quite different). Just
as essentially, no one but me can have my experiences or partake in
my observations: they can be neither shared nor displaced. We might
think that only human beings can be individual subjects, or that the
status should be extended to animals, corporations, social groups, or
whatever.6 We might think that individuals are in various ways inelimi-
nably socially embedded, bound up in relationships, or historically con-
structed. But the structural point we are making here cuts across all of
these views: whatever individual subjects turn out to be, only one of
those can die a death, live a life, or recognize a rabbit in a bush.
2.2 Observatives and Occasion Sentences

On the basis of our analysis in the last section, we can say that observa-
tives, given their agent-relative input and their agent-neutral output, be-
long in box 2 of our grid. At this point, we have defended the classifica-
tions indicated in Figure 4.
Contemporary philosophers of language have not identified observa-
tives as speech acts with a distinctive pragmatic structure. This is odd,
since observation reports have frequently been pressed into distinctive
pragmatic service. Davidson, for instance, uses occasion sentences as the
starting point for triangulation from the language of the interpretee to
the language of the interpreter to the world itself.7 Indeed, he takes our
capacity to recognize speech acts as observation reports—or, more pre-
cisely, as assents to sentences whose truth fluctuates with the passing
scene, as he puts it—as a primitive condition for the possibility of inter-
pretation. It is odd, given this special pragmatic place that Davidson as-
signs, not just to observation, but specifically to the special speech acts
that report on observations, that he did not concern himself with giving
any kind of pragmatic analysis of these acts.
For example, Davidson proposes no mechanism for differentiating be-
tween proper observatives, in our sense, and declarative speech acts
6. We (Mark and Rebecca) disagree as to whether a group or a corporation could poten-

tially count as an individual subject in the relevant senses.
7. Davidson’s triangulation argument shows up in multiple papers, but the classic source is S
“Three Varieties of Knowledge,” reprinted in Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). R
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52 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
with which I describe my own observational episodes—both of these

simply count, for him, as observation reports. But it’s hard to imagine
how declarative descriptions of the contents of observation could an-
chor interpretation in any special way that other objective truth-claims
could not. A Cartesian might try to mark out the speech acts that play a
privileged role in anchoring interpretation at the level of semantic con-
tent, claiming that descriptions of the contents of our own experience
(“I see a rabbit”) are epistemologically prior to claims about the world.
But such a view is not open to Davidson, who, like all post-Kantian neo-
pragmatists, holds that the ability to have beliefs about the world is as
primordial as the ability to have beliefs about the contents of one’s own
Input
Output
1 2
Agent-neutral Declaratives Kantian judgments
of taste, baptisms,
some recognitives,
i.e. observatives
3 4
(promises,
invitations,
reproaches...),
ostensions
S
Figure 4 R
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experience. So there is no way to find the special role of observation in

the semantics of claims like “I see that P.” And semantics will not help us
if we turn simply to speech acts such as “There is a rabbit in the bush,”
for the content of such acts is just what is shared between observational
and inferential episodes.
A Davidsonian might well respond that what makes occasion sen-
tences distinctively useful in anchoring interpretation is the way they
are causally connected to the world, rather than their semantics or their
pragmatics. But all speech acts are causally connected to the world some-
how or other, and Davidson would need some non-question-begging
way of making the causal origin of occasion sentences distinctively im-
portant. It certainly seems that these causes are important precisely be-
cause they give rise to speech acts that are recognitive responses. But such
responses need to be pragmatically distinguished from other speech acts
if we are to demarcate which causes give rise to them, rather than the
other way around. Hence, we believe, Davidson implicitly depends upon
our ability to sort observatives from other inferentially fecund speech
acts in virtue of their pragmatic function.8 More generally, we suggest
that observatives have been playing an important theoretical role in phi-
losophy of language for some time now, and our analysis should be un-
derstood as making precise a notion upon which we were already de-
pendent.
2.3 Observing-That and the Declarative Fallacy

Even though they are not themselves assertions, observatives are firmly
planted within the conceptually articulated space of reasons. “Lo, a rab-
bit!” is an utterance that makes use of the concept ‘rabbit’; although it
expresses a receptive encounter, what it captures is not a preconceptual
‘given’ but a conceptually articulated experience. (For discussion of the
conceptually rich character of the content of observatives, see Chapter
3.) When philosophers have considered non-declarative, expressive lan-
8. Because Davidson focuses on sentences rather than speech acts, it would be hard for him
to draw this distinction. For after all, one and the same sentence—such as “I see a rabbit”—can
serve as either an observative or a declarative report on one’s observational state. Davidson and
Quine, despite their lack of pragmatic analyses, often use explicitly observative locutions such
as “Lo, a rabbit!” for their examples of occasion sentences. This perhaps enables them to focus S
in on speech acts that tend to do the pragmatic work they want without having explicitly iden-
tified their distinctive pragmatic structure. R
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54 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
guage in the past, they have focused on inarticulate expletives like ‘boo’
and ‘yay’. Indeed, expressive language has been taken as almost synony-
mous with ‘non-cognitivist’ language.9 However, observatives function
differently from such traditional examples of expressive language. They
ground beliefs and public knowledge, they facilitate discursive commu-
nication, and they allow us to give voice to our encounters with the ob-
jective world.
Yet we maintain that observatives are not truth-claims, even though
they license truth-claims. Truth is inherently public, and for that reason
access to the truth is agent-neutral. (Although, again, not everyone will
be equally able to access various truths.) While we are not proposing
any kind of full-blown theory of truth in this book, we have suggested
that the agent-neutral accessibility of truth goes right to the heart of
what is distinctive about it; truth is never for you or for me. Likewise,
truth-claims essentially have agent-neutral inputs. While the content of
what I observe is a matter of public truth, the event of my observation is
inherently mine, and when and insofar as I give expression to that event
in an observative I do not assert a truth, any more than I do when I shout
“Ouch!” or give expression to other first-personal events.
A revealing piece of evidence that observatives are not truth-claims
is that although you might accept my entitlement to my Lo-utterance,
and indeed accept on its basis that there is a rabbit present, it is prag-
matically inappropriate for you to respond, “That’s true!” Typical asser-
tions of “That’s true,” whatever other function they may have, behave as
“prosentences,” which pick up their semantic content anaphorically,
from an antecedent declarative. In response to a declarative, the claim
“That is true” functions both as the assertion with the same content—
semantic anaphora—and also as the re-performance of the very same
speech act with the same declarative structure.10 But if we acknowledge
an observative—perhaps by saying “You’re right”—we thereby claim the
semantic content of the observative but without reinstantiating its prag-
matic structure. This new speech act has the same output as the obser-
vative, but a very different input. Standard discussions of anaphoric
prosentences, then, are ambiguous, failing as they do to distinguish the
9. Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003); C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). S
R
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reproduction of a speech act type from the production of a new speech

act with the same semantic content.11
Observatives often lack explicit propositional content. “Lo, a rabbit!”
is perfectly idiomatic (at least insofar as anyone is pretentious enough to
say “Lo!” at all). And “Land, ho!” is certainly idiomatic among Holly-
wood pirates. If we insist upon understanding observatives as a subcate-
gory of declaratives, then we must read them as expressing their propo-
sitional content elliptically. But this introduces apparent arbitrariness
when it comes to filling in the ellipsis. Is “Lo, a rabbit!” equivalent to
“Lo, there is a rabbit present!,” “Lo, there is a rabbit in the bush!,” or
perhaps “Lo, a rabbit is near enough to me for that to be remarkable!”?
There seems no principled way to choose among the numerous declara-
tives that serve as output to the observative, and this makes the de-
claratival analysis seem decidedly ad hoc. We claim instead that these
observatives are complete, well-formed utterances that imply proposi-
tional truths with each of these contents (as well as many more), but
that they are not themselves propositional in form.12
Now consider an observative that does not immediately raise the
problem of ellipsis: “Willard is on the mat!” Unlike “Lo, a rabbit!,” or
even just “A rabbit!,” this observative utterance takes the form of a prop-
osition that can function as a purely declaratival expression. Clearly,
there is an important sense in which these two utterances—“Willard
is on the mat!” and “Willard is on the mat.”—have the same seman-
10. For philosophers, the most important discussions of prosentential anaphora are Robert
Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), chap. 5, and Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp Jr., and
Nuel Belnap, “A Prosentential Theory of Truth,” Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 73–124. For
an argument that an anaphoric account of the semantics of truth talk is quite independent of
the broader inferentialist semantic framework in which Brandom places it, see Mark Lance,
“The Significance of Anaphoric Theories of Truth and Reference,” in Bradley Armour-Garb and
J. C. Beall, eds., Deflationary Truth (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2001).
11. If truth-talk functions only to relate anaphorically to the content of an antecedent ut-
terance, one wonders whether there is a corresponding pragmatic pro-form, a speech type
that functions systematically as a re-performance, drawing not only its content but its prag-
matic significance from an antecedent. Such vocabulary exists in colloquial English, we think.
One can utter “You can say that again!” or “Indeed!” (or, in reasonably current street lingo,
“Word!”) as a way of picking up the pragmatic force of a speech act.
12. See Robert J. Stainton, Words and Thoughts: Subsentences, Ellipsis, and the Philosophy
of Language (New York: Oxford, 2006), for a compelling argument against reading non-
propositional utterances as elliptical. S
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56 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tic content. But unlike its declaratival half-sister, the observative still has
an agent-relative input, and it still functions to express recognition of
something. The fact that these two utterances in some sense share se-
mantic content can make it easy to think that the observative is just a
funny version of the declarative—one that just happens to also mark its
own causal genesis in an observation, through tone of voice, or perhaps
through the addition of a ‘Lo!’
At this point we might be tempted by the thought that this observative
is really just a short form for two declaratives shoved together: “Willard
is on the mat.” and “I am seeing that Willard is on the mat.” or some-
thing of the sort. But again there does not seem to be a good way of
choosing between the various ‘declarative translations’ of the observa-
tive. Does it really mean “Willard is on the mat and I see him there”? Or
perhaps, “Willard is on the mat, and the reason I know this is that I am
seeing him there”? Or maybe, “I see something. Willard is on the mat.”
Indeed, it seems that all of these express declarative commitments are
immediately licensed by entitlement to the observative “Willard is on
the mat!” At the same time, there seems to be no reason to pick one of
them as the ‘proper’ analysis of the observative.
Though not a declarative, an observative licenses moves to many
declaratives. But the fact that these declaratives are licensed by the ob-
servative does not show that they are identical to it, and the fact that
there seems to be no good reason to choose one of these declarative
translations over the others strongly suggests that none of them in fact
exhausts or nails down the import of the original. We submit that any
such ‘reduction’ will be either arbitrary or driven by a theoretical com-
mitment that begs the question in favor of the primacy of declaratives.
In our view, it should not be surprising that the difference between the
propositional observative and its declaratival counterpart cannot be ana-
lyzed in terms of a difference in propositional content. What interests
us here is specifically that the difference between these two utterances
seems to be one of pragmatic function, and not one of semantics. If we
analyze “Willard is on the mat!” as some cluster of declaratives, we do
not capture its crucial function of expressing (rather than asserting) the
speaker’s observational recognition of the fact that Willard is on the mat.
The temptation to try to capture the difference at the level of proposi-
tional content, we think, is motivated by the tendency of philosophers S
to privilege semantics over pragmatics, and declarative pragmatic struc- R
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tures over others, with the result that all differences between utterances
tend to be understood, if at all possible, as differences in semantic con-
tent between declaratives. In other words, it is an instance of the declar-
ative fallacy. In rejecting the declarative fallacy, we reject first and fore-
most a methodological orientation that assumes that all speech acts have
a declaratival structure made up of propositional contents until proven
otherwise; we pointedly shift the burden of proof in the other direction,
thereby pushing against a great deal of philosophical inertia.
Observatives may express recognition of propositionally structured
facts, or they may express recognition of phenomena or objects. In each
case they commit their speakers to believing in the propositions that fol-
low from what they observe. But if we do not buy into the presumption
that all speech acts that justify truth-claims have the pragmatic structure
of a declarative, then it seems clear that what observatives do, whether
or not they happen to embed propositions, is something distinct from
merely asserting their content; instead, they express recognitive uptake
of their content, and this expression is of something essentially agent-
specific and individuating in a way that a declarative assertion essen-
tially isn’t. Recognizing something, including even recognizing the fact
that a proposition obtains, is simply distinct—pragmatically distinct—
from asserting that something is the case. Thus observatives are not just
modifications or transformations of declaratives.
Not everything propositional is declarative, and hence it remains pos-
sible to agree that observatives are pragmatically distinct from declara-
tives, while still insisting that observatives such as “Lo, a rabbit!” are
elliptically propositional. However, we believe that by now we have un-
dercut the motivation for this move. In arguing that we need not read
non-propositional observatives as implicit declaratives, we are in fact
resting on the idea that they need not have an implicit propositional
structure either.13 We are content to say that the conclusion that there is
a rabbit present follows directly from the acceptance of an utterance of
“Lo, a rabbit!” as properly entitled, without a mediating translation into
a propositionally formed premise. One simply cannot see a rabbit with-
out it’s being the case that there is a rabbit present, and so the former
event implies the later truth. Sometimes we express our recognition of
13. Thus we disagree with Sellars, who counts observation reports as a special “level of S
propositions,” and with McDowell, who follows him in doing so (for instance during his key-
note presentation at the Space of Reasons Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, July 2004). R
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58 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
a propositionally structured fact—for example of our observation that

there is a rabbit in the bush. At other times we express our recognition
of an object, or an event—our observation of a rabbit, or of a rabbit dart-
ing into a bush.
Debates rage over whether we must see-that in order to see at all.
Some defend the strong claim that every seeing involves a seeing-that,14
although one could also hold the weaker thesis that being able to see-
that, generally speaking, is a transcendental condition for the ability to
see objects or anything else. It is not our primary purpose here to enter
into such debates on the nature of seeing. Our inclination is to assert the
weaker and deny the stronger thesis. But surely it is possible to see a rab-
bit or a rabbit hiding, in addition to whatever other propositionally struc-
tured facts we see, and whatever the dependence relations are between
such seeings. We are urging that such non-propositional observations
can be expressed in observatives. We are also arguing for the more sub-
stantive and contentious thesis that such non-propositional observa-
tions and their expressions ground justified declaratives.
Now there will be those in the grip of a strong perceptual rationalism,
driven perhaps by a Sellarsian critique of the given, who will find this
thesis absurd. They will claim that nothing without propositional form
could ground another proposition, because it wouldn’t have the right
kind of structure to serve as a premise in an inference. But such an ob-
jection seems to rest on a suspiciously narrow conception of inference.
After all, in the domain of practical inference, reasons ground actions
that are not themselves propositional. Of course, only propositions can
be inferentially related according to the usual rules of propositional
logic, but to presume that propositional logic is, or is structurally analo-
gous to, the only inferential game in town—or that it is the inferential
game that must govern observation and its expression—is to beg the
question. Indeed, this particular form of question-begging can be under-
stood as a form of the declaratival fallacy, as it presumes that the only
discursive logic is the propositional logic of the declarative, and that ev-
erything that isn’t propositionally structured must be somehow mute or
inarticulate.
We are not attached to calling the licensing moves from observatives
14. This is the position taken by McDowell in John McDowell, Mind and World (Cam- S
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), and by Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). R
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to declaratives “inference.” One reason to deny that it is possible to talk

of an “inference” between observatives and declaratives is that our only
well-developed accounts of good inference proceed in terms of truth-
preservation, which concerns relations among truth-claims. In the Ap-
pendix we argue that one can understand the idea of an inference in
terms of a more basic idea of licensed normative moves between types of
actions (some of which are speech acts). This would include, for in-
stance, practical inferences from beliefs and desires to actions. Within
this framework, we can represent licensed transitions between speech
acts as particular cases of the general phenomenon of pragmatically li-
censed act-transitions. But in any case, little turns on whether or not we
attach the label ‘inference’ to the justificatory relation between observa-
tives and declaratives. We could say that knowledge depends both on in-
ference and on non-inferential warranted transitions from observatives
to declaratives, or that there are two types of inference. For ease of ter-
minology, we use ‘inference’ in the broader sense in this work.
2.4 The Ineliminability of the First-Person Voice

Declarative truth-claims are not essentially indexed to any particular
speaker or audience—they are inherently “impersonal” rather than
structurally bound to a first-, second-, or third-person voice. A declara-
tive such as “Ottawa is the capital of Canada” has no personal voice.
Many declaratives do have a voice: “I am sick of crappy Mexican food”;
“You have schmutz on your face”; “Louise thinks that Toronto is the
capital of Canada.” However, to the extent that what we are interested in
when it comes to the pragmatic force of declaratives is their status as as-
sertions or truth-claims, any declarative can be translated from one per-
sonal voice to another without its force being changed in the least—it
works the same way regardless of who says it, and to whom. Thus, qua
truth-conditional assertion, “I am sick of crappy Mexican food” (spoken
by Mark) is just the same as “Mark is sick of crappy Mexican food,” and
“You have schmutz on your face” (directed at Rebecca) is just the same
as “Rebecca has schmutz on her face,” or (uttered by Rebecca) “I have
schmutz on my face.” The fundamental impersonality of the declarative
is deeply linked to the agent-neutrality of its input and output.
We have pointed out several times that contemporary philosophers S
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60 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ing block of language. But now notice an interesting effect of this start-
ing point: if we assume that the essence of discourse is captured by the
functioning of declaratives, then, since declaratives are essentially im-
personal and agent-neutral, we exclude from the start the possibility
of discovering that some agent-relative, voiced dimensions of language
play an important role in constituting or enabling meaningful discursive
practices within a linguistic community. Why should we think that this
restriction is important?
Throughout this chapter we have argued that speech acts that give
expression to perceptual episodes—observatives—are structurally first-
personal. If perceptual episodes had a normative pragmatic structure
analogous to acts of declaring, then they would likewise inherit the
structural impersonality or agent-neutrality of declaratives. Perceptual
episodes could then be ‘passed on’ or transferred between agents with-
out loss of identity. Indeed, Brandom apparently understands perceptual
episodes as funny kinds of assertions.15 However, we have argued that
perceptual episodes are inherently individuating and unshareable. It is a
correlate of this analysis that perceptual episodes themselves cannot be
understood as analogous to ‘inner assertions’, but rather share the first-
personal, agent-relative input structure of the speech acts that express
them.
Brandom acknowledges a certain perspectivality of entitlement at the
level of the content of our intentional states: the content of an agent’s per-
ceptual judgment, for instance, will depend on the orientation of her
body and her visual perspective, or the specific way she is embedded in
the environment.16 But these differences at the level of content go no dis-
tance toward getting a hold on the first-personal ownership of perspective
that is essential to perception: no array of different perceptual contents
inflected by different orientations will mark one of them as mine.
15. See Making It Explicit, 236 and 243; see also the excellent discussion of this point in Jo-
seph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Explaining Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2002), 216ff.
16. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 590. Rouse comments: “To talk about sameness of content
[for Brandom] is thus to bracket the pervasive and ineliminable differences in conceptual per-
spective that result from the inferential significance of differing collateral commitments and
different embodied locations. It might be more natural to say that, on Brandom’s account, one
could only inherit a perspectivally shifted conceptual content from others’ observation re-
ports.” How Scientific Practices Matter, 216–217. S
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It is not enough to emphasize that our perceptual judgments are in-

flected and constituted by our practical bodily relationship to what we
observe, although this is true too. This engaged body must furthermore
be my body in order for its entitlements and commitments to have any
normative bite, and no mere enrichment of bodily and social details will
get this in. All these details, no matter how embodied, would not help
me be gripped by my situation if they belonged to someone else. An ac-
count of perception as an assertion-like episode that is perspectivally
marked only by its content is insufficient. Rather, perceptual episodes
are first-personally structured, agent-relative events.
Voice, as we are characterizing it, is a pragmatic rather than a gram-
matical feature of a speech act (though it is of course often closely
tracked by grammar). The voice of a speech act concerns the manner in
which the agent takes up her entitlement to the speech act and strives to
assign statuses to others. We argue just below that the capacity of a lan-
guage to express such perceptual episodes in a first-person voice is a
constitutive condition for its existence. To put the point much more
simply, any language must allow its users to articulate observatives in or-
der for it to allow its users to articulate anything at all. But if this is right,
then there could be no such thing as a language that traded only in im-
personal, agent-neutral speech acts. The capacity of language users to
express observatives is a constitutive condition for the possibility of
their sharing a language that enables its users to pass around empiri-
cal truth-claims: no declaratives, then, without observatives. Hence any
functioning language must include means for speaking in the first-per-
son voice, and for allowing speakers to perform speech acts with agent-
relative entitlements. If we are right, then any philosophical account
that commits the declarative fallacy, and considers discourse only as a
series of agent-neutral, declarative speech acts, will go wrong.
Someone might argue, in contrast, that this feature of language is con-
tingent. Even granting that we are right about the ineliminable agent-
relativity of some of our speech, the objection would go, there could per-
fectly well be a coherent, functioning language that contained the prag-
matic resources only for impersonal declarative speech. So, for example,
imperatives are inherently second-personal: an imperative must be is-
sued to someone in order for it to count as an imperative at all. The idea
of “translating” an imperative into the third or first person while retain- S
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62 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ing its meaning or force does not even get any conceptual traction.
“Close the door!” makes a specific demand upon someone in particular
(or upon several particular people) by addressing the target of this de-
mand. A “translation” into the third person, such as “Mark ought to
close the door,” is a speech act with an irreducibly different pragmatic
structure and function; it does not constitute an order at all. And yet,
one might acknowledge this but also think that a discourse without im-
peratives (not just without a distinctive imperative syntax, but with-
out any pragmatic resources for making second-personal demands upon
others) would be inconvenient, but not impossible. Later we argue in
detail that second-personal speech is not eliminable in this way, and that
the capacity to make second-personal demands in language is as funda-
mental as the capacity to assert truth-claims. But we will not take up that
argument now. Instead, we will focus on the ineliminability of the first
person.
We can legitimately inherit entitlements to declaratives in any of sev-
eral ways: by having them passed on to us from someone else, by hav-
ing them follow inferentially from our other commitments and entitle-
ments, or, crucially, through direct experience. However, to the extent
that our discourse as a whole counts as about and accountable to the con-
crete empirical world—rather than just being an elaborate syntactic,
non-referential game—our declarative entitlements must be traceable,
through chains of entitlement, back to direct experiences, whether ours
or someone else’s. As McDowell has made vivid, it is this termination of
inference in receptive experience that gives our thinking and talking the
external constraint that it needs to count as objective claim-making, as
opposed to mere frictionless spinning in the void.17 This much seems
fairly uncontentious. But here’s the point: the edifice of empirical knowl-
edge, and with it our justified ability to make empirical assertions, de-
pends upon there being chains of commitments and entitlements that
terminate in someone’s first-personal experiences. The necessary termi-
nation of empirical claims in experience means that whenever we make
an empirical assertion, we are committing ourselves to someone having
had an experience—a receptive encounter with concrete features of the
world—that grounds this assertion. (Again, we are certainly not saying
that these chains must terminate in a preconceptual ‘given’. Experiences,
S
17. McDowell, Mind and World, 67 and elsewhere. R
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as we have described them, are conceptually articulate affairs.) And al-

though we needn’t have any particular idea of who served as the origin of
this bit of empirical knowledge, we are committed to thinking it was
someone (or several people) in particular who did.
Now we have seen that these perceptual episodes themselves have an
inherently individuating and first-personal input structure. They are not
experiences that merely happen to be linked with some agent: if I am the
original perceiver, then I must experience them as irreducibly mine, and
they are not shareable. If there were nobody who could claim a piece
of experiential knowledge from this first-personal perspective, then it
would not count as knowledge that we share and can make assertions
about at all. From an epistemological point of view, this means that em-
pirical assertions can be justified only to the extent that their asserters
have reason to be committed to the claim that these assertions terminate
in some particular speaker’s perceptual episodes. But if we could never
recognize, in language, other people’s discursive expressions of their
own, first-personal experiences, then such expressions could not func-
tion as discursive reasons in the game of giving and asking for reasons.
In that case, we would be left without any way to attach our edifice of
declarative assertions to the empirical world about which it is supposed
to make claims. In turn, this means that empirical discourse gets to
count as properly open to justification only to the extent that it has the
capacity to recognize discursive expressions of such first-personal expe-
riences.
To put the point another way, it is through observatives that individ-
ual experiences contribute to public discursive space. Observatives cre-
ate new epistemic responsibilities for everyone by expanding the space
of the known. Indeed, an entitled empirical claim can be thought of as
one that can trace its warrant to the kind of recognitive episodes ex-
pressed in observatives. Although individual empirical claims can be
warranted on grounds that don’t trace to an observative, such as abduc-
tive grounds, the totality of our empirical knowledge must all rest, glob-
ally and holistically, on observatives. Yet it is not enough that people be
able to express the content of perception in language in order for our
claim-making practices to be grounded in linguistically expressed rea-
sons. We must be able to distinguish, within language, between those
empirical claims that are merely inherited through the passing on of an S
inference or reassertion licenses, and those that function as the termina- R
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64 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tion of a set of claims in someone’s receptive contact with the external

world—between inferential commitments to the presence of a rabbit in a
bush and first-personal observations of the rabbit, for instance. This is
part and parcel of being able to critically assess empirical claims within
the space of reasons. Otherwise, we might just have an edifice of circu-
lating claims, without any linguistic means of accessing and marking the
essentially first-personal point of receptive contact between language
and the world. But this means that we must be able to use language to
give first-personal expression to perceptual episodes. In other words,
our language, insofar as it is used to make empirical claims, requires the
capacity to utter recognitives, because recognitives are the speech acts
that make explicit our first-personal experiential encounters with the
world.
It may seem that it is enough that we be able to declaratively report
upon our experiences, rather than expressing them with a recognitive.
But if a declarative such as “I see a rabbit” truly had no recognitive, prag-
matically first-personal component, then in effect we would be taking
a third-personal stance toward ourselves, and reporting on an experi-
ence “from the outside.” Such an assertion is the kind of thing that can
be translated into the third person and reasserted—or in Brandomian
terms, it issues a reassertion license. You can now assert, “Mark sees a
rabbit,” and this (again, to the extent that it is a pure declarative) will be
the same assertion. But if this were all we could do in language—that is,
make assertions that were agent-neutral in this way—then making such
assertions would not give expression to the termination of empirical
knowledge in a first-personal, owned experience: an experience that is
practically grasped as mine. To the extent that I give expression to that
when I say “I see a rabbit!,” I am not merely making a declarative, agent-
neutral report but uttering a recognitive, at least implicitly. And it is be-
cause we can recognize this pragmatic move in discourse that we count
as a discursive community whose members are speaking in a way that is
held accountable to the world.
But why, we might wonder, must we be able to give discursive expres-
sion to our recognitive episodes at all? Could we not anchor assertional
entitlement in acts of perceiving without giving the recognitive aspect of
that perception public expression? Not without relying upon the myth
of the given that Sellars notoriously exposed in Empiricism and the Phi- S
losophy of Mind. Minimally, avoiding this classic Sellarsian demon means R
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not treating any empirical epistemic accomplishment as in principle im-

mune from discursive examination, challenge, and discussion. But if
recognitive entitlement—the entitlement that comes from a receptive
first-personal encounter with the empirical world—plays a distinctive
role in justification, then this distinctiveness must itself be able to be
brought into the space of explicit critical examination within the game
of giving and asking for reasons. For instance, we must, at least some-
times, be able to challenge a claimed receptive entitlement. This requires
that our language have the resources for making recognitive discourse
explicit.
We conclude that any satisfactory account of language that takes prag-
matics as fundamental cannot be built upon narrow attention to asser-
tions. Indeed, the very practices of passing around commitments and
entitlements to assertions cannot themselves exist except in the context
of a richer set of linguistic practices. Specifically, we conclude that any
philosophical account of language that attends only to agent-neutral as-
sertions that have no essential voice will be insufficient. Recognitive dis-
course is a kind of discourse that is voiced and agent-relative in its input,
and it is constitutive of any language with the expressive capacity to
make meaningful empirical assertions. The subject who participates in
discourse concerning a public, empirical world is one who can speak in
and recognize the entitlement of the first-person voice.18
18. We have only argued that a language expressing empirical content—a language respon-
sive to an objective empirical world—must contain observatives. One might think there could
be, say, a language of pure mathematics. We don’t think so for several reasons. For one, we are
not convinced that any talk is genuinely contentful in holistic abstraction from empirical lan-
guage. For another, we are not sure that there could be such a thing as justification in mathe-
matics without the recognitive uptake of such facts as that this is a genuine proof.
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The Pragmatic Structure

of Objectivity
3.1 Observatives, Observation, and Answerability to the World

At the beginning of this book, we claimed that what we were ultimately
interested in was the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons, and
we suggested that the space of reasons could have a structure no less
rich than that of the space of discourse. Up to now we have kept our fo-
cus on language. However, we believe that our analysis of discursive
pragmatics in general, and of the observative in particular, has fairly di-
rect implications for analyses of reasoning and observation themselves.
There is a tight relationship between reasons and claims. Spelling out
an exact theory of this relationship would require a book unto itself, but
surely something like this is true: both reasons and claims can have con-
ceptual articulation and propositional structure, and both have norma-
tive force. Successful claims (whether truth-claims or claims upon our
actions, loyalties, or whatever) give us reasons (to believe, act, etc.), and
in turn, reasons make claims upon us. Spoken claims succeed in claim-
ing only insofar as they provide reasons, and reasons are the kinds of
things that we can express in claims. Perhaps not all reasons are of a sort
that could be translated into discursive claims, but surely lots of them
are, particularly including reasons for belief and inference.
Many mental events that provide reasons, including observing, com-
ing to believe, inferring, deciding, and so forth, are of a sort that can be
expressed in discursive claims. Indeed, post-Kantian philosophers such
as Sellars, Davidson, Brandom, and McDowell are quite comfortable un-
derstanding our capacity for conceptually articulate mental activity as S
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The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity 67
essentially parasitic upon our capacity to engage in similarly conceptu-

ally articulated discourse. Some claims must be spoken in order to do
the work they are supposed to do. There is no such thing as issuing a
mental imperative, at least not to someone other than oneself. But it
seems plausible to suppose that some reason-giving mental events can
be understood as having a pragmatic structure that mirrors the structure
that their expression would have. In these cases, we can use the same
name for the mental event as for its spoken correlate. A declarative men-
tal event would be an occurrent doxastic commitment to a declarative
truth-claim, for instance. When I come to believe that there is a rabbit in
the bush (as I often but not always do coincidentally with seeing the rab-
bit), I achieve a normative status that is implicitly agent-neutral. Even if
I do not share my new belief with anyone, and hence don’t actually try to
transform anyone else’s beliefs, I am still committed to a public truth
whose normative force has nothing to do with me personally—a truth
whose denial would be a mistake on anyone’s part. In other words, I en-
gage in a mental act with a structure analogous to the act of declaring.
At the end of the last chapter we argued that perceptual episodes—
like the observatives that gave expression to them—have an inherently
first-personal and agent-relative input structure. Our working hypothe-
sis is that the activity of observation should be understood as having a
pragmatic structure analogous to that of the observative that expresses
it; more generally, that episodes of recognition should be understood as
having a recognitive structure, as opposed to a declarative structure. We
think that understanding observation as a normatively structured activ-
ity, which takes an agent-relative, individuating, first-personal input and
achieves an agent-neutral status, can help clarify a set of important
philosophical puzzles and issues concerning the epistemological status
and function of this activity—that is, the activity of recognizing features
of the world that are sensuously received through our encounter with
them, in a way that grounds empirical belief and inference.
If observations have a recognitive structure analogous to that of ob-
servatives, then we can understand them as fully discursively and con-
ceptually articulated participants in the space of reasons, and yet as not
having the structure of declarative propositions. On the one hand, ob-
servations and their reports have full-fledged rational relations to be-
liefs, which they can license or contradict. Observations and observative S
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68 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
speech acts are, on our account, properly governed by the so-called con-
stitutive ideal of rationality1—they are held to the tribunal of the world
and embedded in the discursive structure of the space of reasons. Yet at
the same time, observations are not beliefs, and observatives are not
belief-reports; observations are not themselves adoptions of commit-
ments to declarative propositions, though they directly license such com-
mitments.
We all exhibit a solid practical skill at determining what follows ratio-
nally when we see a rabbit. To acknowledge this skill, we need not insist
on interpreting this event of seeing as one of becoming committed to
some particular declarative belief. Moreover, this skill is one that draws
essentially upon the conceptually articulated structure of our observa-
tion—the relationship between my recognition, “A rabbit!”, and my be-
lief that there is a rabbit in the bush is not mutely causal, but rather
clearly and intimately linked to the way my recognitional episode in-
vokes my use of discursive concepts such as ‘rabbit’.
In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars dealt the death blow
(in our opinion) to the so-called myth of the given by showing that ex-
periential states that are not themselves conceptually articulate can-
not ground inference and hence cannot function articulately within the
space of reasons. In the wake of this argument, many philosophers have
treated experience insofar as it can justify belief as having the form of
full-on propositional belief itself. For instance, Richard Manning claims
that “it is irrational to draw inferences from what one does not believe.”2
Likewise, Davidson famously claimed, “Nothing can count as a reason
for holding a belief except another belief.”3 Sellars himself encouraged
this commitment; he takes his arguments against the possibility of a
non-conceptually-articulate given that can ground inference as argu-
ments for the claim that only something with propositional form can
ground inference to a declarative proposition. Although our goal here is
not to give a close reading of Sellars’s texts, we claim that none of his ar-
guments against the given support this stronger conclusion. The famil-
1. See Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
2. Richard N. Manning, “Interpretations, Reasons and Facts,” Inquiry 46, no. 3 (2003):
346–376, 371. See also Barry Stroud, “Sense Experience and the Grounding of Thought,” in
Nicholas H. Smith, ed., Reading McDowell on Mind and World (New York: Routledge, 2002). S
3. Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Davidson, Subjec-
tive, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 137–158. R
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iar fact that practical reason always involves moves from the appropri-
ateness of a claim to the appropriateness of an action should already cast
into doubt the idea that the particular pragmatic and semantic form of a
normative consequence must be the same as that of its antecedent.
In casting doubt on the assumption that only commitments to declar-
atives can serve as reasons for commitments to declaratives (to translate
Davidson’s dictum into language more helpful for us), we are merely
opening a space for our argument about the structure of observation and
its relationship to empirical knowledge. We are certainly not claiming
that we have a full-blown theory of the rationality of such moves within
the space of reasons—not that philosophers have offered much in the
way of theories of material inference in any case. Despite this theoreti-
cal gap, we think that our pragmatic placement of observation reports
helps us coherently occupy a much-sought-after philosophical ground
between notoriously problematic positions.
Philosophers who believe that only propositionally structured beliefs
can serve as reasons for declarative claims face a dilemma: either the ac-
tual causal interactions between our sense organs and the world have no
rational relation whatsoever to the kind of experience that is caught up
in the space of reasons—in which case, as McDowell has often charged,
our beliefs are left “spinning in the void” without making proper contact
with the world that they are about—or we must say that somehow the
world is itself already prepackaged in the form of propositions, and that
perception is just a kind of reception of those propositions from the
world. Perception, on this account, somehow involves the absorption
from the world of fully formed declarative propositions, which seems to
commit us to a level of rationalist excess that makes many of us uncom-
fortable.4
Several philosophers have tried to find a middle ground between
“spinning in the void” and a propositionally prepackaged world by seek-
ing some sort of intermediate status for perceptual episodes. Frequently
this search turns into a quest to articulate a level of “nonconceptual con-
tent” taken in through perception.5 Such nonconceptual content is sup-
4. Indeed, in his repeated urging that the world is “what is the case,” McDowell comes close
to this sort of position. See Manning, “Interpretations, Reasons, and Facts.”
5. See for instance Tim Crane, “The Non-Conceptual Content of Experience,” in Crane, S
ed., The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 136–157; D. W. Hamlyn, “Perception, Sensation and Non-Conceptual Content,” Philo- R
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70 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
posed to serve as the bridge between the causal impact of the world and
the propositional attitudes, especially doxastic attitudes, which we form
on the basis of this impact; it is meant to provide the transition into the
space of reasons. As Michael Luntley puts it, “The idea of nonconceptual
content is required in order to make sense of the thought that experi-
ence is an openness to the world; that the world is delivered in experi-
ence and thereby impinges on the operation of concepts within the
space of reasons.”6 Here the content of perception is treated as transi-
tional or “proto-conceptual,” making contact with our conceptual ca-
pacities but falling short of having conceptual structure. A major point
to introducing such a layer of nonconceptual content is to take account
of the rationally relevant and yet receptive character of perception—the
sense in which it is “openness to the world”—that seems lost if we insist
with Davidson that nothing could be a reason for a belief except another
belief.
Such accounts of nonconceptual content suffer from at least two
problems, however. First, they are always at risk of raising the specter of
a “third man.” Given that it is difficult to understand how conceptual
judgment can be accountable to a world that is not itself already concep-
tually structured, it is equally difficult to understand how such concep-
tual judgment can be accountable to the nonconceptual contents of per-
ception. For that matter, it is also unclear how causal impacts on our
sense organs yield content that is “proto-conceptual.” Thus appeals to
nonconceptual content seem simply to double the original explanatory
conundrum.7 Second, these accounts generally leave open large ques-
sophical Quarterly 44 (1994): 139–153; and Christopher Peacocke, “Does Perception Have a
Nonconceptual Content?” Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001): 239–264.
6. Michael Luntley, abstract of “The World Delivered,” presented at the Space of Reasons
Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, July 2004.
7. The person who most directly and extensively grappled with this specific type of third-
man problem was Kant, who posited schemata as the ‘bridge’ between the brute manifold of in-
tuition and spontaneous discursive judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and
Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Where in the chain from the world
to judgment Kant first wants to introduce conceptual structure, and whether he indeed sticks
by his commitment to a level of content that serves as a bridge between the world and our judg-
ments, are questions that receive vigorous debate in the secondary literature. See for example
McDowell, “Having the World in View: Kant, Sellars, and Intentionality,” Journal of Philosophy
65 (1998): 431–450; and Richard N. Manning, “The Necessity of Receptivity,” in Rebecca S
Kukla, ed., Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 61–84. R
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tions about what kind of content they are pointing to. We know that it is
not conceptual content, but since we use concepts whenever we talk,
theorists of nonconceptual content understandably have a hard time ex-
plaining in any positive way what such content might be like. Thus
these accounts are often unsatisfying in remaining almost exclusively
negative. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy opens its sympathetic
entry on nonconceptual mental content by commenting, “The notion of
nonconceptual content is fundamentally contrastive.”)8 Such accounts
motivate themselves by correctly pointing at an important gap in our
philosophical story of the path from the world to judgment, but they of-
ten do no more than posit a ‘something’ that will close that gap.9
McDowell has also tried to understand perception as ‘in between’ the
brutely causal impact of the world on our sense organs and full-fledged
doxastic judgment. For him, perception directly engages our conceptual
faculties but falls short of belief. Like advocates of nonconceptual con-
tent, he too is motivated, not only by the gap that seemingly trou-
bles Davidson and similar figures, but by the need to capture the recep-
tive character of perception in contrast to the spontaneous character of
committed judgment. However, for McDowell, perception is not proto-
conceptual but proto-doxastic. This is different from the appeal to non-
conceptual content; his percepts are indeed conceptually articulated,
and indeed propositionally structured. Thus he does not have a third-
man problem, in the sense that it is clear how such percepts hook up
with the space of reasons. He holds on to the sensible idea that only con-
ceptually articulated experience could bear rational relations to concep-
tually articulated beliefs, while getting rid of the assumption that every-
thing conceptually articulated is a belief. We think that so far this is a
promising approach to a solution to the problem of rational responsive-
ness to the world.
Unfortunately, many commentators have been thwarted in their at-
tempts to make sense of these quasi-doxastic percepts—these mysteri-
ous half-breeds—in McDowell.10 He often seems to just assert the coher-
8. José Bermúdez, plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-nonconceptual/, accessed 10/10/07.

9. For example see William P. Alston, “Sellars and ‘The Myth of the Given’,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 65 (2002): 69–86; and Alston, “Back to the Theory of Appearing,”
Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 181–203. S
10. See for example Davidson, “Response to McDowell,” in The Philosophy of Donald David-
son, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); Manning, “Interpretations, Reasons, and R
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72 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ence of such an option without giving a positive explanation of what

perception is and how it works. Davidson is among those who have
been frustrated by this move, writing that “McDowell holds that what is
caused [by features of the world in perception] is not a belief, but a
propositional attitude for which we have no word,” and that it is “en-
tirely mysterious” what kind of ‘taking in’ of the world this constitutes.
He complains that McDowell “gives no explanation of why features
of the world cause the particular propositional attitude they do, nor of
why an attitude which has no subjective probability whatever can pro-
vide a reason for a positive belief.”11 In return, McDowell has repeatedly
punted the burden of proof.12
We agree that McDowell has not said enough about how perception
works to satisfy those who cannot share his sanguine silence. However,
we also think that the reason his proposal has seemed so baffling is that
everyone, including McDowell himself, has presumed that if what is ab-
sorbed in perception is not a full declarative judgment, but still engages
our concepts, then it must somehow be a proto-declarative. Indeed, like
Sellars, McDowell often simply equates the propositional and the con-
ceptual, presuming that insofar as our concepts are exercised in per-
ception, the form that perception takes must be propositional form.13
McDowell interprets perception as having the form of a declarative judg-
ment, only without the judging part. For McDowell, we perceive that the
cat is on the mat, etc.: “That things are thus and so is the conceptual
content of an experience.”14 Perceptual episodes must have proposi-
tional structure, and be “on their way” to being declarative commitments
to that propositional structure. All we add, somehow, when we commit
ourselves to our percepts in belief, is the commitment.
But it is not clear how to understand a belief as decomposable into a
propositionally structured part and a separate commitment part, and it
is hard to understand what either of these parts could be like on its own
without the other. This leaves it quite mysterious what kind of state
McDowell thinks we are in when we have taken in something that par-
Facts”; Stroud, “Sense Experience and the Grounding of Thought”; and Brandom, “Placing
McDowell’s Empiricism,” in Smith, ed., Reading McDowell.
11. Davidson, “Response to McDowell,” 107.
12. See for instance his responses to Brandom, Stroud, and others in Reading McDowell.
13. He has implied as much repeatedly, and he insisted on this particular commitment in S
conversation at the Space of Reasons Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, July 2004.
14. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26. R
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ticipates in the space of reasons and has propositional and conceptual

structure, but have not yet issued a judgment about it.
One of Kant’s most powerful and influential moves in the Critique of
Pure Reason was to understand concepts in terms of their possible roles
in judgments, rather than understanding judgments as concatenations
of concepts. His Table of Judgments gives the possible logical forms that
the activity of propositional judging can take, and his Table of Catego-
ries is derived from the Table of Judgments. For Kant, empirical con-
cepts are really rules for activities that essentially form a part of judg-
mental activities, which in turn take one of the forms outlined by the
Table of Judgments. McDowell gives no hint that he wishes to depart
from this core Kantian commitment to the priority of judgments over
concepts. In fact this move is one of the banners of those who share a
commitment to the usefulness of the space of reasons imagery, for all
their differences. Yet McDowell offers us no tools for understanding
what it means for the spontaneous activity of the concepts to be engaged
in perception, without this activity constituting judgment. He does not
provide any pragmatic story about what we can do with a proposition, in
the course of our epistemic inquiries, other than either declaring it (in
speech or thought) or refraining from declaring it, where the latter is
only negatively defined.15
Once we cease to presuppose that everything that has any conceptual
structure has the form of a declarative—that is, once we avoid this par-
ticular manifestation of the declarative fallacy—we open new room for
making an account like McDowell’s satisfying. If we understand obser-
vations as having the pragmatic structure given expression in observa-
tives, then we can hold on to several key results at once. Observatives di-
rectly express our receptive contact with the world, and yet they are
thoroughly embedded within the rational, discursive, inferential struc-
ture of the space of reasons. Hence they can provide reasons for belief
without being beliefs. Observations are, as McDowell insists, both con-
ceptually structured and non-inferentially acquired, and thus they do
15. This is not to say that we do not accept a fundamental insight behind Kant’s under-
standing of concepts in terms of their possible role in judgments rather than judgments as a
concatenation of concepts. The key here is Goethe’s point: in the beginning is the act. One can-
not understand a conceptually significant action by putting it together with the right glue, tak- S
ing concepts as functionally divorced from actions. The mistake is to assume that the only dis-
cursively significant type of action is judging. R
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74 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
not fall prey to the Sellarsian critique of the given. They are not the same
as doxastic commitments, even if they generally accompany such com-
mitments. To observe is not just to inherit entitlement to a belief, but
rather to recognize how things show up to me. I recognize what I see
with my concepts, and hence such recognitions already bear articulate ra-
tional relations to the rest of the space of reasons, including beliefs. (I
see a rabbit as a rabbit, embedded within my web of beliefs about rab-
bits.) But my observation is not itself the production of a propositional
judgment, nor does my expression of this observation in an observa-
tive give voice to one. (My observation has the form “A rabbit!,” is
not grounded in but rather entails beliefs such as “There is a rabbit
present.”)
Unlike McDowell, we do not claim that observations somehow in-
volve less commitment than do declaratively structured beliefs. So we
can avoid the objection that there is no way that something to which we
are not yet committed—for which we have “no subjective probability,”
as Davidson put it—could provide a reason for a belief. Observations, on
our account, are not beliefs that are missing something, but different
pragmatic events that are not themselves declarative judgments, even
though they commit us to truths. As they are for McDowell, observa-
tions are for us entries into declaratival judgment. However, their status
as such entries derives not from their being mere “petitions for judg-
ment,” as Brandom (glossing McDowell) puts it,16 but instead from the
fact that they serve as the direct point of receptive contact between us
and the world that is the tribunal of such judgments. Observations are
not “on their way” to being beliefs, and they are no less firmly planted
within the conceptually articulated space of reasons than are beliefs—
they have a different pragmatic structure altogether.
McDowell has accused Davidson, and by extension others who make
beliefs the only ground for beliefs, of descending into a coherentism
that leaves our beliefs without “friction” from the world that they are
about and to which they are accountable. In granting the world only
causal, arational efficacy in constituting our standing in the space of rea-
sons, Davidson does not seem to allow any moment at which that world
can show us what we must think about it. Davidson’s own insistence
16. Brandom, “Placing McDowell’s Empiricism,” 94–95. McDowell’s view here seems prima S
facie implausible. Perhaps when it merely appears to one that such and so we can see this as a
sort of petition. But when one sees, one would think the petition had already been granted. R
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upon the pivotal role of occasion sentences in anchoring interpreta-

tion, and with it the space of reasons as a whole, marks his own recog-
nition of the necessary role of receptivity in accountable knowledge. But
McDowell has plausibly argued that, if these receptive encounters are
merely causal, they cannot serve to add the necessary friction. If the
world merely causally produces full-fledged belief in us, then the causal
origin of such belief in the world seems to be neither here nor there,
epistemically speaking; the resulting beliefs, once we have them, seem
indistinguishable from any other beliefs and without any special features
that would let them serve as touchstones of empirical accountability.
In order to avoid coherentism, we need not only receptive contact
with the world, but special recognitive events: events that are conceptu-
ally structured and bear articulate rational relations to belief, but that
bear their recognitive character on their sleeve, as part of their norma-
tive structure and not merely as their causal origin. This is the analogue,
at the level of mental events, to the point we made about language at the
end of the last chapter. There we pointed out that in order for observa-
tive expressions to play their necessary role in the discursive game of
giving and asking for reasons, they had to express in language their dis-
tinctive, first-personal expressive structure. Here, the point is that in or-
der for observations themselves to ground inference and play a role in ra-
tional judgment, they must likewise display their recognitive structure.
We can put this McDowellian point in Kantian terms. Kant argued
that our concepts, which we spontaneously apply in judgment, are
“empty” without receptive intuition (just as intuition will be “blind” ex-
cept as synthesized under concepts).17 But if there were nothing inside
the space of reasons that marked when our conceptual judgments had di-
rectly receptive content, then the receptivity of intuition could play no
rational role in filling in our concepts, which would in effect remain
empty. The mere fact that the content of a conceptual judgment has its
causal origin in the world does not make our receptive responsiveness to
the world accessible to reason itself. What keeps our concepts from being
empty is not just that we are impacted by the world, but that this impact-
ing itself constitutes our recognizing when and how this is so. Hence this
recognitive function of reason is essential to its empirical meaningful-
ness and accountability.
S
17. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75. R
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76 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
We saw earlier that this recognitive character cannot be borne by the

semantics or the mere causal origin of a speech act or a propositional at-
titude, which is why Davidson’s assents to occasion sentences won’t do
the trick. McDowell’s proto-doxastic perceptual takings-in can be read
as his attempt to identify such a layer of recognitive events, and to
demarcate them not by their semantics (which they share with the judg-
ments they become) but by their pragmatics (they are missing spon-
taneous assent). Understanding this layer of recognitive events as ob-
servations with the normative structure of observatives—that is, with
essentially singular and receptive agent-relative inputs, and producing
agent-neutral outputs in the form of justifications for truth-claims and
beliefs—does a better job of filling this McDowellian niche. Such events
are essentially conceptually articulated and distinct from beliefs, and
they bear their receptivity on their sleeve: their receptive connection to
the encountered world plays a direct role in their pragmatic structure,
rather than needing a separate account. Like McDowell’s takings-in, they
are distinguished from beliefs by their pragmatics rather than their se-
mantics. But we find it implausible to claim that observation doesn’t in-
volve immediate (fallible, overridable) commitment to the truth or exis-
tence of its contents, and we think that McDowell has mislocated the
pragmatic difference he is looking for, perhaps because of his failure to
imagine a positive, non-declarative pragmatic structure for an event that
grounds empirical judgment.
Sellars was right to insist, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,
that observations and observation reports “do not rest on other proposi-
tions in the same way as other propositions rest on them.”18 Observatives
cannot, for instance, ever be inferences from declaratives (or from any-
thing else); their receptive structure rules this out. But Sellars was also
right that this does not imply that we can have them, or the knowledge
they yield, prior to or independent of all sorts of declarative, proposi-
tional knowledge and commitments that we have in place. It is only
once we inhabit the conceptually articulated space of reasons, which
surely includes being properly in the grip of all sorts of propositional be-
liefs, that we can be concept-users of the sort whose normative entitle-
18. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1997), §38 (emphasis added). S
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ments can be affected by interaction with the world, and hence who can
issue observatives.19
The activity of observing, or perceiving, is a substantive skill.20
Though falling short of offering a full theory of perception, we can say a
bit about this skill: an event occurs in the world and we perform an ac-
tion of looking at that event or at the objects involved in it. As many
neo-pragmatists have argued in detail, perceiving is no mere passive mir-
roring or being-pushed-about by the world. One deploys concepts, fo-
cuses attention, ignores much, highlights some, and articulates the re-
sult.21 But for all this complexity, observation is a matter of events in the
world licensing the actions of epistemic agents. One’s entitlement to an
observative arises, if it does, as a result of her normative achievement in
the act of perceiving.
Such a story requires that events in the world have normative sig-
nificance. But there is nothing in principle puzzling about events in the
natural world holding normative significance within our practices. That
a natural resource is in a particular place means, in the right context,
that I am entitled to take it; the violence of the storm constitutes a
ground for not allowing my daughter to play outside; the edges of the
pool table constitute the limits of a legal shot, etc. In all these cases, we
enable features of the world to have normative significance—to matter
to us in various ways—through our own engagement in normative prac-
tices that are essentially embedded in and responsible to various features
of their environments. The normative involvement of the world in our
practices is built into our running and driving on the world’s fields and
19. In Section I of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars says: “I presume that no
philosopher who has attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term,
immediacy, has intended to deny that there is a difference between inferring that something is
the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case. If the term ‘given’ referred merely to what is
observed as being observed, or, perhaps, to a proper subset of the things we are said to deter-
mine by observation, the existence of ‘data’ would be as non-controversial as the existence of
philosophical perplexities.” Sellars’s detailed discussion of the variety of types of interlinguistic
dependence and his argument that these distinctions make it possible, without regress, to be-
lieve that observation reports are dependent for their authority on the existence of other war-
ranted commitments occur in §§32–38.
20. For an excellent extended account of perception as a skill, which is reasonably compati-
ble with our views, see Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
21. For a nice discussion of this point see Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Ex-
plaining Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). S
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78 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
roads, sailing on its oceans, trading its objects, and so forth. We use
worldly objects directly in the practices to which they matter, including
in the game of giving and asking for reasons. The rabbit darting into the
bush, when related to my skillful perceptual activities in the right way, is
what legitimates my belief that there is a rabbit in the bush.
But if Davidson is right that only a belief can justify another belief, or
more generally if the space of reasons is no more than the space of
declaratives and their contents, then we have a serious problem—for the
world does not have beliefs, nor make assertions, nor contain proposi-
tions, whatever metaphors we might like to invoke. However, by making
room for observatives, we can claim that what we are open to, in obser-
vation, is the normatively significant events in the world that are caught
up in our perceptual activities. Observations are the activities through
which we engage with the elements of the world, the complex transi-
tions from the competent and interactive moving about of our body—
focusing eyes, picking things up, all the rest—to normative output. But
if it is true that our perceptions are recognitions and the observatives that
express them express recognitions, then we build receptivity right into
the structure of observation. Perceptual episodes are different from judg-
ments, but not because they are less conceptually articulated or inferen-
tially fecund. Rather, they do something different: they take up, ac-
knowledge, or recognize the normative significance of worldly events
and objects. They put us into singular, first-personal receptive contact
with the world and thereby render us answerable to it.
3.2 Intersubjectivity
Consider what the structure of knowledge would look like if agent-
relative entitlements could not give rise to agent-neutral commitments
and entitlements. (In fact, it is impossible to properly imagine such a
thing; some willing suspension of disbelief is required for this mental
exercise.) In this case, Jones’s agent-relative entitlement to P, based in his
observation that P, would have no normative implications for Smith’s re-
lationship to P. Smith could know that Jones has this status, and happily
go on either failing to believe P, or even believing not-P. Imagine Smith
asserting not-P to Jones’s face. Jones replies: “But I am entitled to P.”
Smith could then rightly return: “But this implies nothing for me.” To S
agree that no social constraint arises from an agent-relative entitlement R
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would be to patently deny the socially shared nature of our epistemic

projects.
We might instead suppose that the only way in which other people’s
observations can have normative epistemic consequences for me is by
way of theoretical inference: Smith observes that Jones is entitled to P,
and she believes that Jones is reliable. She concludes that P is true, and
that is her reason to believe P. But this analysis makes no room for the
crucial fact that, whatever other normative significance it has, Jones’s
commitment to the truth of P has the import of standing in opposition
to anyone’s not believing P, or believing not-P. Two agents in these posi-
tions are disagreeing, and argument or a change of belief is called for. For
this reason, the beliefs of others cannot simply serve as ‘natural’ evi-
dence for our own beliefs; rather, we must understand others’ beliefs as
making a normative claim upon us. What one says, in saying P, is that
anyone who will not accept P is wrong. It is precisely the agent-neutrality
of beliefs that allows such disagreements to be a coherent possibility.
Conversely, a practice in which agent-neutral entitlements were not
holistically rooted in agent-relative entitlements would be equally dis-
tant from language as we find it. Insofar as we constitute a discursive
community that empirically investigates a common world, we must meet
at least two criteria: First, each of our individual observational episodes
must have the sort of content that someone else could also take in
through observation. Though my recognition is mine, essentially, and
though what I recognize might be something that no one else ever in fact
recognizes, if it is a genuine empirical observation it is of something that
others could in principle observe as well.22 Second, our collective agent-
neutral entitlements must rest on a sufficient range of such reproducible
observations. In particular cases we can come to know something on the
basis of just one person’s having observed that it is the case. But the abil-
ity of such an unreproducible event to constitute agent-neutral knowl-
edge depends upon the existence of a vast range of other knowledge
22. One might worry that “internal” mental states are an important counterexample. For
just the sorts of reasons we are in the midst of discussing, we are committed to the view that we
can indeed observe one another’s mental states. Of course, there are probably important quali-
tative differences between the way that Rebecca observes that Mark believes that the policies of
the Bush administration are ill-considered, and the way that Mark observes that Mark believes
this. However, we are happy to accept the weak behaviorist thesis that we have non-inferential S
access to one another’s mental states. See Rebecca Kukla, “How to Get an Interpretivist Com-
mitted,” Protosociology 14, (2000): 180–22, for a defense of this view. R
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80 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
based in reproducible empirical observation. Or, to put the point suc-

cinctly, our public body of empirical knowledge rests not just on a foun-
dation of agent-neutral declaratives, but of widespread intersubjective
agreement.
Intersubjectivity is sometimes understood simply as universal agree-
ment. But this kind of intersubjectivity cannot bear any interesting con-
stitutive connection to objectivity—understood loosely, for the moment,
as answerability to a public world—for at least two reasons. First of all, a
claim can be objective even if not everyone assents to it—an objective
claim must demand universal acceptance, but this demand will rarely be
satisfied. Second, everyone may be wrong: we need to be able to forge a
meaningful distance between what everyone agrees to and what is the
case, in order for objectivity to have any bite at all. Surely, for example,
debates about the objectivity of a rash of UFO sightings are not capable
of being settled by a survey. In short, we want the relationship be-
tween objectivity and universal agreement to be structural and norma-
tive, rather than merely extensional.
However, we have the resources now for a richer account of inter-
subjectivity, which shows more promise for playing a constitutive role in
objectivity. Observative entitlements are intersubjective, not in the sense
that everyone has them (not everyone does), but in the sense that they
have essentially first-personal, singular, agent-relative inputs, yet their
output is public, such that others can come to be entitled to an observa-
tive with the same content. Later we will see that not all recognitives
share this intersubjectivity; it is distinctive of observatives, which voice
recognition of features of the public world. This is a kind of intersubjec-
tivity that, in our grid, has a distinctive box-2 pragmatic structure.
There is a widespread sense that understanding objectivity as depen-
dent upon intersubjectivity smacks of unsavory idealism or social con-
structivism. If intersubjectivity merely involves universal agreement,
then this worry is justified. But the kind of intersubjectivity that we have
built into the pragmatic possibility of objective claim-making—claim-
making that owes allegiance to the world—does not appear to raise any
such concerns. Indeed, it earns its subjectivity precisely by involving a
receptive encounter with the empirical world.
We pointed out earlier that lo-claims are never pure observatives. ‘Lo!’
serves not only to mark my own recognition, but to ostend that which I S
recognize. “Lo, a rabbit!” involves deixis: in making such an utterance, I R
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call upon or direct certain people—those to whom I am speaking—to

observe the rabbit as well. The appropriate response to the utterance
“Lo, a rabbit!” is not, then, merely to believe the consequent declarative,
but to look and see the rabbit for yourself. Thus lo-claims call people into
just those intersubjective practices of observation that constitute the
necessary framework supporting declarative truth-claiming and episte-
mic inquiry. In a lo-claim, we explicitly mark the intersubjective char-
acter of observatives by calling others to shared attention to a public
world. In Chapter 8 we return to this kind of intersubjective practice,
and argue that our ability to use speech acts like lo-claims, which call
others to direct their attention to a shared object, is essential to the con-
stitution of discursive communities.
3.3 Objectivity
Both declaratives and observatives must display fidelity to the objective
world if they are to be legitimate: our declaratives must be answerable to
this world, and our observatives must be responsive to it. The notion of
objectivity, however, is one of the most slippery and most multivalent in
the philosophical canon.
Many philosophers have approached the philosophical problem of the
nature of objectivity by offering a metaphysical account, in which they
describe or enumerate the kinds of things that count as objective, and
define objective claims as those that are about objective things.23 Such
metaphysical accounts have generally taken one of two forms. Some-
times they have tried to distinguish levels of reality, in an effort to pin
down the “really real.” So, perhaps, one might claim that values or so-
23. Such accounts show up in several philosophical domains. One version is the deter-
mined universal naturalistic reductionism of people like Peter Railton in ethics, David M.
Armstrong in metaphysics and epistemology, and Hartry Field in science; see Railton, “Moral
Realism,” Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 163–207; Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind
(New York: Routledge, 1993); Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2004); and Field, Science without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980). Others take an eliminativist approach following on the ex-
ample of Quine. Yet others acknowledge different metaphysical realms but assign them differ-
ent grades of objectivity, either by claiming that there are different senses of truth applying to
them, as Crispin Wright does in Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1992), or by simply offering alternative metaphysical accounts of the subject matter of S
non-objective discourse, as dualists do, for example David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In
Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). R
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82 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
cially emergent properties are not just figments of our imagination, but
that they are not the “really real” stuff either.
We will assert, dogmatically, that no one has been able to make this
notion of the “really real” remotely coherent or compelling, except per-
haps via eliminativist or reductionist moves. But if the really real is just
the real, then the objective is just everything, and there is nothing subjec-
tive, and no interesting distinction has been drawn. Other times, meta-
physical accounts identify the subjective with what’s “in the head” and
the objective with what’s “out there.” This is a fair enough distinction, as
long as we are willing to make all empirical psychology subjective and to
admit that lots of things are neither objective nor subjective since they
are not located at all (functions, waves of civic unrest, etc.). But it is cer-
tainly not satisfying as our only account of the distinction, for surely
there is an important sense in which we can perfectly well make ob-
jective (universally valid, empirical, suitably independent, etc.) claims
about psychological phenomena, and likewise various important senses
in which we want to be able to challenge the objectivity of claims that
have external objects as their topic.
We propose to try to understand objectivity the other way around, by
beginning with a pragmatic story about the nature of objective and sub-
jective claims rather than with a metaphysical story about the nature of
the referents of those claims. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have
shown how our notion of objectivity actually incorporates various com-
peting strands that do not fit together neatly, with different versions
of objectivity having greater grip at different historical moments.24 We
agree with Daston and Galison (though without committing ourselves
here to her particular historical analysis) that our common philosophi-
cal notion of objective claim-making is neither neat nor unified, but
rather is made up of sedimented layers of mismatched ideas. Pragmatic
analysis turns out to be useful in sorting some of these out.
Perhaps the most familiar first stab at a distinction between the two
kinds of claims is the one still ringing in our ears from when we teach
our introductory classes: an objective claim is supposed to be somehow
“true for everyone” or “universally true,” whereas subjective claims are
24. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books,
2007). See also Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies S
of Science 22 (1992): 597–613; and Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representa-
tions 40 (1992): 81–128. R
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“true for me” or “true for you.” Along with this stab goes the idea that
we can ask whether various domains of claims—especially moral or
other normative claims—are objective and “universal” or subjective and
just “true for the individual.” We have argued that truth-claims are by
their very nature claims with agent-neutral outputs—that part of what is
involved in making a truth-claim (and there are lots of other kinds of
claims to make, as we have already seen) is making a claim that creates
an agent-neutral entitlement, demanding of everyone, regardless of nor-
mative position, that he or she take up, reiterate, and use that claim.
Hence we would argue that the notion of a claim that is only “true for
the individual” is simply incoherent, and should be scrapped altogether.
Truth by its nature claims us indiscriminately, and truth-claims build in
a universal demand for acknowledgment, so if this is what we mean by
objectivity (and it is one thing we could mean), then all truth is objec-
tive.
The association of objective claims with agent-neutrality of output
and subjective claims with agent-relativity of output is one elegant way
of cashing out the intuition that the objective is the public: objective
claims make normative statuses and entitlements available to everyone.
Indeed, they ask, as a regulative ideal, that everyone take up these nor-
mative statuses and use these entitlements. All legitimate declaratives
and observatives are objective, in this sense, which is also the sense in
which they are about a public world—and notice that observatives have
this publicity and “aboutness” despite the agent-relativity of their in-
puts. Imperatives, on the other hand, are not public in this sense.
But we can equally articulate a different notion of objectivity that atta-
ches it to agent-neutrality of input rather than output. In this sense, the
objectivity of a claim resides in something like the democratic availabil-
ity of its appropriate production—anyone has a claim on this claim, for
the entitlement does not amount to any special normative feature of the
speaker. Clearly some such notion is presupposed by the fundamental
methodological assumption of science that all results are reproducible
by any rational inquirer with the relevant equipment. In contrast, a
speech act is ‘subjective’ if its entitlement is indexed to its speaker. In
this case, the status of a speech act as objective or subjective does not
turn on the truth being claimed, but on the sort of entitlement one can
have to it. On this understanding, declaratives are again objective, but S
now observatives are not. Although observatives make a public truth ac- R
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84 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
cessible, and are therefore objective in the first sense, they do not do so
by making their input entitlement publicly accessible. They are expres-
sions of essentially private, first-personal recognitions that cannot, even
in principle, be democratically shared. An observative is my speech act,
my accomplishment, in a way that a declarative is not, and it is, in that
sense, subjective. Similarly, the fact—expressed by a declarative—that
two people are legally married is objective, while the performative—“I
hereby pronounce you husband and wife”—is subjective, even though it
licenses the former declarative.
So far we have marshaled notions such as universality, publicity, and
democratic accessibility in our discussion of different senses of objec-
tivity. But equally time-honored is the attempt to understand objective
claims as those that are accountable to, governed by, or responsive to the
world (and indeed this is the prethematized notion of objectivity that we
have appealed to in this book so far). Objective claims, we often say, ex-
press independent truths, or truths that are grounded in empirical experi-
ence, or held to the tribunal of the world, as McDowell would say. It is
interesting to notice that this is prima facie a quite distinct sense of ob-
jectivity from either of the above. Although epistemology often presup-
poses that they go together, we would need to offer a specific argument
to show that there is some essential link between agent-neutrality of ei-
ther entitlement or import, on the one hand, and accountability to the
world, on the other.25
Our conceptual framework allows us to give a succinct account of
what it is for a claim to be empirical, or receptively responsive to the
world: An empirical claim is one that can trace its warrant to or be inval-
idated by an observative. Although an individual empirical claim can be
warranted without being traceable to an observative, the totality of our
empirical knowledge must rest, globally and holistically, on observa-
tives. Because we have left the scope of observatives open, this definition
likewise leaves the scope of the empirical open. We do not come down
on whether you can make empirical claims about values, meanings, ab-
stract entities, or any of the many other domains that have come under
contest in this regard. We see this as an advantage of our account. We are
happy to say that we can define the notion of the empirical in advance of
haggling over its particular contents. To associate objective claims with
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empirical claims is to capture the intuition that objective claims are re-
sponsive to experience, which is another useful notion of objectivity.
But the empiricality or responsiveness of a claim is not, we can now
see, actually the same thing as the independence of the truth it asserts. We
can say that the object of a claim is independent of that claim when there
are no constitutive connections between the making of the claim and the
correctness of what is claimed. Austinian performatives paradigmati-
cally fail this particular independence test: in those cases it is the appro-
priate making of the claim that makes the claim true. More subtly, claims
about social proprieties fail this particular independence test; while no
one claim about a social propriety makes that social propriety hold or
fail, it could not be the case that everyone’s claims about social propri-
eties were systematically wrong. There is a constitutive connection be-
tween the claims we make about social proprieties and the social propri-
eties themselves. Sometimes we understand a claim as objective insofar
as its object is independent, in this sense of independence. There is a
sense in which the rules of gravity are ‘objective’ while the rules of base-
ball are not. Hence we have found yet another locally reasonable sense
of objectivity—and surely we could find yet more reasonable ways of de-
fining objectivity, and independence too.
Both objectivity-as-empiricality and objectivity-as-independence
could be taken as (different) glosses on what we mean when we say that
our objective claims “owe allegiance to the world,” as McDowell would
say. McDowell takes care to provide a picture in which there is “external
constraint” on thought. Yet the phrase “external constraint” seems to do
double duty for him as a marker of both receptivity and independence.
For instance, against those who would accuse him of an idealism that
fails to give the world the proper independence, he argues that there is an
inherently receptive character to the engagement of our spontaneous
conceptual faculties. In order to counter the charge that we are con-
demned to “frictionless spinning in the void,” he reminds us that “to
acknowledge the required external constraint, we need to appeal to re-
ceptivity.” Indeed, “The fact that experience is passive, a matter of re-
ceptivity in operation, should assure us that we have all the external
constraint we can reasonably want. The constraint comes from outside
thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable.”26
But there are, we can now see, many sorts of external constraint we S
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86 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
could (and do) reasonably want. On the one hand, we can make the
epistemological demand that our claims be justifiable in terms of empiri-
cal evidence. This is what McDowell apparently wants when he speaks
of the essential role of receptivity in judgment. On the other hand, when
he emphasizes the need for an external tribunal of our claims, he seems
to be calling for some combination of the need for our claims to have
universal output (and hence to be about a public world) and the need
for them to be constitutively independent of linguistic propriety (and
hence to be about an independent world). These are metaphysical rather
than epistemological constraints. That Smith hit a home run yesterday
can certainly be a deliverance of receptivity, but the existence of such
deliverances will do nothing to assuage those social idealists who want
to think of all of objective reality as constitutively dependent on social
conventions in the way that this fact is.
What McDowell really seems to be looking for is a multifaceted ac-
count of objectivity that illuminates how receptivity and independence
are both compatible with the engagement of our spontaneous concep-
tual capacities in experience and judgment. Now there certainly are
important categories of claims for which empiricality, intersubjective
availability of warrant, universality of consequent, and objectivity-as-
independence are ineliminably intertwined. As well, language and
thought must be able to sustain both receptive, empirical claims and
claims about independent states of affairs in order for any part of lan-
guage or thinking to be contentful—and this is a point that McDowell
has done a wonderful job of bringing home. But these dimensions of ob-
jectivity are nonetheless distinct, and play importantly different roles
within the normative pragmatics of discourse.
In this chapter we have explored a number of ways in which we dis-
tort the space of reasons if we understand it as in the first instance a
space of inferentially articulated declarative claims. Instead, elements
of this space have a rich and varied pragmatic structure. Authors like
McDowell have worked hard to cure us of our attraction to any picture
of the space of reasons that leaves it cut off from a world that can caus-
ally impinge upon us, deliver itself to us through our receptivity, or en-
joy robust independence from our social norms. We suggest that the
pragmatic framework that we have introduced can help alleviate the fear
that we face a bridge between mind and world that philosophical expla- S
nation cannot cross. R
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Anticlimactic Interlude:
Why Performatives Are Not
That Important to Us
By ‘performatives’, we mean what Austin meant in the first part of How

to Do Things with Words—that is, roughly, speech acts that in their very
utterance serve to enact, institute, or make true what they assert. Con-
sider, for example, a typical utterance of “The meeting is adjourned!”
The fact that this speech act is performed—in the appropriate context,
by someone of the relevant social position, etc.—constitutes the fact that
the meeting is adjourned. There is no antecedent reality being described
here. Rather, the speaker is creating the relevant reality through a discur-
sive performance.1 Other examples that have become philosophical clas-
sics include acts of promising, baptizing, and marrying. Such performa-
tives have been analytic philosophers’ favorite examples of utterances
whose entitlement conditions are more normatively complex than the
possession of epistemic warrant.
The meaning of the term ‘performative’ notoriously drifts around in
Austin’s classic work on the pragmatics of speech acts. In particular, he
begins by defining ‘performatives’ as a pragmatic subclass of speech acts
but ends by focusing on the fact that all speech acts have a performative
dimension and force. Indeed, performative force has functioned as the
1. Of course on any account there will be matters of degree. A lower-court decision to the
effect of “the law implies that such and so,” or a referee’s determination in a sport in which ap-
peals are possible, does not in itself—even with the right background context—institute the
truth. But it is nonetheless partially constitutive. It is, in some clear enough intuitive sense, pro-
ductive of the truth that it asserts rather than merely reflective of some preexisting truth. What-
ever other worries one has about the category, it is a simplification to think of the class of per- S
formatives as the class of utterances which by themselves constitute truths. The concerns we
raise in this chapter apply independently of this complication. R
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88 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
main conceptual tool for categorizing speech acts by their pragmatic

structure. Be that as it may, we reserve the term ‘Austinian performatives’
for the kind of speech acts that Austin marks out at the start of How to
Do Things with Words, namely speech acts that constitute truths, not by
causing a change in states of affairs, but by instituting new states of af-
fairs in and through the very act of their utterance.
Such speech acts—and the paradigmatic examples we have inherited
from Austin, such as baptisms and commitment ceremonies—would ap-
pear on first blush to fit into box 2 of our grid. As Austin made clear, the
entitlement to performatives depends on specificities of the normative
position of their speaker, in the context of the social scenario in which
the speech act occurs. Thus performatives seem to be classic examples of
acts with agent-relative inputs. Only a religious or state authority can
perform a marriage by pronouncing it; only the chair of a meeting can
adjourn a meeting by asserting that it is adjourned. Meanwhile, it seems
fairly natural to say that what these speech acts primarily do is to make
true what they assert, and hence that they have agent-neutral outputs—
in fact, it is this constitutive function that has drawn them together as a
salient class of speech acts. Thus the functional effect of the utterance
“The meeting is adjourned” seems to be to make what it pronounces—
that the meeting is adjourned—true, not just for you, but simpliciter. Be-
cause they are so familiar to us as examples of speech acts with a differ-
ent pragmatic structure from declaratives, one is tempted to think of
them as the paradigmatic examples of box-2 speech acts. But there are at
least two reasons why performatives aren’t as neat or as illuminating as
examples of box-2 speech acts as are observatives.
First of all, as Austin makes explicit, performatives manage to func-
tion in the way that they do because of their function within social ritual
or ceremony. A pronouncement of marriage does something only be-
cause we have established the social institution of marriage and a reper-
toire of ceremonies for initiating people into it, and what it does is estab-
lish a normative status defined within this social institution. Were there
not established, conventionally agreed upon rituals and institutions of
marriage, there would be nothing that it would be to be married, and
nothing enacted by this speech act. Because performatives are so deeply
dependent upon “convention” and “ceremony,” to use Austin’s favor-
ite terms, they create a sense that such speech acts are somehow less S
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Anticlimactic Interlude 89
grounded in reality, less substantial, or less central to the core of episte-

mology and the functioning of language than are declaratives.
Whether or not this intuition can be made precise while retaining
plausibility, it is common in analytic philosophy to somehow feel that
such speech acts are, if not outright gimmicks or tricks, at least not
tied as firmly to the objective world as are “central” or “traditional” ele-
ments of language. Even though the truths performatives produce are
agent-neutral, public truths, they are truths that are contingent upon our
chosen conventions and practices in a special way—they seem to have
“mere” conventions at their core. They are things we make true, not
truths drawn forth by hard epistemic labor, or truths revealing the struc-
ture of independent reality. (Or, again, so we suspect the intuition runs.)
Likewise, their distinctive pragmatic functioning is unlikely to unseat
for us the intuition that basically, at its core, the pragmatics of declara-
tives is the pragmatics of language that we need to be worried about.
One might well argue that no speech act—declarative, observative, or
other—can in fact have any pragmatic function or performative force ab-
stracted from the rituals and conventions that support the functioning of
speech (even beyond the obviously conventional rules of syntax and se-
mantics). But regardless of how successful such an argument would be if
it were developed in detail, there seems to be no question but that the le-
gitimacy of observatives is tied to objective facts that enjoy a kind of ro-
bust independence from social ceremonies and conventions of just the
sort that performatives lack. Hence observatives cannot be written off as
‘gimmick sentences’, whose universal purport and status as truth-claims
is dependent upon a trick of pragmatics. Observatives, which mark a re-
ceptive recognition, stand for their legitimacy before the tribunal of the
independent world in as straightforward a way as any declarative; no
plausible epistemology of our knowledge of the external world is going
to be accomplished by assigning observation a second-class status. At-
tention to observatives, then, makes it clear(er) that what distinguishes
box-2 from box-1 speech acts is not the distinction between noting and
making, nor between objective truth and social convention, nor between
receptivity and spontaneity, but rather the pragmatic structure of the en-
titlement itself.
This point is merely pedagogical, of course. That they are less useful
examples for the philosophical lessons we hope to draw from the func- S
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tion of box-2 structures is no point against the category of performatives

per se, nor an argument that they are not genuine denizens of this box.
But there is a second, deeper reason for rejecting performatives as the
paradigmatic examples of box-2 speech acts. While it is true that perfor-
matives ‘make things true’, and in many cases that this making-true is
their most characteristic performative function, it is not as easy to pin
down the essential pragmatic output of a performative—that structure in
virtue of which we classify it as a performative—as it is to pin down the
output of a declarative, an imperative, or an observative.
We have emphasized the fact that our boxes capture normative transi-
tional structures, and that typical acts exhibit more than one such struc-
ture. And yet, declaratives, imperatives, and observatives are categories
of speech acts brought together by a characteristic normative transi-
tion. Performatives do not seem to share any such single characteristic
normative function. On the one hand, plenty of classic performatives
arguably have agent-relative outputs that are more essential to their
functioning than any making-true function. So, for instance, consider
another Austinian chestnut, namely promising. When Rebecca says to
Mark, “I promise to have a draft of this section done by Monday,” she in-
deed makes it true that a promise now has been made—the utterance
does enact its own truth. But it is at least as central to the function of
what she has done that she has undertaken an agent-relative commit-
ment to Mark to produce the draft on time, and has entitled Mark spe-
cifically to expect her to do so and to hold her accountable for producing
the draft. Nothing is a promise that doesn’t lead to (defeasible) obliga-
tions on the part of the promiser and entitlements on the part of the
promisee, both of which are agent-relative normative outputs of the
promise.2
2. It is essential to promises that they generate these particular agent-relative normative
proprieties in a particular relation to one another. One has not understood promising if one
merely understands that this person now is obliged to do x, and this other person entitled to
hold them to doing x. These could be, as it were, free-standing norms. (That parents are
obliged to feed their children and children are entitled to demand this of parents does not im-
ply that a promise was made.) What makes something a promise is that the promiser is obliged
to the promisee, and that the promisee is entitled, by and through recognizing the promise, to hold
the promiser not merely to the act but to her promise. This dialogical, second-personal structure
of promising goes missing in Gary Watson’s pragmatic analysis of the distinction between as-
serting (declaring) and promising, in which he explicitly analyzes promises as having (what we S
would call) an agent-neutral output; see Gary Watson, “Asserting and Promising,” Philosophi-
cal Studies 117 (2004): 57–77. R
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So such performatives arguably belong in box 4, along with impera-

tives, instead of in box 2. After all, all speech acts institute truths—if
nothing else, the truth that they have been performed, and other infer-
entially and materially related truths. Hence, on a second pass, it seems
that performatives do not form a category that maps neatly onto our
grid, since some performatives reside most centrally in box 2 and some
in box 4; performatives appear to be distinguished by the way they enact
social statuses rather than by a distinctive pragmatic structure of the sort
we are discussing.
But once we notice this, we also notice that seemingly typical box-2
performatives, such as marriage pronouncements, have not only agent-
neutral but also agent-relative effects. In addition to making it true that
two people are married, marriage pronouncements also impose clear, in-
stitutionally defined commitments and entitlements (as well as subtler,
more implicit ones) upon these two people, as well as agent-relative re-
quirements on others to recognize and respect the marriage in various,
differential ways. (The normative force of the marriage for the spouses’
employers, who now have a new person to whom they owe benefits, is
different from what it is for their parents, who now have a new member
of the family, and so on.) Such agent-relative effects seem as essential to
the function of the pronouncement as is the making-true of the public
fact of marriage. Indeed, there wouldn’t be much point to all the fuss
about marriage if engaging in it first and foremost added a truth to the
universe.
Likewise, box-4 performatives such as acts of promising produce
agent-neutral outputs: not only do they make new truths, but, for in-
stance, they make it the case that everyone is now entitled to treat the
promiser as bound by her promise, even though the person(s) to whom
the promise is made will also have a special entitlement to hold her to
the promise. Thus it is starting to look as if all performatives, though
uniformly agent-relative in input, will have a complex mix of agent-
relative and agent-neutral outputs, and hence will not fit neatly into ei-
ther box 2 or box 4.
The best we can say, perhaps, is that a given performative may be pri-
marily a box-2 or a box-4 utterance, depending on the centrality of its
various outputs to its pragmatic functioning. Some performatives have
no clear priority in either direction: arguably, it is equally central to the S
act of adjourning a meeting, for example, that we make it the case that R
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92 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
the meeting is over (an agent-neutral output), that no more motions

can arise (also an agent-neutral output), that the chair no longer has the
authority to call on speakers (an agent-relative output), and that the
minute-taker need not continue to write down what people are saying
(also an agent-relative output).
All speech acts have some combination of agent-relative and agent-
neutral effects: Mark’s declaration that Emma gets out of school at 3:15
p.m. not only has agent-neutral outputs in virtue of being a truth-claim,
but imposes an agent-relative burden on Rebecca to help finish this writ-
ing session in time for Mark to pick up Emma, and so on. Rebecca’s
imperatival command that Mark revise his example has as a conse-
quence the universally available truth that she commanded this, etc. In
Chapter 1 we dealt with this problem by pointing out that we could dis-
tinguish, roughly but robustly, between the outputs that are part of the
functional structure of a speech act and those that are accidental effects
of it. So perhaps we should be no more disturbed by the apparently
“mixed” character of performatives than we are in these other cases.
The problem with performatives, though, is that the distinction be-
tween essential and accidental pragmatic effects does not seem to be
nearly as intuitive or as vivid. It seems that performatives are especially
messy in this way; that is, it is much harder than usual to distinguish
which elements of their pragmatic functioning are essential to their
structure and identity as speech acts. To return to the marriage example:
Is it essential or accidental to the pragmatic functioning of the pro-
nouncement of marriage that, for instance, the taxation status of part-
ners now changes, or that the partners have new rights to make difficult
decisions regarding one another’s health and welfare, or that the partners
must be taken—by family members, and by the society at large—as gen-
uine rights-and-responsibilities-bearing members of each other’s fami-
lies? It is because the answers to these questions are not clear that there
is so much to argue about in terms of what’s at stake in granting same-
sex couples the right to marry. Indeed, in the case of performatives, the
pragmatic essences and consequences of speech acts are often up for ac-
tive social negotiation.3
Perhaps there is a systematic reason for this inherent messiness, for it
S
3. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge,
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seems that it is a fairly direct product of the dependence of performa-

tives upon a wide variety of social conventions and ceremonies. A per-
formative exists only insofar as it is placed as a move within a web of
rituals and normative practices, and these webs are often thoroughly ho-
listic, without neat centers or peripheries. There is no good answer to
the question of how much of such a web must be in place in order to
make possible a given type of speech act. Elaborate, multifaceted, politi-
cally charged institutions with vast numbers of implicit and explicit
rules are just the sorts of things that support the possibility of performa-
tive speech acts, and they are also just the sorts of things whose bound-
aries, essences, and criteria of individuation are dynamic, contestable,
and not determinate in advance of particular pragmatic and political
struggles to establish or broaden them. There’s no fact of the matter as to
which normative conditions, entitlements, and effects within such insti-
tutions are robust across context and which are changeable, prior to ac-
tual attempts to insist upon or change them. (Again, the current fight
over the meaning and possibilities of same-sex marriages is an excellent
case in point.) Thus it is in the nature of performatives not to be neatly
parsable along the lines demarcated by our grid—and this is so because
of the nature of social institutions and rituals themselves.4
The failure of these speech acts to fall neatly into one box or another
is no criticism of the analytical framework we are advocating (nor, of
course, is it a criticism of performatives themselves). We have already
noted that individual speech acts can exhibit more than one of the nor-
mative pragmatic structures. In what follows we argue that all speech
acts exhibit more than one. Thus, the point of the grid is not to sort
speech acts into four mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories, but
rather to isolate four distinct types of normative structure that can be
present in, and constitutive of, a speech act. In some cases, one nor-
mative structure is more central to the nature of a particular act in par-
ticular ways, but others are always present. The case of Austinian perfor-
matives shows that in some utterances, multiple pragmatic normative
4. In contrast, many imperatives—“Shut the door,” “Please hand me the pen,” etc.—have
well-defined functions that don’t rely essentially on the particularities of any such rich and con-
testable institutions, even though what they effect is a thoroughly social change in status. Like-
wise, observatives, like declaratives, function to note features of the world, and although they S
are enabled by various social rituals, this particular function is essential to them in a way that is
robust across background social context. R
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94 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
dimensions are present, and there is no precise or determinate answer

to the question of which are most central. But in every case, including
the case of performatives, we can gain clarity about the nature of the
speech act in question (in part) by becoming clear on which of these
structures are present, in which specific ways, and in what relation to
others.
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Prescriptives and the

Metaphysics of Ought-Claims
Let us return to our original typology. When we last left it, we had filled
it in as indicated in Figure 5.
In this chapter we will explore the remaining empty box, namely box
3. A box-3 speech act would have an agent-neutral input and an agent-
relative output: it would draw upon a public entitlement in order to ef-
fect a normative transition in someone (or some group of people) with a
particular normative status. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, we will ar-
gue that a paradigmatic type of deontic claim belongs in box 3, namely, a
claim that prescribes an action for a person or a group of people, such as
“Rebecca ought to hurry up and finish a draft of this chapter,” or “Cana-
dian voters should send Stephen Harper packing in the next election.”
In order to distinguish such claims from other types of deontic claims
(such as ought-to-be claims: “There ought to be universal health insur-
ance in the United States”), and for purposes of terminological elegance,
we will call such claims “prescriptives.” Although we don’t really make
use of this, we understand ‘prescribe’ here in a broadened sense: a pre-
scriptive can also say something about what someone is entitled to do,
etc. (“Mark and Rebecca are allowed to spend another month working
on this chapter.”) A prescriptive is simply a speech act that attributes a
deontic status to someone or some group of people. In this chapter, we
explore the pragmatic structure of prescriptives, and we argue that they
belong (partially) in box 3.
In essence, we will argue that prescriptives are a species of truth-
claim; they articulate truths about the deontic status of some agent or S
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agents (or perhaps even all agents), and in doing so they prescribe ac-
tions for those agents. We think that it is a strength of our account that
this proposal sounds anticlimactic. Once we delve into the pragmatic
structure of such truth-claims, however, we will show that this decep-
tively simple analysis enables us to solve—or, perhaps more accurately,
to dissolve—some persistent puzzles that have troubled metaethicists.
We end this chapter with an analysis of a philosophically important sub-
category of prescriptives, namely, categorical imperatives.
Of course, we are not the first to defend the idea that we can solve or
dissolve key problems in metaethics by attending to the pragmatics of
Input
Output
1 2
of taste, baptisms,
some recognitives,
i.e. observatives
3 4
(promises,
invitations,
reproaches...),
ostensions
Figure 5 S
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Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims 97
deontic claims, and in particular to their prescribing function. Indeed,

this is the core tenet of ‘prescriptivism’, one of the time-honored meta-
ethical positions. Prescriptivists (whom we will discuss in detail later in
this chapter) share with us a central tenet: many of the problems that
have appeared intractable in metaethics originate from the undefended
assumption that deontic claims should be understood as declarative ut-
terances, and that their philosophical distinctiveness is located entirely
in their semantics; in other words, metaethicists have been crippled by
the declarative fallacy. In contrast, prescriptivists propose—as we do—
that we can only understand deontic claims by considering their prag-
matic structure. Furthermore, as we will see, prescriptivists agree with
us that part of what is distinctive about this pragmatic structure is its
agent-relative component: prescriptives prescribe an action for someone,
and hence surely their pragmatic import for that person is different from
what it is for other people. Declarative claims have no analogous agent-
relative import; therefore, prescriptivists conclude, prescriptives must
not be declaratives.
However, we will argue that classical prescriptivism has been an ul-
timately unsuccessful research program because the only framework
available to the philosophical imagination for understanding a speech
act as non-declarative and agent-relative has been that provided by im-
perative speech. Accordingly, prescriptivists have more or less identified
prescriptives with funny kinds of imperatives. We will argue that this
equation is unviable. Prescriptives are truth-claims, and not imperatives.
But their distinctive structure could not be seen clearly until the dis-
tinction between inputs and outputs was articulated. With our typology
in place, we can both accommodate the insights of prescriptivism and
avoid its fatal pitfalls.
5.1 The Pragmatics of Prescriptives

Our proposal, again, is to understand prescriptives as truth-claims that
are about the commitments of those to whom they prescribe actions.
That is, when I say, “Stephen Harper ought to replace his minister of the
environment,” I am claiming that it is true of Stephen Harper that he has
a commitment—whether or not he recognizes this commitment—to re-
place his minister of the environment. This commitment is among the S
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98 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
normative statuses that carve out his position in the space of reasons.1
My claim is true just in case Harper really has this commitment, and
whether he does or not is a fact about the structure of the public world.
The intuitive, commonsense appeal of this analysis is so strong that
we do not think we need to defend it, as long as we can show that it
yields helpful payoffs. Indeed, we think that the only reason to deny this
obvious reading—and to produce the rather tortured accounts of ought-
talk that have shaped much of the metaethics literature2—is if one be-
lieves, as many have, that any account that analyzes deontic claims as
truth-claims is hopeless from the get-go. There have been two reasons,
traditionally, why philosophers have thought this.
The first is most classically and starkly summed up in J. L. Mackie’s
“argument from queerness”: Mackie associates the idea that moral claims
are truth-claims with the requirement that there be ‘objective values’
about which the truth-claims are made. But, he argues, “if there were ob-
jective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a
very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.”3
The second is that it has seemed to many that, if prescriptives were
truth-claims, then they would be paradoxically severed from motiva-
tion. According to most philosophers, beliefs are distinct from desires,
or motivating states, and truth-claims are the kinds of things we believe.
Hence if prescriptives are truth-claims, it seems that we can believe them
to be true without necessarily being motivated to act as they prescribe—
we could, for instance, believe that it’s true that we ought not to swindle
little old ladies out of their life savings, without this belief giving us any
motivating reason not to do so. But this has seemed to misconstrue the
essence of such claims, which appear to be inherently motivating.4 It is
1. Notice that our proposal draws no distinction between moral oughts, instrumental
oughts, and any other kind that may come along; the distinctiveness of moral ought talk is
mostly beyond the bounds of this book, although as we mentioned we will come to categorical
imperatives later. Moral ought-claims, on our reading, are claims about moral commitments—
about what it is morally good or right to do, whatever that turns out to mean.
2. For instance, see R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1968); and J. E. J. Altham, “The Legacy of Emotivism,” in Fact, Science, and Morality, ed. Gra-
ham MacDonald and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
3. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), 38.
4. Many authors have taken up this worry, which we discuss in detail later in this chapter.
Important examples include Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), and
David McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Philippa Foot embraced the sev- S
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precisely this problem that has led philosophers to seek to understand

moral language as having a pragmatic form other than that of a truth-
claim, and has given birth to expressivism, prescriptivism, and kindred
positions.
The problem of motivation is highly relevant for us, and we return to
it later in this chapter. We believe that one of the most powerful payoffs
of our conceptual apparatus is that it allows us to solve this metaethical
dilemma, and show how a claim can both be a truth-claim and essen-
tially provide reasons for action. In contrast, we can quickly dispense
with Mackie’s version of the problem of queerness. In order for a claim
to have a truth-value, it must be able to correspond, or fail to corre-
spond, to some objective state of affairs in the public world. But Mackie’s
argument presupposes that, in order for this to be so, the words in
the claim must correspond to object-like entities in the world. This is
the persistent and normally unarticulated philosophical intuition that
Derrida, reading Heidegger, has termed the “metaphysics of presence.”5
But one need not delve into the moral domain to see that this assump-
tion is ungrounded. We make perfectly reasonable truth-claims all the
time about events and states of affairs that cannot easily be reduced to
any component object-like entities that serve as the referents of our
words: we speak about intentions, elections, waves of civic unrest, holi-
days, selection pressures, etc. Unless Mackie is promoting a radical re-
ductionist revision of language that would deny truth-claim status to
most of our folk psychological, scientific, and everyday talk along with
our moral talk (which he never suggests), there seems to be no reason at
all to assume that values in particular must correspond to object-like en-
tities if we are to be able to make truth-claims about them.
One might grant this general point and still be impressed by the argu-
ment from queerness if one thinks that it is particularly hard to see how
deontic claims could describe nice, regular (though perhaps not radi-
cally naturalizable) states of affairs—if one feels that these states of af-
fairs would need to have ‘spooky’ properties. As Mackie puts it, “Plato’s
forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to
erance of moral belief from moral motivation in her classic “Morality as a System of Hypotheti-
cal Imperatives,” Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 305–316.
5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974). S
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100 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the
knower with both a direction and an overriding motive . . . similarly,
if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possi-
ble) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built
into it.”6
But notice that our account already manages to avoid such worries. If
prescriptives are about normative statuses such as commitments, then
they require a metaphysics no richer or more mysterious than that re-
quired by any of our other claims about normative statuses, including
our claims about what we are committed or entitled to believe or infer.
Indeed, our everyday ontology is riddled with normative statuses; we
appeal to them when we talk about legal contracts, the implications of a
scientific result, the structure of a philosophical argument, and so forth.
While there may be some who still dream of the eventual reduction of
all normative talk to ‘naturalized’ talk, our equation of prescriptives
with truth-claims makes them rest on entities and states no spookier
or more immune from naturalization than the rest of such talk. And
commitments and entitlements—the topic of prescriptives—do in some
obvious but non-pernicious sense ‘have not-to-be-doneness (and to-be-
doneness, and allowed-to-be-doneness) built into them’: this is just what
a commitment is—it is what-is-to-be-done. Its to-be-doneness does not
need to be understood as some extra property clinging to it, some sticky
motivational jelly coating it; to think this would be to conceive commit-
ments as objects differentiated by their predicates, rather than as states of
affairs, and thereby to succumb, again, to the metaphysics of presence.
Therefore there is no metaphysical barrier to our treating prescriptives
as truth-claims.7 Thus the ground is cleared for us to begin our prag-
matic analysis of these claims and their distinctive function.
In Chapter 1 we argued that truth-claims are entitled by access to fea-

tures of the public, shared world, and hence that their input is necessar-
ily agent-neutral. Nothing can be true “for me” but not “for you”; this is
essential to truth and to our ability to reason and communicate about a
shared world. Prescriptives are no exception; if it is true that Stephen
6. Mackie, Ethics, 40.

7. Notice also that we can remain completely neutral on questions such as whether norma- S
tive statuses are ‘socially constructed’. Our ought-claims have unproblematic references insofar
as there really are normative statuses, regardless of how they got there. R
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Harper ought to replace his minister of the environment, then it is true

“for everyone” that this is so, and one’s entitlement to the claim is con-
stituted by access to facts about the world, rather than on specific fea-
tures of one’s normative standing. So prescriptives, like all truth-claims,
have agent-neutral inputs. This is not to be confused with the thesis, de-
fended by Hare and others, that oughts are based on universal princi-
ples. The reasons for an ought-claim may be as particularist and context-
specific as we like, but if it is a true claim, then it describes a public fact,
and entitlement to it is agent-neutral.
We also argued in Chapter 1 that the utterance of a legitimate truth-
claim, by putting this agent-neutral fact into public social space, makes
it a defect in anyone else in the discursive community not to share in this
entitlement, albeit perhaps a completely exculpable defect of ignorance;
such a person does not know what ‘we’ know. Again, prescriptives are
no exception: like all truth-claims, they strive for universal recogni-
tion and uptake, and to the extent that they are legitimate, it is a defect
not to give them this uptake. Since this effect is agent-neutral, we can
say that prescriptives always and essentially have an important agent-
neutral output. At least one of their central functions belongs in box 1.
Indeed, this all amounts to saying that prescriptives serve a perfectly
healthy declarative function.
However—and here is where things get interesting—they have an-
other essential output as well. For when failing to acknowledge a com-
mitment becomes a defect, this is a very different transformation for the
person whose commitment this is than it is for everyone else. There is a
world of difference between recognizing that Stephen Harper is commit-
ted to x (or ought to do x) and recognizing that I (who am thankfully
not Stephen Harper) am committed to x (or ought to do x). Recog-
nizing a truth about (someone else’s) commitments is like recognizing
any other fact; it commits us to taking account of this fact in our beliefs,
inferences, and behavior. We give proper uptake to this commitment
by acknowledging this truth. But recognizing that I, first-personally, am
committed to x is essentially a matter of practically acknowledging that I
am bound to do x. Of course I still may not want to do x, or my reasons
to do x may be trumped by reasons to do conflicting things, and so forth.
But I literally have not understood the force of the truth-claim if I do not
give uptake to the fact that I am committed to doing x. If I acknowledge S
the truth of a prescriptive that is targeted at me, but somehow deny that R
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102 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
it makes any claim on me to follow its prescription for action, then either
I don’t understand what I am acknowledging, or I don’t identify, first-
personally, with the person whose commitment it is.8
John Perry’s famous argument for the essential indexical showed that
no set of categorical propositions could capture the practical inferential
content of “I am here”—a content without which no knowledge is de-
ployable.9 Likewise, no set of categorical propositions can capture our
placement within the space of reasons, as bearers of particular commit-
ments and entitlements. In order for my commitments and entitlements
to exert governing force upon my practices, I must recognize that these
are mine. I must grasp not only the shape of the normative web of com-
mitments and entitlements, and not only the ways in which new speech
acts change this web, but also where I am located within it—I must
know which commitments and entitlements are mine and which new
claims demand uptake from me. This perspectival grasp of the space of
reasons is a logical condition for any of these statuses making a differ-
ence to me at all. I must not only recognize my commitments and
entitlements, but also have practical, perspectival uptake of the fact that
they are mine—that they commit and entitle me.
When language is functioning ideally, then, the person whose com-
mitments are targeted by a prescriptive will undergo an agent-relative
transformation that others are not called upon to undergo: she will rec-
ognize herself as bound to do what the prescriptive prescribes (whether
that recognition takes the form of doing it, making excuses for not doing
it, feeling guilty for not doing it, etc.). No one else but she is called upon
to do this by the prescriptive. The prescriptive calls to everyone, agent-
neutrally, to recognize the truth of the claim it makes, but it also calls to
her to give first-personal practical recognition of the claims her commit-
ments make upon her. This is an agent-relative output of the prescrip-
tive, whose utterance is still agent-neutrally entitled. While only I am
practically claimed by my commitments, anyone who has access to the
truth is entitled to note them. Thus this function of the prescriptive has
an agent-neutral input and an agent-relative output, and it belongs in
box 3. Hence our grid now appears as in Figure 6.
8. For instance, I might acknowledge the truth of the claim that anyone who has a drinking
problem should seek professional help, but not recognize that it is really I who have a drinking S
problem.
9. John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs 12 (1979): 3–21. R
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Furthermore, the prescriptive always has this distinctive output for

those whose normative status it describes. For as we saw in Chapter 1,
truth-claims seek, in the ideal, to receive uptake from everyone. But this
will always include the person whose commitments the prescriptive de-
scribes, and it will always be the case that appropriate uptake, in this
person’s case, takes this special form. We have said that uttering a pre-
scriptive turns it into a defect not to recognize the relevant commit-
ments. Accordingly, when it is your commitments that are being de-
scribed, it becomes a defect for you not to give recognitive uptake to the
commitments you have. But this is a very different kind of defect from
the kind that others suffer if they merely fail to acknowledge a truth-
Input
Output
1 2
of taste, baptisms,
some recognitives,
i.e. observatives
3 4
(promises,
invitations,
reproaches...),
ostensions
S
Figure 6 R
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104 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
claim. Others suffer an epistemic defect, and lack entitlement to beliefs

to which they would ideally be entitled. You, on the other hand, suffer a
practical defect: your actions are not governed in the right way by the
commitments you have, because you fail to recognize these commit-
ments.
Merely uttering a prescriptive does not generally give someone a com-
mitment that he did not already have. Normally, whether Mark’s com-
mitment to x is a moral commitment to act rightly or a prudential com-
mitment to act sensibly, the true claim that Mark ought to x reflects
rather than constitutes the commitment he already has. We have all
sorts of commitments and entitlements that we do not know about, and
our not knowing about them does not lessen their reality, any more than
it lessens my entitlement to the money left to me in a relative’s will if I
don’t know about it. And here we can note a remarkable disanalogy be-
tween doxastic and practical normative statuses: if I do not know of
good reasons for believing a claim, I am not committed or entitled to that
belief, and this is so even if I am lacking those reasons only because of a
defect, such as ignorance. Consider the claim that mitosis is a form of re-
production. The claim is true, and I ought to have reasons to believe it.
It’s common knowledge, after all. But if I have managed to remain igno-
rant of these reasons, then I am not committed to the belief. It’s not as
though I have the doxastic commitment sitting inside me but just don’t
know about it—rather, I get the commitment (and the entitlement) once
I grasp the reasons.10 Epistemic commitments are produced by epistemic
events, such as discovering reasons. Although we could probably invent
recherché Austinian counterexamples, practical commitments and enti-
tlements generally don’t work this way. I have them regardless of my
epistemic stance toward them.
This gives us another way of getting at the difference between the
agent-neutral and the agent-relative outputs of a prescriptive. Imagine
that I say, truthfully, “Stephen Harper ought to replace his minister of the
environment,” and imagine also that disturbingly few people hear and
accept my claim, despite my backing it up with solid arguments and evi-
dence. It now becomes a defect not to acknowledge that Stephen Harper
10. One reason that Brandom has confused some readers is that he often speaks as if infer-
ential entitlements are automatically transmitted when someone makes a claim, even to people S
who have no way of knowing about the claim. But we have not been using the term this way in
this book. R
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ought to replace his minister of the environment. What sort of defect is

this? For all persons other than Stephen Harper who fail to accept my
claim, they fail to have a commitment that they should have. They ought
to be committed to this claim, but they simply are not. The commitment
is missing. Likewise, given their recalcitrance, they would be unjustified
in using the claim in inference or acting on it in any way. Stephen
Harper, in contrast, is defective in failing to give first-personal, practical
recognition to a commitment that he really does have. As long as he does
not fire his minister, he is falling short of living up to one of his practical
commitments, whether or not he recognizes that he has this commit-
ment. The prescriptive thus seeks to produce (doxastic) commitments or
entitlements in third-party listeners, but to induce recognition of (practi-
cal) normative statuses in those to whom it applies.11 (Normally, as we
discussed in Chapter 1, the form that the recognition of a practical com-
mitment will take is simply performance of the action we are committed
to performing. But this is not always the case: you might recognize that
you have a commitment but also that you have a stronger one that con-
flicts with it, etc.) This difference between the output of prescriptives
and that of other declaratives underscores the prescriptive’s box-3 status.
5.2 Four Ways of Telling Someone What to Do

We have seen that prescriptives always have both agent-neutral and
agent-relative outputs; they necessarily enact both box-1 and box-3
functions. Their box-3 function is to call upon someone to recognize her
commitments, which involves practically, first-personally recognizing
the normative claim they make on her actions. There are in fact several
different ways in which you can be discursively called upon to act on
your commitments.
Consider first the distinction between prescriptives that are spoken in
the third and in the second person, at the level of their surface grammar.
For instance, consider the difference between the claims “Scott ought to
lose some weight” and “You ought to lose some weight” (said to Scott).
In the first case, I might utter the claim with no expectation that Scott
11. If, on the other hand, the prescriptive was about theoretical commitments to start
with—i.e., if someone told me, “You ought to know that mitosis is a form of reproduction”— S
then the prescriptive might both create the commitment and demand recognition of it at the
same time. R
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106 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
will ever know I did so. In this case, presumably, the primary purpose of
the speech act is simply to declare a fact about what Scott ought to do. I
hope to convince the person to whom I am speaking (presumably not
Scott) that something is true of Scott.
Now because it is in the nature of truth-claims to have agent-neutral
outputs, and to strive, in the ideal, for universal uptake, my utterance
also seeks uptake from Scott, in some attenuated sense. Furthermore,
should my claim reach Scott, and should he acknowledge its truth, the
shift in his normative status would be quite different from the shift in
my conversational partner’s normative status, for the reasons we have
seen: acknowledgment of this truth on Scott’s part would require a first-
personal, practical recognition of his commitment to lose weight and
its claim upon his actions. (Colloquially, he would have to recognize,
“That’s me they are talking about! I’m the one who has to lose weight.”)
Hence my third-personal utterance has both agent-neutral and agent-
relative outputs. However, at a concrete communicative level, the im-
portance of its box-1, declarative function far outstrips that of its periph-
eral (yet ineliminable) box-3 function. Although my claim has special
normative implications for Scott, it is a stretch here to say that I am tell-
ing Scott what to do.
Let’s turn to the second case. This utterance, “You should lose some
weight,” makes no sense unless I am speaking to Scott and expect him to
hear my claim. I am still making a truth-claim—I am purporting to say
something true about Scott’s commitments—and so for Scott to accept
my claim, he must take up an agent-neutral commitment to this truth.
In this, he is like any other listener. Yet it is clear that in this case the pri-
mary social purpose of my utterance is not to convince Scott of the
agent-neutral truth of this claim, but to make him recognize the distinc-
tive weight (so to speak) that it has for him. I seek to induce in him prac-
tical, first-personal uptake of the force of his commitment. In this case,
the box-3 function of the prescriptive takes center stage.
In principle, this is not a deep difference. Both utterances are pre-
scriptives with their characteristic box-1 and box-3 functions; the differ-
ence is one of social emphasis and expectations. But the second-personal
prescriptives seem (in most cases) to share an ostensive function with
the ‘Lo!’ utterances of Chapter 2 (“Lo, a rabbit!,” etc.). Remember that
in such speech acts we not only utter an observative that gives recog- S
nitive expression to our first-personal experience, but we also ostend R
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that which we observe. While observatives, we said, have agent-neutral

outputs, the ostensive function that often accompanies them has an
agent-relative output; it can be understood only as directed at those who
are in a position to appropriately direct their attention, and it asks noth-
ing of other people, even in the ideal. In the case of second-personal
prescriptives, we rarely utter them for the mere purpose of declaring a
truth, which incidentally happens to be about the person we are talking
to.12 Rather, we speak in order to call that person’s attention to the norm
that binds him. If I tell Scott, “You need to lose weight,” I do not order
him to lose weight, but neither do I merely inform him of a truth—I
ostend his normative status, which will make a practical claim on his ac-
tions once he recognizes it. So whereas my third-personal prescriptive
had agent-relative normative implications for Scott, my second-personal
prescriptive further demands of him that he attend to and appropriately
recognize his normative situation.
There is a subtle but from our point of view crucial distinction be-
tween such exhibitions of a norm, on the one hand, and the attempt to
hold someone to following the norm, on the other hand. Surface gram-
mar is exceptionally slippery and unreliable here, but in the most literal
cases, “You ought to lose weight” is importantly different in its discur-
sive function from “Please lose weight!,” which is our third and most di-
rect way of telling someone what to do. The latter is a box-4 speech
act such as an entreaty or an imperative, and it holds the other to a
norm rather than merely ostending that norm.13 On our account, such a
speech act had better be different from the first, since the first, being a
prescriptive, belongs in box 3, and the second belongs in box 4.
Since “You ought to lose weight” is a truth-claim, anyone who has ac-
cess to the truth that Scott ought to lose weight is entitled to utter it to
Scott. In other words, its input is agent-neutral. It may be very rude for
various people to tell Scott this—as we discussed in Chapter 1, there are
various levels of social normativity, and not every utterance that is dis-
12. When people excuse giving all sorts of tactless advice by saying “I am just telling the
truth,” we take them to be either lying or lacking a fairly basic understanding of conversational
pragmatics.
13. In Chapter 1 we pointed out that imperatives are not the only box-4 speech acts
through which we make agent-relative claims upon one another: we can also invite, promise,
entreat, etc. What is important for us here, however, is the distinction between agent-neutrally S
entitled exhibitions of a norm, on the one hand, and second-personal, agent-relative holdings,
on the other. R
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108 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
cursively entitled is socially appropriate. However, qua truth-claim, I

will be discursively entitled to this utterance as long as I am entitled to
believe its truth. While I may well inappropriately hurt Scott’s feelings
by calling his attention to this truth, or violate other social norms gov-
erning speech, my utterance cannot be accused of pragmatic misfire at
the level of its structural discursive function. On the other hand, I may
have no standing whatsoever to tell Scott to lose weight, and hence the
utterance, “Please lose weight!” may well pragmatically misfire, no mat-
ter how politely I say it. It is contestable who has the standing to ask
Scott to lose weight—his doctor and his spouse, probably, and per-
haps his children. In the United States, some employers have taken
themselves to be so entitled. But in any case, such an utterance, like all
box-4 speech acts, is grounded in an agent-relative entitlement. I must be
someone with the right sort of authority and standing in order to be en-
titled to ask this of Scott. My knowing that he should lose weight and
my wishing that he would, even for his own sake, is not enough. This re-
quest not only directs Scott’s attention to his normative commitment,
but it seeks to hold him to that commitment, and only someone with the
right kind of normative relationship to Scott has any status as an entitled
holder of this sort.
In both cases, I say something in the hope that it will make Scott take
himself as bound to lose weight. When I utter the prescriptive, I call
Scott’s attention to his normative status, in the hope that this status itself
will exert force over his actions. When I utter the request, I try to use my
normative position in order to exert force over Scott’s actions. I am, in ef-
fect, asking Scott to lose weight for me, or out of recognition of my au-
thority, although presumably a large part of my entitlement to make this
request is based in facts about his actual need to lose weight. In The Sec-
ond-Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall opens with the distinction be-
tween telling someone that she ought to stop stepping on your foot by
calling attention to the moral benefits of ending your pain, and telling
her to please get off your foot, speaking as the one whose foot is being
stepped on, to the one who is doing the stepping.14 While Darwall’s anal-
ysis of this distinction differs from ours (as will become apparent later in
this chapter and in Chapters 7 and 8), the example works nicely for our
S
14. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). R
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purposes. The first utterance is agent-neutral in its entitlement: anyone

who witnessed the foot-stepping could have told her she ought to get off
your foot, and their entitlement would have been just the same. But you
have special normative standing as person being stepped on when it
comes to asking her to get off your foot. In the first case you try to make
the norm itself guide the stepper’s actions, and in the second case you try
to guide her actions by holding her to the norm.
In practice, it is often hard not to smuggle a subtle holding into a second-
personal prescriptive; when I point out an ‘ought’ to someone I am al-
most inevitably heard as requesting that she obey it, rather than as
merely exhibiting its salience so that it can do its own normative work.
Conversely, when I entreat or command you to act as you ought, it
would normally be very odd for me to do so without trying to direct
your attention to the fact that you ought to act in this way. That is, when
I hold you to your commitments, I do not usually just request that you
do what you were bound to do anyhow; instead, I direct your attention
to the norm that binds you and ask that you acknowledge its force. As
we have seen repeatedly, speech acts frequently combine several norma-
tive functions. An utterance such as “Don’t you think you owe your fa-
ther an apology?” will often serve to make a prescriptive truth-claim, di-
rect your attention to the binding force of your commitment, and hold
you to that commitment, all at the same time.
Subtle as it may often be in practice, we think that the distinction
between entitlements to prescriptives and entitlements to holdings is
philosophically and ethically important. Margaret Little has given a care-
ful philosophical analysis of how various kinds of intimacies enable us
to make different sorts of claims upon one another.15 She has worked to
separate the fact that someone ought to do x from another person’s enti-
tlement to ask her to do x, and in turn, she has distinguished various
modalities of holdings (commands, entreaties, etc.) and their distinctive
entitlements. Especially in the domain of duties involving intimacies of
the body, Little argues, our entitlements to hold others to their duties in
various ways will depend on the specificity of our relationships to them.
She offers the following sorts of examples: there may be cases where I
ought to have sex with a stranger—when I find him perfectly attractive,
S
15. See especially Little’s forthcoming Intimate Assistance: Rethinking Abortion in Morality
and Law. R
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110 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
there are condoms available, and it is his dying wish, perhaps. But even
in such a case, the stranger has no standing to demand that I do as I
ought. It is simply beyond the purview of his entitlement to order me to
honor this duty, no matter how nicely he puts it (though he may invite
me to do so).
Little argues that abortion is a domain marked by such intimate duties
and likewise by such shades of entitlement. There are cases in which my
having an abortion would be a callous and morally inappropriate act, for
instance if I get pregnant intentionally and have plenty of financial re-
sources, but decide later that I want to have an abortion just for the
spiteful satisfaction of disappointing my mother. But even in such a case,
she claims, random people (not to mention the law) have no standing to
hold me to gestating against my will. While they would state a truth if
they said I ought not to have an abortion, they would overstep their enti-
tlement if they ordered or even asked me not to. Close friends and family
may have the standing needed to gently hold me to my duty to gestate,
for instance through a Strawsonian reactive attitude that shames me; yet
they still do not have the entitlement to order me to gestate.16
This distinction between prescriptive truth-claims and holdings with
agent-relative entitlements is inchoately reflected in the common (and
nearly incoherent) opinion that ‘abortion is wrong’ but ‘it’s nobody’s
business to judge’ women who have abortions. If abortion is wrong, then
in fact it is everybody’s “business” to judge that a woman who has one
has done something wrong—this is an example of the agent-neutrality
of the entitlements of truth-claims. Yet it might be nobody’s business (or
at least no stranger’s or government’s business) to hold a woman to her
commitment not to abort. We all know that the space of the legal should
never extend as far as the space of the moral; we can now state precisely
one reason why this is so. It is not just that people should be given some
latitude to behave immorally in some ways. Laws hold us to acting in
certain ways, and the mere fact that a prescriptive is true doesn’t entitle a
corresponding state-issued holding. (What does entitle a state-issued
holding is a difficult and important question indeed; much as we hope to
delve into it eventually, we are not going to address it here.)
16. Such shades of holding are examined in detail, in ways that are relevant to our project, S
by Coleen Macnamara in “Beyond Praise and Blame: A Theory of Holding Others Responsible”
(Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2005). R
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So far, we have noted three ways that an utterance may produce pres-
sure on someone, say Ella, to act as she ought:
1. A third-personal prescriptive calls upon everyone to acknowledge
a truth about Ella’s commitments, and thereby calls upon Ella to
give first-personal uptake to these commitments.
2. A second-personal prescriptive seeks to induce such first-personal
uptake in Ella by calling her attention to her commitments and
displaying their force.
3. An imperative (or entreaty, etc.) holds Ella to acting in accordance
with her commitments.
Even though the imperative belongs in box 4, and has an agent-relative
input, it is a distinctive kind of holding that inherits some of the ground-
ing in facts about the world enjoyed by prescriptives. For notice that this
imperative seeks to hold Ella to a commitment that she was bound by
anyhow. The imperative, if it is legitimate, may make Ella especially be-
holden to the speaker for upholding her commitments, but it does not
create the commitments in the first place. As someone entitled to the im-
perative—Ella’s mother or spiritual counselor, perhaps—I am in a spe-
cial position that allows me to make her responsible to me for upholding
her commitments, in addition to the impersonal responsibility she al-
ready has; to put this the other way around, if Ella fails to live up to her
commitments, she will now have failed me and not just failed to do as
she ought. (The stereotype has it that Jewish mothers are particularly
good at marshaling this particular normative tool.) But no matter what
my relation to Ella, the content of my imperative is justified by the facts
about Ella’s commitments. My standing does not add to or create this con-
tent; it merely enables me to demand Ella’s uptake of it.
Let’s call such an imperative an alethic imperative. An alethic impera-
tive holds its target responsible for living up to commitments that she al-
ready has.17 That is, an alethic imperative is one that demands that some-
one do something that she is independently bound to do given true facts
about the world. (We could, of course, similarly have alethic entreaties,
alethic suggestions, alethic permittings, and other varieties of alethic
holdings, in all of which we hold someone responsible for living up to
S
17. See Macnamara, “Beyond Praise and Blame,” for a development of this notion of holding-
responsible. R
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112 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
preexisting normative statuses. For purposes of parsimony, we will stick

to the consideration of imperatives for the rest of this discussion, with
the understanding that the generalization to other modalities of holding
is trivial.)
All imperatives whose deontic content is also the content of a true
prescriptive will be alethic imperatives: if it’s true that you ought to do x,
then an imperative of the form “Do x!” will be an alethic imperative.
Conversely, for every alethic imperative, there is a corresponding pre-
scriptive with the same deontic content: If, when I tell you to do x, it was
already independently true that you were committed to doing x, then
it was also already true that you ought to do x.18 (On the other hand, to
repeat, the mere existence of a true prescriptive does not on its own
guarantee anyone’s—not to mention everyone’s—entitlement to a cor-
responding alethic imperative. Special normative standing is required
before one is entitled to an alethic imperative, regardless of the truth of
the corresponding prescriptive.) The relationship between alethic hold-
ings and the prescriptives that share their deontic content (“Please lose
some weight!” and “You should lose some weight”) is analogous to the
relationship between observatives and declaratives that commit us to the
same sets of beliefs (“Lo, fat Scott!” and “Scott is fat.”): in both cases, the
two speech acts share the same output, but they differ with respect to
the agent-neutrality or agent-relativity of their input.
Yet not all imperatives (entreaties, etc.) are alethic. Many imperatives
are what we can call constative: they seek to create a new commitment
through their utterance where none existed before. Normally, if a colo-
nel orders a private to drop and give her twenty push-ups, the private
thereby becomes committed to doing so—however, there is no sense in
which the private already ought to do the push-ups in advance of the or-
der. In such a case, the legitimate order constitutes a new duty. Consta-
tive holdings litter our interactions: when we appropriately ask or tell
one another to pass the salt, practice the same piano piece one more
time, report to duty at 0600 hours, or welcome a speaker with a round of
applause, we use our normative standing to hold people to actions they
were not otherwise committed to performing. If such an imperative is le-
gitimate, it will make a new prescriptive true: once you have asked me to
18. This may be a good place to point out that our account does not preclude the existence S
of moral dilemmas. Perhaps we can be truly committed to conflicting actions, and hence sub-
ject to conflicting oughts. R
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pass the salt, assuming it’s a reasonable request, then I ought to pass it.
But your utterance here tells me what to do by making it so that I should
do it, rather than by holding me responsible for living up to commit-
ments I already have.19
Hence we have seen four pragmatically distinct kinds of speech acts
that call upon someone to do something:
1. Third-personal prescriptives (which belong in box 1 and box 3,
but in which the box-1 function dominates).
2. Second-personal prescriptives (which belong in box 1 and box 3,
but in which the box-3 function dominates).
3. Alethic holdings (which belong in box 4 but are grounded in true
prescriptives).
4. Constative holdings (which belong in box 4 but can make new
prescriptives true).
5.3 Two Alternative Accounts

In this section we turn to influential attempts to understand ought-
claims as having a distinctive pragmatic structure: R. M. Hare’s clas-
sic version of prescriptivism, in which he understands prescriptives as
odd sorts of universalized imperatives; and J. E. J. Altham’s analysis
of moral judgments as ‘besires’, especially as filtered through Michael
Smith’s more widely read discussion of besires.20 Both these accounts
share with ours the insight that deontic claims cannot be understood
simply as declarative judgments because they inherently have a distinc-
tive practical import for the person whose ‘oughts’ they concern. Both
also share with us a refusal, in rejecting the idea that such judgments are
declarative, to simply place them outside the space of articulate dis-
course, as did the ‘Boo/Yay’ emotivists such as A. J. Ayer and C. L.
19. We can rig an example in which an imperative seems to function constatively even
though it demands that someone do something they ought to do anyhow. I might tell my son to
go play at the neighbor’s house, not because I think he has an independent duty to do so, but
just because I want him out of my hair for a couple of hours. As his parent, I have the authority
to order him to do this. Unbeknownst to me, perhaps, my son has already promised that neigh-
bor that he would come over and visit that evening. In this case, he already had a duty to visit.
However, my order does not seek to hold him to that duty, but rather to his new duty to do as
his parent commanded. In this case, my imperative seems best classed as constative, even S
though it holds him to do what he was obligated to do anyhow.
20. Hare, Language of Morals; Altham, “Legacy of Emotivism;” Smith, Moral Problem. R
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114 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Stevenson.21 Here we hope to show that our analysis is more elegant

than these two kindred accounts and better avoids classic metaethical
paradoxes.
R. M. Hare was impressed by the fact that, like traditional imperatives,

moral language, including ought-claims, primarily guided action rather
than belief. Because he presumed that truth-claims were to be equated
with declaratives, and because analyses of moral judgments as declara-
tives seemed unable to capture their prescriptive force, he concluded
that moral judgments could not be truth-claims. Instead, he sought to
understand them as a peculiar, broadened form of imperatives, which
for him formed the only familiar pragmatic category of speech acts with
prescriptive force. Although Hare’s account is out of date and not really a
player in contemporary debates, his idea that prescriptives should be
understood as more similar to imperatives than to declaratives contin-
ues to have substantial influence in metaethics. From our point of view,
Hare is exactly half right: prescriptives—or at least prescriptives in their
distinctive box-3 function—share an agent-neutral input with declara-
tives, but an agent-relative output with imperatives. We hope to show
that our account enables us to make sense, in a way that Hare was not in
a position to do, of both the analogy between prescriptives and impera-
tives and the places where this analogy breaks down.
For Hare, ought-claims, like imperatives, have prescriptive rather
than declarative force: “Their primary function is not to give informa-
tion; it is to prescribe or advise or instruct.” According to him, prescrip-
tives manage to provide information only insofar as they depend upon
our understanding which background facts must be true in order for
them to make sense. However, he claims, they are distinguished from
regular imperatives by their (implicit or explicit) appeal to a universal
rule. In his view, whenever we say ‘ought’, we are “invoking some gen-
eral principle . . . by uttering [an ought] we seem to imply (in a loose
sense) that there is some principle that we are invoking—though it may
not be at once clear, even to us, exactly what this principle is.” He claims
that a truly universal imperative would just be an ought.22
In trying to explain how prescriptives are distinct from regular imper-
21. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Penguin, 2001); C. L. Stevenson, Eth- S
ics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).
22. Hare, Language of Morals, 159, 156, 178. R
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atives by appeal to some kind of ‘universality’ or ‘generality’, Hare ap-

pears to be using an attenuated conceptual toolbox to try to capture the
agent-neutrality of the input of prescriptives, by finding this universality
at the level of their justification rather than at the level of their prag-
matic function. For otherwise his appeal to general principles is really
quite mysterious. Especially given that Hare, like us, does not restrict
himself to moral ‘oughts’, why in the world would he think that oughts
are more grounded in universal principles than are imperatives? Hare’s
only argument is that even when no such rule is explicit, we can always
ask for the reason for an ought-claim in order to draw it out. To use his
example, if I tell you, “You ought to use the starting handle,” you can al-
ways legitimately ask me, “Why ought I to use the starting handle?”23
Hare is certainly right that prescriptives are essentially such that it is al-
ways in order to call for reasons for their legitimacy. But he offers us no
grounds for thinking that the legitimate reasons we might offer in re-
sponse will be any more general than the original claim. (“Because the
automatic start-up function is frozen,” we might reply.) And even if we
have separate philosophical reasons to be committed to the idea that any
chain of legitimate reasons of this sort will bottom out in general rules,
the more important point is this: it seems we can ask for exactly the same
sort of reasons in response to an imperative. (“Use the starting handle!”;
“Why should I?”; “Because the automatic start-up function is frozen.”)
But perhaps it is only alethic imperatives for which we can demand
reasons of this sort, and perhaps Hare would claim that such imperatives
are simply prescriptives phrased using a different surface grammar. Two
points are necessary in response to this move. First, this seems to do a
grave injustice to constative imperatives. If I tell you to close the door, or
to drop and give me ten push-ups, but I can provide no reason at all for
why my request is legitimate, then it seems to be a dubious request.
Only in a few rarified situations of very unequal authority can one get
away with the time-honored parental response “Because I said so!”—
and even then one would hope that this is not the actual whole rea-
son for the request. Second, we have shown that there is an important
distinction between alethic imperatives and prescriptives, and if Hare
has elided this distinction, then he has significantly misrepresented the
pragmatic structure of one or the other or both.
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23. Ibid., 156 (emphasis added). R
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116 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Indeed, it seems that Hare is doomed to misrepresent both, given

his failure to recognize two distinctions that have been central for us
throughout this book. On the one hand, his failure to distinguish the in-
puts from the outputs of speech acts hides the existence of normative
functions that fit into boxes 2 and 3 in our typography—that is, the
‘mixed’ forms where the input and the output have different pragmatic
scopes. Without this distinction, Hare has no mechanism for retaining
the agent-neutrality of the input of prescriptives while holding on to the
agent-relative import they share with imperatives. Hence he is commit-
ted to insisting that prescriptives are ‘not truth-claims’ and that they
‘have no informational content’. But on our account, prescriptives have
plenty of informational content—they give us information about peo-
ple’s deontic statuses. Hare in effect leaves us with no discursive means
for delivering such information, nor does he defend or seem to believe
in any kind of radical elimitivism that would deny its existence. Deontic
information becomes weirdly ineffable, on his account.
On the other hand, Hare also fails to notice the structural distinction
between the first-, second-, and third-person voices. He finds nothing
inherently problematic about the idea of ‘translating’ imperatives, not
only out of the second-person voice, but into a completely impersonal
voice not marked by speaker or audience: “The imperative mood, there-
fore, has for our purposes to be enriched in order to make it possible to
frame sentences in all persons and all tenses.” He suggests the example,
“All mules being barren, please.”24 From everything we have said in this
book, such an imperative is not merely unidiomatic; it is pragmatic gib-
berish and has no discernable functional structure.
Yet Hare’s severance of the imperative from any particular voice or au-
dience is essential for his purposes, for he needs imperatives to be en-
tailed by prescriptives. While he recognizes that imperatives are not en-
tailed by anything if we restrict entailment to propositional inference
narrowly construed, he thinks the notion of entailment can and should
be extended so as to allow practical and prescriptive inferences. Given
this extension, it is important to him that imperatives and prescriptives
be the kind of things that can bear entailment relations, so that norma-
tive judgments do not become mere noncognitive expressions that lie
beyond the space of reasons, as they did for the emotivists. Sensitive to
S
24. Ibid., 188–189. R
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the common worry that any form of prescriptivism will devolve into
such noncognitivism, Hare wishes his ought-claims to be combinable
into conditionals, able to serve as premises of arguments, and so forth.
However, Hare can maintain that imperatives are entailed by prescrip-
tives only by completely erasing the functionally essential role that voice
plays in both prescriptive and imperative speech; only thus can he claim
that a speech act with an agent-neutral input (to which anyone who is
free of epistemic defect would be entitled) could entail one with an
agent-relative input (to which only those with a specific normative posi-
tion are entitled). As we have seen, entitlement to an imperative always
requires a specific agent-relative normative status, which will necessarily
exceed the generalized conditions for entitlement to a prescriptive with
an agent-neutral input. On Hare’s account, entitlement to the prescrip-
tive “Scott ought to lose weight” entails entitlement to the imperative
(issued to Scott) “Lose weight!” But entitlement to the first speech act
only requires knowledge of its truth, and this is insufficient to warrant
just anyone to issue the imperative. Surely if a stranger, noticing the truth
that Scott ought to lose weight, walked up to him and ordered him to lose
weight, Scott would be right to accuse her not only of rudeness but of
wildly overstepping her entitlement to make demands of him. Hare,
though, erases the entire issue of who is entitled to an imperative on the
basis of the truth of a prescriptive.
Hare manages to hide the problem in his text by only giving an exam-
ple in which someone is both the speaker and the target of the prescrip-
tive and the imperative. In defending the claim that all evaluative claims
necessarily entail their corresponding imperatives, he writes: “Value-
judgements, if they are action-guiding, must be held to entail impera-
tives . . . I propose to say that the test, whether someone is using the
judgement ‘I ought to do x’ as a value judgement or not is ‘Does he or
does he not recognize that if he assents to the judgement, he must also
assent to the command “Let me do x”?’”25 Hare has maintained the plau-
sibility of his general claim about entailment by switching to the case of
a particular speaker, namely the target.
Now the entailment principle may actually work in the first-personal
case: it may indeed be that if you recognize, first-personally, that you
ought to do x (lose weight, etc.), then in so recognizing, you are auto-
S
25. Ibid., 163, 168–9. R
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118 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
matically committed to acknowledging the legitimacy of commanding

yourself to follow this prescription. This is an interesting claim, and it
strikes us as plausible; first-personal practical recognition of your own
commitment may intrinsically involve recognizing that you ought to
hold yourself to that commitment. But this plausibility seems to come
entirely from the uniquely first-personal structure of the uptake that we
each give to prescriptives that apply to us—that is, from the output char-
acteristic of their box-3 function, rather than from their general agent-
neutral output. And of course, it concerns only our own entitlement to
the corresponding first-personal imperative; it gives us no reason to con-
clude that everyone is entitled to order me to uphold my commitments.
Hence the entailment link that Hare has identified depends essentially
on the very structure of voice and agent-relative statuses that he himself
erases from his picture.
Hare attempted to mark out the distinctiveness of evaluative lan-

guage pragmatically, rather than semantically. Furthermore, he tried to
do this while keeping evaluative language within the space of reasons.
We have followed his lead in both respects. But he tried to give a voice-
free, audience-neutral account of the pragmatics of prescriptives, and
hence he did not have the conceptual resources he needed to identify the
difference between prescriptives and imperatives. Notice that on our ac-
count, attention to voice and audience is what has enabled us to under-
stand prescriptives as functioning as truth-claims and as action-guiding
at one and the same time: the very same speech act that has declarative
force for third parties has practical, action-guiding force for those for
whom it has first-personal prescriptive significance.
We have, with no need for metaphysical excess, cut ourselves free
from what has been viewed as one of the central paradoxes of meta-
ethics, which Michael Smith has perhaps extravagantly dubbed “the
moral problem.” ‘The’ moral problem, according to Smith, is as fol-
lows: How can moral judgments be both objective, in the sense of being
truth-claims about a public world, and inherently motivating or practical
reason-giving? The problem in reconciling these two apparent features of
moral judgments, in Smith’s analysis, comes from our widespread com-
mitment to some form of belief-desire psychology—that is, an ontology
of propositional attitudes such that they either seek to fit the world (be- S
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liefs), or seek to make the world fit them (desires), but not both at once.
Within the framework of such a psychology, if moral judgments func-
tion to describe the world, then they cannot at the same time inherently
motivate actions that would change it, whereas if their function is to mo-
tivate actions, then they cannot at the same time describe it.
Smith points out that his analysis leaves three options: we can reject
the idea that moral claims are inherently motivating, we can reject the
idea that they have descriptive content, or we can reject belief-desire
psychology. The first position is associated with ‘cognitivists’ such as
Philippa Foot, who take moral judgments to be simply declarative truth-
claims without inherent motivating force. On such a view, there is no
contradiction in being committed to the proposition “I ought to spend
more time with my aging mother” while not recognizing that this com-
mitment gives me any practical reason whatsoever to spend more time
with my mother, however much the truth and the practical reason are
contingently linked in practice.26 Here, the motivation to do what we
judge that we ought to do is external to the judgment—hence the name
‘externalists’ for proponents of this type of cognitivism.27
The second position is associated with ‘non-cognitivists’, including
prescriptivists and emotivists, who claim that moral judgments are in-
herently motivating, and that precisely for that reason they ought not to
be understood as having any declarative content. We already saw Hare
give this argument.28
The final position is perhaps the least popular: it seeks to retain both
the declarative content and the motivational force of moral judgments
by rejecting belief-desire psychology, in particular the idea that prop-
ositional attitudes cannot have both ‘directions of fit’ at the same time.
John McDowell is the best-known proponent of this third view, argu-
ing in “Virtue and Reason” and other classic essays that in perceiv-
ing moral facts, we perceive truths that directly exert practical norma-
26. Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.”

27. See McNaughton, Moral Vision.
28. Another famous proponent of this argument is Gilbert Harman; see his The Nature of
Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Noncognitivists often find extra ammuni-
tion in the idea that cognitivists, in understanding moral judgments as truth-claims, are com-
mitted to an unsavory moral realism. However, we have argued that there are no special meta-
physical barriers to treating prescriptives as truth-claims, so this worry need not concern us
here. S
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120 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tive force upon us—we literally ‘see reasons’ for action.29 Smith follows
J. E. J. Altham in giving the name ‘besires’ to such double-edged at-
titudes, which share a direction of fit with both beliefs and desires.
McDowell and his admirers aside, besires have been generally perceived
as implausible and undesirable additions to a moral psychology, and not
just because of their silly name.
Our account retains the cognitivists’ commitment to the status of
moral judgments as truth-claims (while denying that they have merely
declarative force), as well as the noncognitivists’ commitment to their
inherent practical import. Hence we are best understood as falling into
McDowell’s camp and rejecting the dualistic underpinning of belief-
desire psychology. On our account, first-personal commitments to claims
about one’s own commitments—that is, judgments of the form “I ought
to x”—do indeed count as ‘besires’, if a besire is simply an attitude that
has both directions of fit built into it. This commitment faces the tribu-
nal of the world as beliefs do: if I discover facts that show it to be false, I
should give it up. But it also makes a claim on action: if I have this com-
mitment, it directs me to act in a certain way.
We believe that this option looks vastly less mysterious when it is
situated within the framework we have developed. We need make no
claims about the features of the world having the capacity to reach out
and grab onto our motivational structure as soon as we recognize truths
about them. If we begin from impersonal evaluative claims stripped of
any particular voice—such as the ‘it is right that. . .’ claims that Smith fa-
vors as examples—and portray them as truths that somehow, inherently,
make a direct practical claim on whoever happens to note them, this can
seem mysterious; it looks as if the practical import somehow rests in the
truth and is waiting to be noticed. This idea of an inherent motivational
property that can cling to states of the world is what most fundamentally
struck Mackie as unacceptably ‘queer’. The apparent air of queerness
surrounding ‘besires’ is dissolved once we distinguish carefully between
first-personal and third-personal prescriptive judgments, taking this dis-
tinction in voice as a pragmatic distinction as opposed to a semantic or
merely grammatical one. Recognizing that I have a commitment is es-
sentially a matter of recognizing a claim over my actions, whereas recog-
29. See McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” The Monist 62 (1979): 331–350; and McDowell, S
“Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
supp. 52 (1978): 13–29. R
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nizing third-personally that a commitment exists is a theoretical recog-

nition of a truth. The practical force of my commitment comes from my
recognition that it is I who am committed. When I recognize my own
commitment, I both recognize a truth and, in so recognizing, acknowl-
edge a claim on my actions, and hence this recognition has both direc-
tions of fit.
Smith distinguishes between ‘motivating reasons’, which are the things
that psychologically move us to act, and ‘normative reasons’, or actual
rational claims upon us. He argues that the temptation to believe in
‘besires’ is based in a conflation of these two types of reasons. In his view,
normative reasons are “best thought of as truths,”30 and they have no in-
herent motivating force; they need not exert psychological pressure on
us, which is what motivating reasons do. The apparent existence of
‘besires’, according to Smith, comes from our conflating what are in fact
two separate mental states: our acceptance of a normative reason (which
is a belief) with our having a motivating reason (which is a desire).
However, as we have described them, first-personal recognitions of
our own commitments provide a kind of reason that does not fit neatly
into either of Smith’s categories. It is surely true that we can recognize
our commitments without this recognition creating in us a desire that
psychologically motivates us to act. I might recognize that I ought to do-
nate all of my spare wealth to charity or get my cholesterol level checked
while experiencing no psychological feeling that I want to do these
things, not even one that is trumped by competing desires. Yet when I
recognize these things about myself, I don’t recognize a mere truth, as I
would if I recognized them about someone else. Rather, I recognize that I
have a commitment to act. This is one single mental act, not two separate
mental states, and it is an act that recognizes a truth and a practical rea-
son at the same time. There is no way of construing this commitment as
devoid of practical import; its practical import is what I recognize. I can-
not merely theoretically note a discrepancy between what I ought to do
and what I actually do; by noting such a discrepancy, I acknowledge my
own transgression. To put the point another way, in so recognizing, I
must take my own inaction in the face of this commitment as a practical
failing on my part. We should not confuse acknowledgment of a practi-
cal reason with a psychological feeling of wanting to act in accordance
S
30. Smith, Moral Problem, 95. R
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122 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
with it, any more than we should confuse acknowledgment of a theoreti-

cal reason with a psychological feeling of wanting to draw inferences in
accordance with it.
Thus our analysis of prescriptives, and in particular our attention to

the special pragmatic structure of first-personal prescriptive judgments,
makes several resilient problems of metaethics go away, with little fuss.
It accommodates the intuition that there is a tight relationship between
prescriptives and imperatives, without needing to struggle with the pit-
falls that have attended versions of the claim that prescriptives just are
imperatives. It retains the commonsense intuition motivating cognitiv-
ism, namely that moral judgments are truth-claims bearing articulate in-
ferential relations to other claims, but without positing metaphysically
questionable entities or properties. And it solves ‘the’ moral problem by
taking the mystery out of the idea that a single moral judgment could
have both descriptive content and practical import.
5.4 Reasons, Claims, and Addresses

Stephen Darwall, in The Second-Person Standpoint, analyzes the structure
of moral claims by taking their voice as essential to their form and func-
tion. Since Darwall seems to share several of our motivations and to be
trying to get at distinctions that matter to us, it is worth exploring how
his account diverges from ours.
We have distinguished in this chapter between two kinds of claims
that have practical import for the person(s) whose commitments they
target: prescriptive claims, which are truth-claims with agent-neutral in-
puts that have special practical import when taken up first-personally,
and imperatives and other holdings, including alethic imperatives, which
have agent-relative inputs. Darwall opens his book with the example we
cited earlier, which at first glance seems to track this distinction. He
writes of a situation where someone is standing on your foot:
Compare two different ways in which you might try to give someone a
reason to stop causing you pain, say, to remove his foot from on top of
yours. One would be to get him to feel sympathetic concern for you in
your plight, thereby leading him to want you to be free of pain. Were S
he to have this desire, he would see your being in pain as a bad thing, a R
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state of the world there is reason for him (or, indeed, for anyone who is
able) to change. And he would most naturally see his desire that you be
pain-free, not as the source of this reason, but as a form of access to a
reason that is there anyway . . . Alternatively, you might lay a claim or
address a purportedly valid demand. You might say something that as-
serts or implies your authority to claim or demand that he move his
foot and that simultaneously expresses this demand . . . the reason you
would address would be agent-relative rather than agent-neutral.31
According to Darwall, not only does the first transaction result in an
‘agent-neutral’ reason to act whereas the second results in an ‘agent-
relative’ reason, but also, the second provides what he calls a ‘second-
personal reason’. Although this sounds roughly like our distinction
between prescriptives (“You ought to get off my foot”) and alethic im-
peratives (“Please get off my foot”), two distinctions that we have
dwelled upon are conflated in this passage.
First, like Darwall, we portray prescriptives as providing access to a
reason that is there anyway, and we also insist that this gives them a kind
of agent-neutrality, namely at the level of their input. As Darwall aptly
puts it, when we show someone what he has a reason to do with a pre-
scriptive, he accepts a “state-of-the-world-regarding” reason: “Qua this
form of reason-giving, you would be asking him to agree, as it were, that
there is a reason for him to do something rather than asking him to agree
to do it.”32 You are not drawing on your agent-relative entitlement to
make a claim on him, but pointing his attention to an agent-neutral fact.
But this agent-neutrality of input does not entail the agent-neutrality of
output that Darwall assumes when he says that what we show is merely a
state of the world that anyone who is able has a reason to change. A pre-
scriptive may be agent-neutral and state-of-the-world-regarding in its
input while being utterly and non-interchangeably specific in its output:
for instance, I might point out that because of the special commitments
that you have taken on in adopting a child, it is now your obligation to
see to it that this child gets the unexpected medical care she needs. Here
I am not demanding or entreating that you do so, or drawing on the spe-
cial relations of authority between us; indeed, I might point this out to a
third party instead of to you. I am pointing out a truth that anyone in
touch with the truth is (discursively) entitled to point out, namely that
S
31. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 5, 7.
32. Ibid., 6–7. R
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124 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
you have a special, agent-relative reason to act that is not transferable to

anyone else, even if someone else is in a position to help.33 Other times,
it may well be that my prescriptive gives you a reason to act only because
you happen to be one of the people in a position to do something that
ought to be done—for instance, turning off a running tap so as not
to waste water. In both cases, the prescriptive has practical rather than
theoretical import for you only in virtue of your taking up its import
first-personally. Darwall need not and should not draw any conclusions
about the generality or neutrality of the reason that a prescriptive re-
veals, in pointing out the neutrality of its entitlement, or the fact that the
reason is ‘there anyway’, independent of my address.
Second, here and elsewhere in the book, Darwall conflates the agent-
relativity of a claim with its second-personality. He writes: “What makes a
reason second-personal is that it is grounded in (de jure) authority rela-
tions that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee.”
This definition actually includes two distinct elements: (1) the ground-
ing of a reason in specific, agent-relative relations between people; and
(2) the grounding of the force of a claim in a second-personal address.
Darwall explicitly associates both of these with his second-personal
reasons. For instance, he first introduces second-personal reasons as fol-
lows: “A command is a form of address that purports to give a person a
distinctive kind of (normative) reason for acting, one I call a second-per-
sonal reason.” But shortly thereafter he claims that it would be a second-
personal reason because it “would concern, most fundamentally, his re-
lations to others . . . The reason would not be addressed to him as some-
one who is simply in a position to alter the regrettable state of someone’s
pain . . . It would be addressed to him, rather, as the person causing gra-
tuitous pain to another person.”34 These features ought to be kept quite
distinct. Someone can perfectly well have an agent-relative (or even an
agent-specific) reason to act—a reason that is grounded in her particular
relations to others and specific to her particular normative position (as
the one causing pain, as the one who adopted the child, etc.)—without
that reason being presented to her in the form of a second-personal ad-
33. Indeed, even if I am the adoptive child herself, I still make a claim with an agent-neutral
input if I point out your distinctive obligation to me. But as the adoptive child, I also have an
agent-relative entitlement to ask you to live up to your commitment to me, which is a box-4 S
speech act.
34. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 4, 3–4, 7. R
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dress. For that matter, she can have agent-relative reasons of this sort
that no one ever points out, or that are pointed out only between third
parties and not to her at all. Indeed, she might come to have an agent-
relative reason to act because of a transaction between two other people
in which she is not involved: If her agent rents out her New York prop-
erty to a tenant while she is living in Florida, she now has an agent-rela-
tive reason to pay taxes on that rental income. Meanwhile, I can be held
to acting on an agent-neutral reason through a second-person address;
my spouse may beseech me to return that ridiculous Hummer to the
dealer and buy a Civic instead, for instance, because we should all stop
burning unnecessary fossil fuels.
Thus the agent-relativity or agent-neutrality of reasons seems to be a
red herring for Darwall, who is (or at least ought to be) more interested
in the addressing and holding functions of second-person transactions.
Whether or not our reasons for acting are specific to us, and whether or
not these reasons are dependent upon particular relations to others, are
questions that are simply orthogonal to whether we are held to those
reasons by a second-personal demand made by someone with the proper
authority to so hold us.
Part of the reason why Darwall may have difficulty nailing down the
location of the second-personality he seeks is because he consistently
talks in terms of the second-personality of reasons (and sometimes ‘-
perspectives’) rather than of claims. It makes perfect sense to separate
agent-relative from agent-neutral reasons—that is, reasons that claim us
in virtue of our special normative position and reasons with generic
force. Such a distinction is part and parcel of our distinction between
agent-neutral and agent-relative normative statuses. However, it is not
at all clear what it means for a reason to be second-personal (or third-
personal, etc.). Second-personality, one would think, is a feature that a
transaction such as a speech act can have. A second-personal claim is
one that I make to you. Transactions can have such a second-person
voice because they can have a direction and a transitive object. In this
work, we have used the notions of first- and second-personality to de-
scribe how claims and speech acts are directed and received (and starting
in the next chapter, the second-person voice will become vastly more
central to our account).
Granted, Darwall admits up front that he is stretching the notion of S
second-personality and bending it to his own ends, since his concern is R
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126 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
not with second-personality as a grammatical voice. But it is hard to see

how to get any traction out of the use of the term unless we are talking
about the kind of thing that can have a direction in this way. And reasons
do not seem to be good contenders for such directionality. Reasons are
essentially subject to public epistemic appraisal, and they bear publicly
accessible rational relations to other reasons. Whether a reason has force
only for me or for everyone, a statement of that reason will be an agent-
neutral truth-claim. One and the same agent-relative reason may be de-
scribed in a third-personal truth-claim (“Since Mark is the one who is
causing Rebecca pain, he really ought to get off her foot”), or imputed in
a second-personal address (“Mark, please get off my foot!”). The voice
attaches not to the reason but to the claim. While my demand may give
you an extra reason to act as a by-product—wanting to do as I ask as a
matter of politeness, for instance—this is clearly not the reason that
Darwall has in mind. He is explicit that it is your causing me pain that
provides the reason for action here, and this seems to be the same across
the two cases.
Why would Darwall think that the reasons themselves could be second-
personal? We suspect that this mistake is rooted in his overinflation of
the category of constative imperatives (and similar constative box-4
holdings), which are second-person addresses that create reasons that
did not exist before. Darwall says of the second-personal case, “What is
important for our purposes is that someone can sensibly accept this sec-
ond reason for moving his foot, one embodied in your claim or demand,
only if he also accepts your authority to demand this of him (second-
personally).”35 But this seems manifestly false. Surely you can accept
that you have an agent-relative reason to stop causing me pain whether
or not you accept the authority of my demand, or even hear it at all. In-
deed, we may accept all sorts of thoroughly agent-relative reasons for
doing something for another person while openly denying that that per-
son has the authority to demand this from us. I might accept that I have
a reason to shower compliments upon my spouse when he is feeling
unconfident, while denying that he has the right to demand compliments
from me. (And I certainly wouldn’t think that everyone owes my spouse
these compliments.) Darwall apparently believes that a second-person
address always holds its target to act on reasons that have force only in-
S
35. Ibid., 8. R
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sofar as this target accepts the authority of the speaker to hold him to
the reason. This is a long-winded way of saying that Darwall apparently
believes only in constative holdings, and not in alethic holdings. (This
perhaps explains why he grants epigraphic status to Rawls’s statement
“People are self-originating sources of claims.”) He then counts the rea-
sons arising from all imperatives, entreaties, etc., as second-personal
reasons—that is, as reasons that have force only because they were given
that force by the second-person address.
As we discussed earlier, there certainly are reasons that are constituted
by addresses in this way. If, as your professor, I ask you to write a paper
on a particular topic, you now have a new reason to write that paper,
namely that I, with my proper authoritative position with respect to
making such demands of you, have asked you to do so. Whether or not
this is the only reason for you to write the paper, it is certainly a reason
that was constituted by my demand. There could have been no true pre-
scriptive describing your obligation to write this paper in advance of my
imperative.
Since such a reason owes its entire life to a second-person transac-
tion between us—an address grounded in our proper normative rela-
tions—it is easy to think of the second-personality as somehow attach-
ing to the reason itself. Fair enough.36 However, most of the reasons and
addresses that Darwall discusses are not of this sort. When I request that
you get off my foot, this is an alethic request: I am holding you, second-
personally, to doing something you already had a reason to do, namely
to stop causing me pain. I am holding you to getting off my foot for the
very same reason that I (or a third party) would be impressing upon you
if I (or she) uttered a prescriptive instead, pointing your attention to the
fact that you ought to get off my foot. My special normative relationship
to you gives me the right to hold you to your reason, but it does not cre-
ate the reason.
His belief that all second-person holdings are constative, and that they
create the reasons that they demand be obeyed, ,may explain why Dar-
wall believes that his account ultimately supports a contractarian the-
ory of morality. He argues throughout the book that second-person ad-
36. But even here, the reason so created is perfectly describable by others. I may say, “Smith
ought to write a paper, because her professor told her to,” and this statement will express the S
very same reason that was constituted by the second-personal interaction. So the reason itself
does not, properly speaking, have any particular voice. R
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128 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
dresses and relations of holding are constitutive of the possibility of

moral obligation, responsibility, and community, and hence that some-
thing like a Hegelian or Fichtean picture of the foundational role of mu-
tual recognition in moral agency is correct. We agree, and we will argue
this in detail ourselves in Chapter 8. However, he also takes this conclu-
sion as sufficient to compel a contractarian account of morality. If you
believe both that second-person transactions underwrite all moral com-
mitments and that such transactions always function by creating new
reasons, then it perhaps makes sense to conclude that all moral commit-
ments are ultimately contracted into existence through second-person
transactions. As we will argue soon, we agree that second-person ad-
dresses are the condition for the possibility of moral community and
agency. But from all we have said in this chapter, this position allows us
plenty of room for a healthy realism about people’s commitments and
reasons. A second-person address can hold you to commitments you al-
ready had, rather than creating these commitments.
5.5 Coda: Categorical Imperatives

Kant, as we know, based his moral theory around the functioning of a
special type of ought-claim, the ‘categorical imperative’. The categorical
imperative supposedly makes a claim on each of us, regardless of any of
our individuating features or particular ends, sheerly in virtue of our po-
tential for rationality. Now in fact, when we talk to one another about
what we ought to do, using prescriptive discourse or second-personal
holdings, almost all of our claims are context-specific and have agent-
relative outputs. We tell people to call their grandmother, give them ad-
vice about how to negotiate a sticky situation at work, point out to them
that they ought to have been more tactful or generous in a particular
case, and so forth. Almost never do we make unconditional pronounce-
ments about what commitments everyone has, merely in virtue of mem-
bership in the moral community or the space of reasons. Even if our
moral duties are grounded in perfectly general, context-independent
moral rules (maximize utility, etc.), we must acknowledge that virtually
all of our contentful moral claims are applications of these rules in par-
ticular contexts, with agent-relative outputs, rather than categorical state-
ments of principle. S
Indeed, many critics of Kant over the centuries have argued that there R
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could be no such thing as contentful categorical imperatives—that is,

they have argued that maximally general principles can yield contentful
commitments with practical import only when situated within contexts
that include the type of individuating ends and circumstances that Kant
expelled from the domain of pure moral discourse.37 However, if we can
formulate claims about unconditional commitments—about commit-
ments that we have merely in virtue of our placement within the space of
reasons—then the pragmatic structure of such claims will be quite dis-
tinctive. In particular, they seem, by definition, to be deontic claims that
have (only) an agent-neutral output, unlike the prescriptives that have
concerned us in the rest of this chapter.
Let us consider the pragmatic structure of Kant’s categorical impera-
tive in particular, since Kant is the most explicit and important propo-
nent of perfectly universal moral claims that target us in abstraction
from any of our individuating features. Although he calls his moral judg-
ments ‘imperatives’, Kant himself does not distinguish carefully between
imperatives and prescriptives. In fact, his introduction of the notion of a
categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
fluctuates at least twice within a single passage between these two types
of speech acts. He writes: “The representation of an objective principle,
insofar as it is necessitating for a will, is called a command (of reason),
and the formula of the command is called an imperative. All imperatives
are expressed by an ought . . . they say that to do or to omit some-
thing would be good.”38 The representation of a principle would nor-
mally take the form of an ought-claim, but he calls this representation a
command. Yet he immediately claims that ‘all imperatives are expressed
by an ought’, which of course they are not.
Some authors, such as Foot, have simply concluded that Kant mis-
used the term ‘imperative’ and was actually interested in deontic claims,
or prescriptives.39 It seems more likely to us that Kant had both cognitiv-
37. Most famously, though certainly not most recently, see Hegel’s critique of Kant in Ele-
ments of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991). There has been a recent move to read Kantian morality as more contextually sensitive
than this, but our interest here is not in the details of Kant’s account but in the basic idea of a
categorical imperative.
38. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4:413. S
39. Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” This reading was convenient
for Foot, as it biased the text in favor of her cognitivist, externalist account of moral judgments. R
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130 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ist and prescriptivist intuitions and had not clearly worked out the dif-
ference between prescriptive and imperative claims. In any case, if there
are any moral judgments that make an unconditional claim on us simply
in virtue of our rationality—as we will assume for purposes of argument
for the rest of this section—then we can easily talk about either type of
speech act: a prescriptive that states what we ought (unconditionally) to
do, or a corresponding alethic imperative that (unconditionally) com-
mands us to do it.
Although they may be of special importance to moral philosophy,
such Kantian alethic imperatives would not have a particularly unusual
pragmatic structure for our purposes. Kant is clear that we can be
bound by categorical imperatives only autonomously rather than heter-
onymously; famously, I must give myself the moral law in order for its
claim to be legitimate. Although Kant thinks that we are to act as if we
were willing our action as a universal law for everyone to follow, it is not
this act of willing on our part that will bind others, but only their own
autonomous subjection to the law. This means that the alethic impera-
tive corresponding to the categorical prescriptive, for Kant, must be is-
sued by each of us to our self. Each of us can command, “Let me obey
the moral law,” and this command will bind only its speaker. Such an
imperative—like any other—will have an agent-relative input and an
agent-relative output, and will belong in box 4 of our grid. And if some-
one else undertakes to hold me to my Kantian duty through an alethic
imperative or other such alethic second-person address, her speech act
will likewise belong in box 4, along with all other holdings. Our prag-
matic interest is instead in the prescriptive form of the ‘categorical im-
perative’—henceforth CI—and we will restrict our attention to it.
Kant notoriously defines CI several times over, but his primary and
most general formulation is that the CI “would be that which repre-
sented an action as objectively necessary of itself, without reference to
another end.”40 The universally binding force of the CI comes from the
fact that it presents an unconditional ought, which is in no way indexed
to a particular agent. Thus Kant builds the agent-neutrality of its output
into its very definition. What is special about CIs is not the universality
of their extensional scope, but the agent-neutrality of their binding force.
A true prescriptive that applies to all of us because of its content, such as
‘we all ought to try to minimize our use of fossil fuels’, does not count as S
R
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a CI, for Kant; it binds each one of us only because of conditional facts
about our supply of fossil fuels and the bad effects of burning them that
happen to have a similar normative significance for all of us. Hence this
is a thoroughly hypothetical imperative regardless of its scope. Indeed
Kant is famously critical of those who try to ground CI in extensionally
universal but ultimately contingent features of agents. He writes: “There
is . . . only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accor-
dance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it
become a universal law.”41 Since we are not, in fact, willing for anyone but
ourselves here, Kant’s point is not that the output of CI is universal in its
extensional scope, but rather that there is nothing in the maxim that
marks its force as in any way specific to us and our normative position.42
In CI, the universality of its scope is in fact a product of its structural
agent-neutrality, rather than the reverse.
The output of the categorical imperative is thus genuinely different
from the prescriptives we have considered in the rest of this chapter.
Whereas normal prescriptives have agent-relative practical import for
those whose commitments they identify, the categorical imperative has
this practical import for everyone, not merely as a matter of fact, but spe-
cifically because this import is independent of any specific features of
the agent. The categorical imperative speaks to each of us and calls upon
us to act merely as inhabitants of the space of reasons, or as members of
the most generalized possible ‘we’, rather than as individuals with a spe-
cific normative place in the space of reasons. (Indeed, to the extent that
it speaks to us as specific, differentiated individuals, it does not function
categorically.) It thus has agent-neutral instead of agent-relative outputs.
At the same time, like all prescriptives, the categorical imperative has
an agent-neutral input. Not only is it a truth-claim, but its grounding is
supposed to be in reason itself, again specifically independent of any
particular features of the speaking agent. We are each a subject of the
41. Ibid., 4:421.

42. It might, in some cases, be unclear whether the universality of a prescriptive is
grounded in its structural agent-neutrality or merely in its extensional scope. Colleen Fulton
(in private correspondence) suggested the example of the Christian call to repent for our sins.
Surely this call is meant to be universal in its output. Is the idea that being a sinner who ought
to repent is a transcendental condition for being a finite agent in the first place, or is it that as a
matter of fact, everyone happens to be a sinner? In the first case, the claim that we are sinners S
who ought to repent is a CI with an agent-neutral output, but in the second it is a normal pre- R
scriptive with an agent-relative output. Which meaning is intended by Christian dogma is an
interesting theological question lying far beyond our expertise. L
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132 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
moral law, but also, “every rational being . . . must regard himself as giv-
ing universal law.”43
Hence the categorical imperative is agent-neutral in both its input and
its output, and—like declaratives, but unlike normal prescriptives—it
belongs in box 1. And yet it is not just a declarative with a special sub-
ject matter. For its agent-neutrality in no way compromises its practical
import. As with all prescriptives, first-personal recognition of the le-
gitimacy of the categorical imperative reveals our commitments and
thereby calls upon us to act, and not just to entertain a belief in its truth.
The only difference here is that all of us, merely qua inhabitants of the
space of reasons, have a first-personal relationship to the claim it makes.
Kant is clear that the import of a CI is practical rather than theoretical:
the representation of the moral law determines the will to act, as he puts
it.44 In recognizing the legitimacy of the categorical imperative, we rec-
ognize that it binds our actions. This is what Kant tries to underscore by
claiming that a CI commands, even though we have seen that, strictly
speaking, the moral law is not the same as an imperatival command to
follow that law. Yet the categorical imperative calls us to act, not on the
basis of our particular situation and ends, but simply as an unmarked ra-
tional will.
Since the output of a CI is both practical and agent-neutral, it will
also, unlike the output of a declarative, be universal in practice and not
just in the ideal. We saw earlier that one difference between practical
and epistemic commitments is that you need not be in a position to rec-
ognize your practical commitment in order to really have it: if you are
committed to paying $3,000 in taxes, say, your ignorance of this fact
does not detract from your commitment, whereas you can be ignorant of
the fact that mitosis is a form of reproduction and genuinely not be com-
mitted to it either, even though, ideally, you would be. If there exists
such a thing as a categorical imperative that captures practical commit-
ments that we have merely in virtue of being rational agents, then these
commitments, unlike their epistemic counterparts, are not only agent-
neutral but also universal.
Thus, although this chapter has been devoted primarily to under-
standing the box-3 function of (most) prescriptives, we end with the in-
S
43. Groundwork, 4:443.
44. Ibid., 4:427 and throughout. R
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teresting conclusion that if there can be unconditional prescriptives that

impute contentful practical commitments, then declaratives are not the
only inhabitants of box 1. Although we have not offered an argument for
the existence of legitimate prescriptives of this sort, their prima facie co-
herence as a pragmatic category gives us good evidence that we should
not take the declarative as the essential or definitional instance of a
speech act with an agent-neutral input and output. One might have
thought that such thoroughgoing agent-neutrality was the special pur-
view of the declaratives, but we now to have reason to be suspicious of
even this claim to their primacy or uniqueness. The current state of de-
velopment or our typology is indicated in Figure 7.
Input
Output
1 2
of taste, baptisms,
Categorical some recognitives,
Imperatives i.e. observatives
3 4
(promises,
invitations,
reproaches...),
ostensions
S
Figure 7 R
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Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the

Pragmatics of Recognition
Vocative speech acts—that is, second-personal speech acts that hail or

call (such as “Yo, Emma!” or “Hi, Eli!”)—form a distinct pragmatic cate-
gory of utterances. They are not declaratives, prescriptives, or any other
kind of truth-claim, for they have no truth-value. Nor do they seem to
function straightforwardly as interrogatives, imperatives, or any of the
other types of speech act that form the traditional canon of pragmatic
analysis. Sentences in the vocative mood were recognized by the ancient
classical languages as forming a distinct grammatical category, with its
own declension. But contemporary philosophers of language and lin-
guists have given vocatives next to no attention; the syntax, semantics,
and pragmatics of the hail are all more or less uncharted territory. Some
Continental philosophers, most notably Buber and Levinas, have given
second-personal encounters special philosophical pride of place, but here
too second-personal and vocatival discourse has received little rigorous
attention.1 In this chapter we will tease out the pragmatic structure of
vocatives.
We began this book by pointing out that philosophers of language
have tended to focus on impersonal, declarative speech that reports
on public facts as the paradigm of language. In the wake of influential
twentieth-century philosophers as diverse as Dewey, Wittgenstein, Hei-
1. An important exception—and an important inspiration for our analysis of vocatives and

acknowledgments in this chapter and the next—is Louis Althusser’s discussion of interpella-
tion in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (Lon-
don: New Left Books, 1971). S
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Vocatives and Acknowledgments 135
degger, and Austin, however, many authors assign philosophical impor-

tance to the fact that language is essentially personal: it does not merely
involve the abstract movement of information, but is always spoken by
this or that concrete, embodied, context-bound person, to a particular
audience.
Over the course of this work we have seen several senses in which
language can be ‘personal’. It may be agent-relative in its input, its out-
put, or both. Furthermore, agent-relative inputs and outputs may or
may not be agent-specific; some agent-relative statuses are distinctively
indexed to particular concrete individuals, while others attach to who-
ever fills a certain slot or description. And some agent-relative statuses
are singular (only one person can have them), whereas others can be
held by several agents at once. A status that is both singular and specific
is individuating; it essentially attaches to one and only one concrete
agent. Finally, and most relevantly, some discursive claims are inherently
voiced: they must be understood not just as entitled for or targeting this
or that agent, but as from me or for you.
For instance, we saw in Chapters 2 and 3 that observational epi-
sodes, and the observative speech acts that express them, are not only
agent-relative and singular, but in each case mine. Their origination in a
first-personal perspective is ineliminably built into the kind of speech
act that they are. In focusing on vocatives and acknowledgments in
this chapter, we will be examining speech acts that are not only agent-
relative in both their input and their output (and hence belong in box 4
of our grid), but also inherently second-personal: they are in each case di-
rected at you. They not only pick out a concrete target audience, but in-
herently address themselves to that audience. This indexing of speech
acts to first and second persons cannot be reduced to semantic or struc-
tural features of these acts that could be third-personally available; such
speech acts must be irreducibly heard and owned as mine and as yours—
and such hearing and owning can make sense only from particular points
of view that are actually taken up by living, embodied subjects who are
capable of making and being bound by claims.
A vocative is the purest form of an address in which one person calls
out to another. The second-personal structure of the vocative seems
clear even though there may be no second-person pronoun used in the
hail. This second-personality does not reside in the surface grammar of S
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136 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
the hail, but in its pragmatic structure. As Hagi Kenaan puts it, such
speech acts have a specific ‘directionality’: they are essentially from me to
you.2 Oddly, although both Kenaan and Stephen Darwall have argued at
length for the fundamental importance of second-personal speech acts
in general, and addresses in particular, neither of them discusses voca-
tives per se, but rather they look for cases in which more philosophically
familiar forms of speech such as declaratives and imperatives function as
addresses.
Both Kenaan and Darwall conflate the addressing function of certain
speech acts with the generic fact that any speech act at all, including an
impersonal declarative, can be addressed to a particular other person in
the course of communication. This conflation makes it difficult for them
to clearly and consistently demarcate those speech acts that count as
second-personal in the sense that is important to them. For of course
even a thoroughly agent-neutral declarative is always uttered by some-
one in particular, and usually uttered to someone in particular, for the
purpose of informing or otherwise affecting that person; such perlocu-
tionary effects, however, do not transform a perfectly decent impersonal
declarative into a second-personal speech act. By focusing directly on
the vocative, or the pure form of the address, we will be able to isolate
and examine the pragmatic structure of the second-personal address
more effectively.
In the next chapter we will argue that, in fact, vocatives play an essen-
tial role in discourse; indeed, we claim that all meaningful, functional
speech acts contain what we call a transcendental vocative—that is, they
each have a vocative function, in addition to whatever other functions
they might have, and this vocative function is a condition for the possi-
bility of their being genuine speech acts at all. We will argue that the
vocative is not only an example of the second-personal address, but the
essence of its pragmatic form, and furthermore that all speech acts have
a second-personal address built into their function. But before we get to
that argument, which is one of the most important punch lines of this
book, we need to devote some detailed attention to regular, everyday
vocatives and the acknowledgments they call for.
2. Hagi Kenaan, The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005). S
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6.1 Two Kinds of Recognitives

Remember that a recognitive is a speech act that serves to express recog-
nition of something that makes itself present to the receptive faculties of
the speaker. We argued in Chapter 2 that an observative speech act such
as “Lo, a rabbit!” does not merely make the declarative claim that a rab-
bit is present, nor that I see a rabbit. Rather, it serves a special recogni-
tive function: it marks or expresses my detection of a rabbit. It is the rec-
ognizing, and not just what is recognized or who is recognizing, that is
given expression in such a claim, and since what is expressed is the in-
dexed recognition itself, this entitlement is not generalizable, even in
the ideal. While others may well see the same thing as I do, and so while
my entitlement to such a speech act may well not be unique, it is still
the case that this reception and recognition are unshareably and spe-
cifically mine.3 Hence the entitlement that grounds my speech act is
agent-relative and individuating. Since recognitives by definition ex-
press such recognitions, they have necessarily agent-relative inputs.
In natural language we speak of ‘recognizing’ many kinds of things:
we can recognize objects, facts, persons, nations, rights, and claims, to
name just a few. But there is an important difference between the way
that I use speech to recognize a state of affairs (that there is a rabbit in
the bush, perhaps), and the way that I recognize a person by calling
upon her in a meeting. While we might be tempted to interpret the first
type of recognition as a mere passive noting, notice that both types
of recognitive speech acts change the normative status of others in the
discursive community, as well as making demands upon those others.
When I call out “A rabbit!” my utterance embeds a demand that others
accept that there is a rabbit present and that I saw it, use these beliefs
appropriately in inference, and so on. Such a recognitive has an agent-
neutral output; I have secured public knowledge, even though my enti-
tlement to the speech act is agent-relative. (If I utter “Lo, a rabbit!” my
utterance also has the agent-relative output of ostending the rabbit—
that is, calling upon others around me to direct their attention so that
they too will recognize the rabbit in a certain way.) On the other hand,
3. This leaves open whether the agent, the ‘I’, that recognizes might be sometimes also a
‘we’ or a group agent. S
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138 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
when I recognize you as a speaker in a meeting, or when the provost at

a university commencement ceremony recognizes the graduating class
of 2008, the output of such a recognitive speech act is agent-relative:
the recognition makes special demands upon and grants special entitle-
ments to the one(s) recognized that are not shared even in the ideal. In
recognizing you, I call upon you to speak; in recognizing a graduat-
ing class, the provost calls upon the members of that class to assume
the duties and entitlements that attach to their degree (and, as collateral,
I and the provost call upon others to recognize these normative claims).
Hence all recognitives are agent-relative in their input, but some have
agent-relative outputs and others have agent-neutral outputs; some rec-
ognitives belong in box 2 of our grid and others in box 4.
6.2 Vocatives
Vocatives are hails. To utter a vocative is to call another person—in call-
ing out “Hello, Eli!” I recognize the fact that that person there is Eli, and
I do so by calling upon him to recognize that he has been properly recog-
nized. Vocatives are thus recognitives with agent-relative outputs, and
their pragmatic structure is rather complex. You cannot hail someone
unless you recognize that he is there to be hailed, and part of what your
hail expresses is this very recognition (where this recognition certainly
need not involve direct perception—you can hail over the Internet, etc.).
The vocatival demand that the one called appropriately acknowledge the
call is not a separate pragmatic component of the hail over and above its
recognitive function. Rather, it is how it carries out that recognitive func-
tion. This is why “Lo! Richard” is a very different speech act from “Yo!
Richard”; both recognize Richard, but the first makes a claim with an
agent-neutral output—it recognizes the publicly available, shared fact of
Richard’s presence (and would be quite odd if directed at Richard)—
whereas the second, in calling for a response specifically from Richard,
has an agent-relative (and agent-specific) output.
Many speech acts function to call upon an audience to recognize and
respond appropriately to that speech act—indeed, we will soon argue
that all of them do. Vocatives, however, in their pure form, isolate this
function and elevate it to their central point; they recognize a person
specifically in calling forth an appropriate recognition back from him S
that this recognition was itself appropriate and received. In the language R
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of Chapter 5, vocatives serve a constative function: in recognizing an-

other, they hold that other to responding appropriately to that recogni-
tion. When I call out “Hello, Eli!” I hold Eli to saying “Hey, how’s it go-
ing!” back, or something of the sort, but of course my hail created rather
than reflected this “duty” of Eli’s; he could have had no prior duty to re-
spond to a recognition that hadn’t happened yet. (In Chapter 8 we will
show that vocatives serve an alethic function as well.)
Consider two cases of hailing: a teacher calls out my name during roll
call in a class; a colleague greets me as she passes in the hall. The teacher
and the colleague are discursively registering their recognition of who I
am. However, these are not merely observative utterances, but rather
they call for a response from me. In turn, my recognition that it is really I
to whom my colleague is speaking is not just a matter of my recognizing
the descriptive content of his claim; it is part and parcel of my recogni-
tion that I am the one who is being called upon to respond and uphold
the norms of greeting behavior. The point is that my recognition of the
hail and my recognition of the normative demand it makes on me to act
so as to acknowledge the correctness of its recognition of me are one and
the same thing. Recognizing the hail involves recognizing not just its
presence but its target, its source, and its binding force, which is insepa-
rable from taking it as really aimed at me—as making a real claim on me
in virtue of having correctly identified me. This demand is not just a so-
cial nicety added to the discursive recognition, but part of the performa-
tive function of the call itself. The vocative hail can be a visceral, even an
uncomfortable experience when it succeeds in grabbing its target. When
the moderator of a panel asks, “Does anyone have any questions?”;
when the leader of a support group asks, “Who would like to share their
experiences with the group?”; or when a buddy I wasn’t expecting to run
into calls out “Hey, Mark!” across the strip club,4 the feeling that it is re-
ally I who ought to respond to the hail may become a tangible weight.
We have pointed out that vocatives are agent-relative in their output:
they are intrinsically directed at an individual whom they identify or rec-
ognize. They are also agent-relative in their input. This is so, not only in
virtue of their recognitive character, but also because they can only be
entitled insofar as their speaker has the proper authority to legitimately
make such a demand on the one she is hailing—and this authority,
S
4. As an anonymous referee was concerned might happen. R
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140 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
though it may be widely distributed, is always individually owned. The

right to hail someone (in a particular fashion, in a particular circum-
stance) is not a publicly available entitlement but one that attaches to
the normative position of the hailer as she is particularly situated within
a structure of authority and normative relationships. Different people
have the right to call one another in different ways and in different situa-
tions, and to call one another different things. A doctor’s patients may
only be able to appropriately call her by her title and last name, whereas
her friends can call her by her first name, and her parents can call her by
an endearing albeit undignified nickname. Those same friends, patients,
and parents cannot call her at all when she is in the middle of surgery or
a public lecture, except perhaps in an emergency, which changes the
normative structure of entitlements yet again. We can also have differen-
tial commitments to hail in various contexts: shopkeepers often ought to
greet incoming customers, for instance.
It may seem that a minimal hail—calling “hello” to someone as she
passes by, for instance—requires no special authority or entitlements.
But this is just because it requires an authority weak enough that almost
everyone has it. It is easy to imagine a society so inegalitarian that even
such minimal hails are not acceptable or acknowledged between certain
kinds of people—perhaps hardly anyone can hail the king in even this
minimal way, or perhaps men may not hail women in public. Indeed,
all cultures have elaborate rules and rituals that constrain who can be
hailed by whom and how and when, and the ‘neutral’ hail is an illusion
sustainable only in a relatively lax and ritualistically flexible society such
as ours.5 Because hailing someone always makes a demand upon her,
asking for something in return, entitlement to a hail is never simply an
agent-neutral given.
It is essential to the functioning of vocatives that they establish a nor-
5. Notice that in the case of both imperatives and vocatives the normative structure of so-
cial ethics plays a large role in constituting discursive entitlements to speak. In such cases, the
internal norms of discursive pragmatics are particularly intertwined with larger social norma-
tive structure governing discourse, and thus the two levels of normativity we distinguished in
Chapter 1 are heavily interdependent. This does not mean that the distinction has been con-
fused or undermined. If one issues an imperative or a vocative without the proper discursive
entitlement, however constituted by social ethics this entitlement is, then the resulting speech
act will not merely be rude or socially inappropriate; it will be a pragmatic misfire without ap-
propriate performative force. Conversely, a vocative or an imperative can be rude and yet effec- S
tive, because the norms governing these two layers of normativity are inextricably intertwined
and mutually constitutive, with fuzzy boundaries between them, but still distinct. R
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mative relationship between caller and called and engage the one called
in this relationship. This establishment and engagement places claims
and burdens upon the one called, in part by demanding acknowledg-
ment of this very establishment and engagement—the vocative does
much more than note someone’s presence. It calls for a response and
hence draws the one called into a direct and agent-relative normative re-
lationship with the caller. The right to call others into such normative re-
lationships is differentially distributed. It is against the background of
the normative relationships that are already established that we some-
times, but not always, earn the right to engage others in new relation-
ships through speaking to them.6
This is why vocatives can so easily be received as abusive, burden-
some, or obtrusive: consider, for instance, how a man’s hailing of a
woman he doesn’t know in a bar, or a homeless person’s attempt to hail
me as I pass on the street, can be received as an uncomfortable or oner-
ous demand for a response. Learning the theoretical fact that a homeless
person needs money and wants you to give it to him is very different, in
terms of its practical normative burden, from being called upon by that
homeless person to give money. For example, it is only in response to
the latter that our not giving money counts as a refusal. The homeless
person’s call to you to give money, regardless of whether you do so, es-
tablishes a new normative relationship between you within which inac-
tion is transformed into refusal, which is itself a second-personal, transi-
tive action: I refuse you.7
In order to have standing as a person with normative commitments
and entitlements in a community, others in that community must be
able to recognize us as such and hold us responsible for that normative
standing, and this in turn requires that we be hailable—an appropriate
6. James Bohman, in “The Importance of the Second Person: Interpretation, Practical Knowl-
edge, and Normative Attitudes,” in Hans H. Kögler and Karsten Stueber, eds., Empathy and
Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 222–
242, points out that “competent interpreters and communicators thus possess the practical
knowledge that is manifested in the ability to establish and maintain . . . normatively guided in-
teractions and social relationships” (234).
7. Rousseau, in the Sixth Walk of his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter Frank (New
York: Penguin, 1979), explores this normative transformation with the story of a little crippled
beggar-boy, who, through the act of hailing Rousseau on his walk, turns the pleasure of charity
into a resented duty to the boy. Rousseau argues that the former is somehow morally preferable, S
while the agent-relative duty imputed by the call is an unjustified interruption of his individual
freedom, but of course we need not follow him in this particular romantic individualist fancy. R
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142 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
target for the vocative—for at least some people in some circumstances.

One of Darwall’s central claims in The Second-Person Standpoint is that
second-personal interactions necessarily involve mutual recognition—
that is, two agents, each of whom recognizes the other as recognizing
her. (Although Darwall’s main historical referent for this relationship is
Fichte, in fact this is more familiar to most of us as Hegelian mutual rec-
ognition.)
Vocatives have the characteristic function of calling another person
into such a relationship of mutual recognition. They initiate that rela-
tionship by expressing recognition of the other, and they call for its
continuation by asking for recognition in turn. They thus function to
forge second-personal relationships of the sort Darwall describes. Dar-
wall, like Hegel and presumably Fichte before him, points out that mu-
tual recognition presupposes and acknowledges the personhood of each
party; we recognize the other as one capable of recognizing in turn, and
hence as a being with a standing and a perspective in normative space.
Darwall does not talk about vocatives, but he does attach a great deal
of importance to Strawsonian reactive attitudes. Reactive attitudes, he
points out, recognize the one to whom they are a reaction as a person
who can in turn recognize and respond to this reaction, by holding that
person responsible. Vocatives are speech acts that crystallize and express
this normative pragmatic structure. While not all vocatives reflect a
judgment of moral responsibility, all reactive attitudes serve a vocative
function.
Vocatives, like speech acts in our other categories, need have no par-
ticular surface grammar: though terms such as ‘hey’ and ‘yo’ explicitly
mark the vocative mood, a vocative can take the form of anything from a
slight nod of the head, to a formal greeting, to a declarative utterance
whose point, in context, is to recognize someone by calling him and de-
manding an appropriate acknowledgment (for instance, “I see a cute lit-
tle boy in a red sweater!” directed at a toddler son by a parent who has
just returned home from work). The semantic content of a vocative call
may be more or less specific—we can call “Hey, you with the blue hat
and the big nose!” or “Anyone who is willing to volunteer please raise
your hand,” or just “Hi!”—But in terms of its pragmatic function, its job
is to call upon you as this particular person who was recognized by the
call. As Althusser puts it, in order for the call to be effective, its intended S
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target needs to recognize: “That’s really me being called.” Otherwise this

audience cannot be effectively claimed by the normative demands that
are differentially distributed by the call. A third person, who hears and
notes the correctness of a call, is not claimed by it in the same way—
there is no demand on her to recognize herself as having been called.
This means that, in order for the call to reach its target, the one called
has to recognize more than that the call occurred, and even more than
that it has correctly identified her, in some funny third-personal sense.
Rather, her response has to be essentially deictically indexed and first-
personal so that she can be claimed by the norms that demand her ap-
propriate acknowledgment in an inherently personalized way.
The vocative has an agent-specific output rather than functioning as a
generalized address. Because of the recognitive dimension of the hail, in
order for it to succeed in reaching its target, it has to be heard as calling,
not just anyone who happens to fall under a particular description, but
me. In this sense, vocatives are inherently individuating; where percep-
tual episodes, we argued earlier, individuate at the level of input, voca-
tives serve an individuating function at the output end.8 Even when a
vocative calls several people (“Those of you seated in rows ten to twenty
may now board”) or even everyone (“Thou shalt not kill”), it is, as
Heidegger might put it, “in each case yours.”
Furthermore, not only is the call agent-specific and individuating, but
its voice is inherently second-personal. A speech act can recognize and
have differential normative implications for a particular person while
functioning third-personally—for example, I may see Jim mistreating
his dog, and on the basis of my recognition of this particular event of
mistreatment, say, “Jim should stop mistreating his dog.” This is a pre-
scriptive with an agent-relative output, and furthermore it is an output
that individuates a particular target—it imputes a normative commit-
ment to Jim, and not to anyone who happens to be mistreating his or her
dog. But it is a third-personal speech act, and not a call to Jim.9 Here
8. In chapter I of division II of Being and Time, Heidegger is concerned with just this indi-
viduating character of calls, which is why his call of conscience is, despite its lack of content, a
call to authenticity, or a call to the subject to ‘be herself’ and not some other self.
9. At least not at its most straightforward level of function. Since we will be arguing in the
next chapter that all speech acts have a vocative dimension, this particular claim will have to be
precisified later. S
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144 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
we can see that the audience of a speech act and the target of its output
are not necessarily the same, which is part of why agent-specificity and
second-personality are not the same property of speech acts. However,
vocatives, unlike prescriptives, necessarily call to the person they recog-
nize and in doing so call upon that person to recognize that recognition.
Thus a speech act counts as a vocative only if it is a second-personal call
to you (and, perhaps, you and you).
Some quasi-vocatives involve variations on the paradigmatic, recog-
nitive structure that we have described. Some are what we might call
‘conditional vocatives’; instead of responding to a person recognized
through the receptive faculties of the speaker, these speech acts seek
their target. When Mark comes home and calls out, “Hello? Are you
home?” he is not hailing Amy by recognizing her, but seeking to dis-
cover if she is there to be hailed. If Amy is home and hears this call, then
she will have been called upon to acknowledge herself as having been
called in the traditional vocative fashion; furthermore, Mark’s call still
recognizes Amy as the proper target of the call. Such conditional voca-
tives are fairly benign tweaks on the traditional vocative structure. A
more interesting variation on the vocative is an interrogative that hails
by seeking an as-yet-indeterminate target. When someone calls, “We
need help! Is there a doctor on the airplane?” this is not a call to anyone
in particular, even if it successfully targets someone who is in fact there.
Yet this type of call is still clearly parasitic on the traditional vocative. It
is not in the first instance a recognitive, but it still seeks the kind of ac-
knowledgment appropriate to a vocative, and, interestingly, if successful
it will function as though it had been a recognitive for the one called, who
will respond out of the recognition that “that’s really me being called.”
(“I am a doctor! They’re calling me!”)
Even further from traditional vocatives are those that function not
to discover a proper target but to create such a target. Much advertising
has this structure. An advertisement that reads “Are you over thirty
and worried about premature wrinkles?” or even “Now that you’re over
thirty, you’re worried about premature wrinkles” seeks to marshal the
“that’s really me being called” response, in order to constitute a proper
audience upon whom it places a normative demand (to buy the wrin-
kle cream). In recognizing myself as targeted by the vocative, I become
(really) someone over thirty who is (now!) worried about premature S
wrinkles. Such speech acts are not recognitives in any straightforward R
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sense—we might call them constitutive misrecognitives.10 However, once

again, their functioning is parasitic upon the functioning of traditional
recognitive vocatives, and when they successfully grab their target they
will be received as recognitives that demand appropriate acknowledg-
ment. We will return to such vocatives in detail in the final chapter,
arguing that this constitutive function is extremely important to en-
abling the possibility of a discursive community and placing individuals
within this community; we mention them here only for the sake of com-
pleteness.
6.3 Acknowledgments
An acknowledgment, of the sort we are interested in here, is a (more or
less) explicit taking on of the normative status and responsibilities de-
manded of one by a given speech act. In acknowledging a speech act,
whether a vocative or some other kind of utterance, you give expression
to your normative uptake of its output—you mark your claiming of the
commitments and entitlements that it imputes to you. You can, for in-
stance, acknowledge an imperative by uttering “okay” while carrying
out whatever action was demanded of you. You can acknowledge a de-
clarative by marking that you accept that you are committed to its truth-
claim, for instance by uttering “You’re right”11 or “Oh!” You can ac-
knowledge a vocative in various ways: by returning the hail, nodding
your head, etc.
Testifying provides a lovely example of acknowledgments at work.
The preacher calls out “God is great,” and the congregation calls back
“Amen!” or “I hear you!” The congregation’s speech acts do not (just)
reassert the preacher’s claims—they give expression to the uptake of the
claims. When a preacher calls out and demands an acknowledgment,
10. For detailed analyses of this type of constitutive vocative see Rebecca Kukla, “Myth,
Memory and Misrecognition in Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’,” Philosophi-
cal Studies 101 (2000): 161–211; Kukla, “Talking Back: Monstrosity, Mundanity and Cynicism
in Television Talk Shows,” Rethinking Marxism 14 (2002): 67–96; and Kukla, “The Ontology
and Temporality of Conscience,” Continental Philosophy Review 35 (2002): 1–34.
11. “You’re right” is a bit of colloquial English that nicely incorporates several features of
declaratival acknowledgment. It functions as an anaphoric reassertion, in that it entails com-
mitment to the content of the declarative (“You’re right,” that is, pragmatically entails “That’s
true”). Furthermore, the phrase is usefully ambiguous between the normative recognition of S
justified performance and the normative undertaking of the content of the speech act. So, as
colloquially used, “You’re right” implies also “You’re justified.” R
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146 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
this is an explicit call upon the members of the congregation, not only to
endorse the position (consider how underwhelming it would be for the
congregation to respond “That’s true, Minister”), but to express that the
preacher’s words have made a claim on them, and to express and high-
light (and celebrate) their (new or renewed) commitment to this claim
and all it entails.
Vocatives stand in a dialectical relation of mutual dependence with ac-
knowledgments. Vocatives, in essence, recognize second-personally by
calling for acknowledgment of that recognition, and hence a vocative
that goes completely unacknowledged has failed in its function. Any
speech act can be acknowledged, and many speech acts call for acknowl-
edgment as part of their normative output. For instance, Darwall points
out that when a sergeant issues an imperative, she “expects from her
charges a ‘looking back’ that reciprocates her address to them.”12 That is,
she demands more than mere compliance; she expects acknowledgment
of the normative status of her address. However, not only do vocatives
put the demand for acknowledgment front and center, but they are also
peculiarly self-referential: what they call upon you to do is specifically to
acknowledge them. Furthermore, what they call upon you to acknowl-
edge when you acknowledge them is that you were properly so called.
The acknowledgment of a vocative recognizes that the vocative was ap-
propriate, and that it reached its target, and it meets the demand for rec-
ognition of that vocative recognition. While conversations consist (usu-
ally) of more than just a string of hails and acknowledgments, they are
sustained as conversations (rather than as a mere succession of speech
acts) by an ongoing fabric of vocative calls for recognition and acknowl-
edgments of these calls, which sustain the normative engagement of the
interlocutors with one another and with the conversational project.
Acknowledgments of vocatives serve as vocatives in their own right;
they are targeted at the hailer and call for her to recognize that her de-
mand for recognition has been met. One might worry that this begins a
pragmatic regress of calls for recognition. But perhaps this ought to give
us insight rather than worry; remember all the meaningless conversa-
tions we have been stuck in, which have involved seemingly unending
S
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 91. R
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cycles of response, just because at no point has it seemed allowable to

fail to acknowledge what has just been said.
Failure to respond to a vocative with an acknowledgment is not merely
rude; it is a pragmatic subversion—the hail has not succeeded in carry-
ing out its function if it is ignored. And ignoring a hail on purpose can
constitute a shunning tantamount to acting as if the hailer did not have
the authority to issue that hail in the first place. In thus denying the au-
thoritative status of the hail, we might be resisting this person’s right to
call us in this way, because of either the normative positioning implied
by the hail, the normative position of the one hailing, or both. For in-
stance, a married woman who has kept her maiden name might refuse to
respond when she is called by her husband’s name, even though she
knows that it is she who is being called. Or a supervisor might refuse to
respond to subordinates who call her by her first name rather than a
more formal title.
Ignoring is a complex attitude. The paradigmatic failure of a hail is
when its normative upshot is not taken up and hence not acknowledged.
But refusing to take up a normative demand requires recognizing that the
demand has been made. To refuse a hail is already to recognize and ac-
knowledge it as a hail in refusing it. We can refuse a hail only from
someone whom we ultimately recognize as capable of addressing us.13
For instance, if I walk past a talking toy bunny in a store that “hails” me,
I am not ignoring or shunning it in “refusing” to answer it—I simply
don’t recognize the sounds it makes as a hail at all. Hence ignoring a hail
is a degenerate form of acknowledgment that recognizes the personhood
of the speaker and the claim made by the hail through the very act of re-
jecting that claim, and with it the speaker’s attempt to forge a relation-
ship of mutual recognition with us.
Because acknowledging involves recognizing that a normative status
has been imputed to me appropriately, along with expressing my accep-
tance of that status, the acknowledgment is itself another type of recogni-
13. Colleen Fulton (in private correspondence) has made the interesting point that certain
vocatives can be oppressive or objectifying precisely because they call for being ignored, and
hence there is no escape from them or way of rejecting their force. Her example is catcalls, for
which not responding actually seems to be the proper, expected response. (After all, one who
responded would be a “slut.”) This makes such calls unshunnable, in an important sense. If
you ignore a catcall, you have in effect provided the acknowledgment the call asks for, and S
hence you have, whether you like it or not, acknowledged the authority of the caller to call you
in this way. As Fulton puts it, there is no way for the person called to “win the exchange.” R
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148 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tive speech act. Here, though, what is recognized is not a fact or an ob-
ject or a subject, but, in the first instance, the force of a normative claim.
The input of the acknowledgment, like that of all recognitives, is inher-
ently agent-relative and individuating: what I acknowledge is the claim
that a speech act makes on me given my particular position as the audi-
ence of the speech act—and this is still so even when everyone is targeted
by the speech act, either in virtue of its extensional scope or its agent-
neutral pragmatic structure. Only I can express my normative uptake of
a claim.
On the other hand, the output of an acknowledgment can be either
agent-neutral or agent-relative. When we acknowledge a speech act—
that is, give expression to our normative uptake of the claim it makes on
us—we may do so by acknowledging the speech act to the speaker, or
through a public act.
Sometimes we acknowledge the claim a speech act makes without the
specific identity of the speaker being essential to the normative force of
the claim, and our acknowledgment takes the form of an agent-neutral,
public expression. I might publicly acknowledge my responsibility for a
crime of which I stand accused, for instance, or I might publicly ac-
knowledge the truth of a scientific theory in response to a rival’s evi-
dence. Both acknowledgments are expressed recognitions of the force of
particular speech acts, but they are not directed at particular agents or
dependent upon the identity of the original speakers, and they have
agent-neutral outputs.
At other times we may acknowledge a speech act that succeeds in
making a normative claim on us because of the specific identity of the
speaker, even though our acknowledgment itself is public and agent-
neutral. I may affirm my commitment to a particular political cause,
perhaps, because it was Nelson Mandela who called upon me to com-
mit to it, and I may do so without directing my acknowledgment at Nel-
son Mandela (who doesn’t even know that I exist) himself. These types
of public acknowledgments have recognitive, agent-relative inputs (be-
cause uptakes are agent-relative statuses) and agent-neutral outputs,
and hence they are box-2 speech acts similar to observatives. They in-
clude rituals designed to show—in a public, agent-neutral way—that
one has taken up a normative claim: accepting the wafer during mass,
donning a garish frosh-week sweatshirt during hazing, etc. Indeed, ele- S
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gantly, in the religious context, we call such practices of publicly acting

out our uptake of normative claims observance, or being observant.
Such public acts of acknowledgment are quite different speech acts
from those that acknowledge to a speaker that I have recognized and ac-
cepted the normative force of her claim. The latter type of acknowledg-
ment is inherently second-personal, and it is agent-relative in its output;
it serves to complete a relationship of mutual recognition.14 Any speech
act can be given such second-personal acknowledgment. Some speech
acts can be acknowledged in either way. For example, I can respond to a
colleague’s compelling argument either by saying “You’re right,” and
thereby offering acknowledgment to her, second-personally, or by pub-
licly expressing my acceptance of the commitments entailed by her ar-
gument. In contrast, by their very nature, vocatives call for second-
personal acknowledgment and fulfill their pragmatic function only if
they get it. Since their normative demand on us is that we respond to our
recognizer with recognition in turn, we cannot even make sense of the
idea of acknowledging the vocative in a public way that is not directed to
the one who called us. If Mark says “Hi, Rebecca!” and Rebecca says to
Richard, or to no one in particular, “Yup, Mark recognized me,” then
Rebecca has not taken up the normative claim that Mark’s hail made on
her, which was a claim to a returned recognition. Hence she has not in
fact acknowledged the vocative, publicly or otherwise. She has (rather
snarkily) reported on its propriety, rather than expressing uptake of it.
Thus the acknowledgment of a vocative has an agent-relative output
along with its agent-relative input: it acknowledges your claim on me,
to you.
Thus acknowledgments are recognitives, and they can belong in box 2
or box 4. At this point, our grid is as filled in as it is going to get in the
course of this book; see Figure 8.
Some speech acts are first and foremost explicit acknowledgments—
for instance, “Yes?” in response to a vocative, “Okay” in response to an
14. For completeness’s sake, we should also mention the possibility of acknowledging a
speech act second-personally to someone other than the original speaker, as, for example,
when one acknowledges the appropriateness of “You may now kiss your spouse” by kissing
him. This case should be distinguished from giving a speech act public, agent-neutral acknowl-
edgment in the course of a conversation with some particular person, since of course speech
acts with agent-neutral outputs can be (and usually are) spoken to some particular audience in
the course of a conversation. S
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150 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
imperative, or “You’re right” or “Amen” in response to a declarative.

Others function as acknowledgments more or less implicitly while doing
double duty as another kind of speech act, for instance when we re-
spond to a vocative with a returned vocative, or to a truth-claim by de-
claring an inference from that truth-claim. Sometimes acknowledgment
doesn’t require a speech act at all, because the recognition and uptake of
the change in normative status is manifested directly in action, for in-
stance when we follow an order. (However, we shouldn’t conflate ac-
knowledging an order by following it with merely doing what was or-
dered. One could do something that was ordered without knowing that
Input
Output
1 2
of taste, baptisms,
Categorical some recognitives,
Imperatives i.e. observatives, some
acknowledgments
3 4
Prescriptives Imperatives
Agent-relative (promises, invitations,
reproaches...),
ostensions, some
recognitives, i.e.
vocatives, some
acknowledgments
S
Figure 8 R
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the order was given, or without recognizing the appropriateness of the

order. Even doing what was ordered while noting that the order was jus-
tified is not sufficient to constitute an acknowledgment of the order. You
could, for instance, recognize that the colonel has entitlement to order
you to raise your hand, and also raise your hand without doing it as
an acknowledgment of this imperative—perhaps because someone else
whose authority you respect more than the colonel’s gave you the same
order.)15
An acknowledgment in our sense never merely notes a change in nor-
mative status—it has to enact or express the uptake of the claim made
by a speech act. This is essential to the recognitive character of the
acknowledgment. Again, I do not acknowledge a hail simply by not-
ing its propriety—i.e., by commenting, “She notes correctly that I am
Rebecca.” Instead, I say “Hi” back, or smile and grunt, or do any one of
the myriad of other context-dependently socially acceptable things that
count as expressing my uptake of the claim that has been made on me by
the vocative. Notice, then, that no set of mere assertions of belief, even
about normative statuses, could ever amount to an acknowledgment,
for an acknowledgment performs the concrete acceptance, in practical
and not just theoretical reason, of a normative status imputed by a
speech act.16
Anyone, whether targeted by a speech act or not, might be in a po-
15. Nor do we think that what is missing is a causal relation. Clearly the mere fact that the
evaluational recognition causes the arm to raise—say by startling you in such a way that you
raise your hands in a reflexive gesture of surrender—is not sufficient, but we do not think the
Davidsonian strategy of filling in the “right sort” of causal relation is on the right track.
16. Gettier notoriously spawned an industry producing cases in which, in response to a
knowledge claim, someone is willing to grant justification and belief, and acknowledge truth,
but not willing to take the agent’s justification as itself her own grounds for taking-true; see
Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963): 121–123. Our anal-
ysis of acknowledgments shows the phenomenon of the Gettier gap between knowledge and
justified true belief to be a species of a general pragmatic phenomenon which includes, for ex-
ample, the gap between, on the one hand, acknowledging that someone gave an order and that
she did so appropriately, and doing the thing ordered, and, on the other hand, following the or-
der. Acknowledgments express recognition not only of the entitlement to a speech act and of
the adoption of the normative statuses imputed by the speech act, but also of the force of this
imputation itself. Whether or not we make it explicit in speech, if we don’t acknowledge this, we
haven’t acknowledged the speech act as fully successful. In the case of knowledge claims, this
means that the acknowledgment of a knowledge claim requires more than the acknowledgment S
of justified true belief, as contemporary epistemology suspected—but that ‘something more’ is
not an external or a semantic condition, but a kind of pragmatic success. R
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152 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
sition to note that the speech act was entitled and successfully per-
formed—the declarative was true, the imperative was appropriate, the
vocative properly recognized the one it hailed—and to note this evalua-
tion in speech. While we can evaluate the propriety of a speech act with
a third-personal declarative (“Sue had every right to tell Joe not to buy
that car”; “Sarah’s version of the proof was correct”), we can acknowledge
our uptake of the normative claim made by a speech act only by way of a
speech act with an agent-relative input. (Only Joe can acknowledge Sue’s
telling him not to buy that car, even while we can stand by and note her
propriety in doing so.)
The necessarily agent-relative, individuating input of acknowledg-
ments will be significant in the next chapter. What it shows is that while
many speech acts have agent-neutral outputs, all speech acts, insofar as
they call for normative uptake and acknowledgment, must call upon partic-
ular individuals to acknowledge them, and therefore must to that extent
have agent-relative outputs. So, for instance, even if a declarative makes
an agent-neutral truth-claim that belongs in public space, the way it
calls upon me to give it normative uptake is never interchangeable with
the way it calls upon you to do so. Only I can acknowledge its call upon
me; only you can acknowledge its call upon you.
Any kind of speech act can be acknowledged. However, acknowledg-

ments bear a special relationship to vocatives. Acknowledgments of voc-
atives crystallize and purify the acknowledging function of discourse,
because acknowledgment just is what vocatives call for. The acknowl-
edgment of a vocative is self-referential, in the specific sense that the
normative uptake to which it gives expression just is the uptake of
the demand for this expression. Indeed, the second-personal vocative-
acknowledgment exchange, in its pure form, just is the discursive ex-
pression of mutual recognition, in its pure form. This equivalence will
be important to us in our final chapter, when we argue that, as Hegel
thought, mutual recognition is a constitutive condition for the possibil-
ity of a community of agents subject to the claims of the world and of
one another. First, in the following chapter, we argue that the second-
personal vocative call for acknowledgment, whose function is to forge
such mutual recognition, is an essential pragmatic component of all dis-
course. S
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The Essential Second Person
Riddle: “What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back to

you?”
Answer: “A stick.”
—Anonymous
In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin argues for what he calls the
“internal dialogism” of speech: “The word in living conversation is di-
rectly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an
answer, anticipates it, and structures itself in the answer’s direction.”1
This structural call for an answer is the essence of the vocative. In this
chapter we argue that in order for a speech act to perform any normative
function—that is, in order for it to count as a speech act at all—it must
have a vocative function, in addition to whatever other functions it has.
This vocative function is a condition for the possibility of the speech
act’s doing or meaning whatever else it does or means—or as we shall
put it, all speech acts contain a transcendental vocative. Speech acts not
only strive to make normative claims upon those whom they target, but
they call second-personally upon those to whom they speak to recognize
themselves as bound by these normative claims, and to acknowledge
this uptake. That is to say, to speak is to hail.
Because vocative speech is necessarily second-personal, this means
that, on our account, language has an essential second-personal prag-
matic dimension. In Chapter 2 we argued that the ability to mark the
first-personal perspective in language in a way that deictically attaches
speech acts to points of view is essential to the possibility of discourse.
S
1. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 280. R
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154 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
We also claimed that Brandom did not have the resources to make sense
of the pragmatic structure of this first-personal ownership of speech
acts, because he treated normative commitments and entitlements ex-
clusively as impersonal scorecards rather than as inherently owned by
embodied subjects with points of view. In this chapter we make a paral-
lel claim, not about the owner of a speech act, but about its target. The
ability to mark the direction of a speech act within language is essential
to the possibility of discourse. The direction of a speech act cannot be re-
duced to or cashed out in terms of any combination of its impersonal
and contextual features; rather, this direction is a basic structural fea-
ture of the speech act itself. Any account of the pragmatics of discourse
must build in from the beginning the fact that speech acts are directed
(though not necessarily direct) transactions between agents, as opposed
to just shifts in abstract scorecards of commitments and entitlements.
Our argument in Chapter 2 was that discursive communities have to
have the capacity to express their first-personal uptake in recognitives,
and hence that the ability to express the first-personal perspective is es-
sential to discourse. There, we did not draw the conclusion that every
speech act has to give expression to this first-personal perspective, but
only that it has to be possible to give such expression in speech. At the
same time, as Austin and others have made clear, any particular speech
act will depend for its felicity and success upon a host of commitments
and statuses of various kinds, and so our capacities to perform speech
acts have a generally holistic, interdependent character. Our claim in
this chapter is quite a bit stronger in form than either of these: here we
claim not just that any language must have the resources to enable di-
rected, second-person speech, nor even just that the ability to produce
some vocatives is a holistically necessary condition upon the ability to
engage in discourse at all. Rather, we claim that each felicitous speech
act contains a vocative, second-personal call. Although we will consider
some partial exceptions to this universal claim later in the chapter, the
exceptions will turn out to be derivative variants on the basic vocative
structure of speech; they will not detract from the fundamental role that
the vocative call plays in making it possible for a speech act to execute
any discursive pragmatic function.
Now this is not, of course, to make the absurd claim that the second-
person voice is the only voice in which we can speak. Many declaratives, S
prescriptives, etc., are clearly spoken in the third-person or impersonal R
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The Essential Second Person 155
voice. Our claim will be that speech acts have a second-personal, voca-
tive function in addition to whatever other function they have. There is,
as we have seen, nothing odd about a single utterance serving more than
one pragmatic function. The utterance “That music is awfully loud” can
function simultaneously as a declarative description of the sound level
(in a third-person voice, with an agent-neutral input and output) and as
an imperatival order to turn it down (in a second-person voice, with an
agent-relative input and output). “How’s it going?” can serve as an inter-
rogative, a vocative, and an acknowledgment of a vocative all at once.
We seek to uncover the transcendental place of the second-person voice
and its vocative call within language, not to exclude or diminish the
many other voices and functions that make up discourse.
7.1 Concrete Habitation of the Space of Reasons

Throughout this book we have taken it as a core principle that what a
speech act—as a material act performed by and among agents within a
discursive community—does is to draw upon the normative entitle-
ments of its speaker in striving to change the normative commitments
and entitlements of others. As such, in speaking, we make normative
claims upon others. A genuine speech act can have an agent-relative or
an agent-neutral output but it cannot have a null output, which is to say
that it must seek to make claims on someone (though it may not suc-
ceed). Once we situate speech acts within a social context, the insight
that they must seek to make a claim on someone can appear fairly trivial.
But this, in and of itself, does not yet show that this claim-making is
essentially second-personal. For, we might ask, why can’t it just be true
that a speech act by person A makes a claim upon person B, without
the speech act being second-personal? Even once we recognize that all
speech is structured so as make a claim on someone, we might still think
that it can be an objective fact that such a claim has been made, without
the speaker attempting to transmit the claim through a second-personal
call. When the government changes the tax laws, the claim on me to pay
taxes changes, whether or not I receive a second-personal communica-
tion informing me of this. And every legal play in football changes the
normative status of every other player, but the plays are not directed at
anyone. The hard part will be arguing that, in speech, claims must be is- S
sued in an essentially second-person voice, and that they must seek up- R
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156 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
take and recognitive acknowledgement of that uptake. We must show

that speech acts not only make claims on someone, but are essentially di-
rected claims made by me, on you.
Since the beginning of this book we have portrayed speech acts as
striving to change the normative status of others. Performing an utter-
ance does not magically transform the normative status of others in the
community without any mechanism or possibility of failure; rather, it is
through concrete communicative interactions that involve holding one
another responsible, granting entitlements to one another, and making
demands upon one another that our speech acts strive to effect their
normative functions. Normative statuses are not abstract entities that
shift around in some kind of ideal space—on some great, abstractly
characterizable Platonic scoreboard, as it were. To think of language in
this way would undercut the point of putting pragmatics front and cen-
ter, which requires recognizing language as a concrete normative phe-
nomenon, grasped in the first instance as a body of skillful interactions
among speakers.
But in order for my performances to constitute discursive speech acts
that are entitled by my normative positions and that make normative
claims upon others, at least two conditions must be met. On the one
hand, I must have a determinate normative position within the space of
reasons; I must be located, not just inside the space of reasons, but at
some particular place inside it. On the other hand, my speech acts must
constitute interactions with particular other people upon whom I make
claims. No normative scorecards will actually shift except through the
material efforts of determinately located speakers making claims upon
other determinately located speakers.
Yet when authors such as McDowell and Sellars speak of our habita-
tion of the space of reasons, there is something oddly missing in their
use of the metaphor. While the space of reasons is richly articulate in the
sense that it displays normative and rational structure (by definition), it
doesn’t seem, in the work of these authors, to provide much by way of
articulate locations for the people who inhabit it. We get the sense from
their writing that one is in this space only by having access to the rea-
sons that give it its structure; one is either in or out, but in contrast
with typical spaces, one does not occupy any particular location within
this one. S
However, we inhabit the space of reasons not just by being able to rec- R
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ognize it, but by negotiating it—we use reasons, are claimed by them,
are thwarted by them, and attribute them to others, for instance, and
these negotiations help fix our particular normative position within this
space. Each of us will occupy a unique, non-fungible place in this space,
if only because we are open to at least slightly different deliverances
of sensibility, and hence entitled to different observatives (though our
place will also be unique because it is articulated by every interper-
sonal relationship, every social role, etc., that makes a normative claim
upon us).
Brandom gives us language for talking about individual locations
within the space of reasons, by introducing his ‘scorecards’ of commit-
ments and entitlements, which mark the social distinction between un-
dertaking and attribution. Out of all the normative statuses that there
are, Brandom suggests, some particular set of them attaches to each
agent, and this set defines her place in normative space. Furthermore,
we can ‘move’ others around in this space by altering their scorecards
through the claims we ourselves make—we can pass entitlements on,
impute commitments, and so forth.
But what does it take for a normative status to belong to me? As far
as Brandom’s account goes, my scorecard simply attaches to me like le-
gal property. He tells us nothing about the pragmatic relationship be-
tween me and my scorecard that makes the scorecard meaningfully
mine, rather than just somehow correlated with me. Nor does he explain
the “motion” of statuses: how your utterance of a declarative, for in-
stance, manages in practice to pass on an entitlement to me and thereby
change my place in normative space, by making a claim upon me and
demanding my uptake of a normative status.
In Chapter 5 we extended John Perry’s argument for the essential
indexical, arguing that in order for my commitments and entitlements to
exert governing force upon my practices, I must have a practical, first-
personal grasp that they are mine. This perspectival grasp of the space of
reasons is a logical condition for any of my statuses making a difference
to me at all. In other words, normative space requires essentially indexi-
cal knowledge for its negotiation analogous to what Perry showed was
required for the negotiation of material space. Recognizing all the com-
mitments and entitlements that attach to subject position x (includ-
ing the commitment to be bound by one’s commitments, etc.), and rec- S
ognizing that Mark is the inhabitant of subject position x, gets me, R
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158 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Mark, no closer to genuine normative commitment. It is only when I

first-personally recognize that I am the one who is so committed that I
enter practical normative space. Hence I must not only recognize my
commitments and entitlements but also have practical, perspectival up-
take of the fact that they are mine—they commit and entitle me.
Nor is our practical grasp of our first-personal relationship to our own
normative statuses a kind of knowledge that is a required accompaniment
to these statuses. Rather, my normative statuses are not in a position to
have a hold over me at all, and cannot be said to make a normative claim
on me, except insofar as we have such a first-personal grasp of our own
place in normative space. Thus the point here is not the reasonably fa-
miliar one that normative commitments must be materially enacted and
not just theoretically attached to us, but the more specific one that such
material enactment requires first-personal ownership of our place in
normative space in order to be so enacted.
Yet the ability to locate ourselves first-personally in normative—or for
that matter material—space is not sufficient to render our knowledge of
such space practically deployable. For crucially—although Perry does
not make this point—in order to usefully place ourselves in any space
we need to be relationally anchored. For all the theoretical knowledge I
want plus the first-personal knowledge of where I am on a theoretical
map will still leave this “I” an empty point with no substantive or usable
relationships to the rest of the world. That is, knowing my place on the
map provides me with neither scale nor orientation in a form deployable
in practical inference. I am here now, and there is a bottle three feet off to
my right. But how much is three feet and which way is right? What I
need is both a place on the map and some practical ability to orient my-
self from this place to some other place, in order to have any practical
knowledge at all. In the case of my practical placing in a world of things,
then, I need both first-personal knowledge of where I am on the map
and also practical knowledge of how to find something else from here. I
must understand not only that “I am here,” but also that that is the lake,
she is over here, this is how long a foot is. I must grasp how other things
are located and locatable relative to me. Indeed, I need a great deal of
such relational and demonstrative knowledge in order to give any usable
bite to my theoretical and indexical knowledge.
But we can run a parallel argument for the ability to negotiate norma- S
tive space. In order to have a place in the space of discursive reasons, we R
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have seen, I need to understand not just some abstract list of normative
statuses, but that some of these statuses are mine and have a governing
hold over me. What does it take to have such practical, first-personal
grasp of a normative status? Among other things, it requires understand-
ing how the claims of others make claims on me, and likewise, the kinds
of claims that I can make on others. In order to grasp the import of an
imperative or a vocative, for instance, I must understand when such a
speech act is directed at me. Likewise, to understand my position in nor-
mative space is to understand, in part, to whom I can legitimately ad-
dress various speech acts and what sorts of claims I can make upon
which others. I must know not only that I am entitled to speak differ-
ently to my children than to others’ children, but also that this is my
child. Given the inherently communicative nature of discourse, without
such a relational understanding of others’ positions in normative space,
my understanding of my own position is reduced to something empty
and undeployable. Even when we are primarily dealing in declaratives,
negotiating a conversation involves grasping that I disagree with Rebecca
by saying P, I agree with Mark by saying Q, and so forth. Hence the prac-
tical, deictic understanding that is a condition for habitation in the space
of reasons and participation in discourse includes understanding of my
own position in this space, and, interdependently, understanding of oth-
ers’ positions in relation to me.
From all this it follows not only that my grasp of the space of reasons
must be both first-personal and relational, but also that I must have
an understanding—as both user and recipient—of the directedness of
speech. For in order to deploy all this perspectival and relational knowl-
edge, I must be able to direct my speech acts to others and to recognize
when they have been directed at me. Knowing that a speech act can be
directed at me, or at others, is not equivalent to knowing how to direct it
at others or how to hear that it is directed at me.
In Chapter 2 we argued that Brandom’s account of the pragmatics of
language, with the primacy it accords to declarative utterances, did not
have the resources to make sense of how commitments and entitlements
could be first-personally owned, nor of how such ownership could be ex-
pressed in language. For all of the same reasons, his account also cannot
make sense of the second-personal, directed force of speech acts. His
speech acts make a difference to others, but they do so agent-neutrally S
and automatically—for Brandom, shifts in normative commitments and R
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160 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
entitlements simply happen because of speech acts, and while he surely

grants that this ‘happening’ is incarnated in a material process, he leaves
it as a separate question for others to worry about how this material pro-
cess might go. He realizes that this process occurs through communica-
tive acts that we direct at one another, but for him, this is contingent. It
strictly makes no difference to my normative position, for Brandom,
whether I am told things or whether they are simply ‘said’, in some im-
personal way (see section 3 of this chapter for a discussion of this dis-
tinction).
What we have uncovered, however, is that the normative discursive
practices that Brandom describes cannot exist at all except insofar as
they occur between speakers with a rich, relational, deictic grasp of their
position in the space of reasons, as well as a grasp of first- and second-
person voice and the directedness of utterances. We concretely inhabit
the space of reasons first- and second-personally, and not just as spec-
tators.
So far we have offered no argument that each speech act has a second-
personal component, let alone a specifically vocative component. What
we have shown, rather, is that it is a global condition upon being a mem-
ber of a discursive community that one be able to locate oneself first-
personally, address others second-personally, and understand oneself as
the second-personal target of others’ speech acts. Thus competence at
second-personal discursive interactions is a necessary condition for lin-
guistic competence in general.
7.2 Second-Person Speech

Earlier we explained that the second-person voice that interests us is
not that which is marked in the surface grammar of a sentence. Sen-
tences with a second-personal grammatical structure can function, at
the level of pragmatics, as impersonal declaratives (“You are wearing
a red sweater”), and utterances that do not include the word ‘you’ or
its cognates can function second-personally, by having an address to
another person built into their pragmatic function (“Please close the
door!”). Not all speech acts that are, in fact, directed at another per-
son are primarily spoken in the second-person voice, in this pragmatic
sense. If they were, then given the communicative nature of language, S
there would be no room left for third-personal speech. Rather, some but R
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not all speech acts primarily execute a normative function that cannot
be coherently understood except as a directed address from a speaker to
a particular audience. For example, all imperatives are second-personal
in this sense. As we saw earlier, an imperative must be issued to someone
in order for it to count as an imperative at all. As we saw in Chapter 5,
the idea of “translating” an imperative into the third or first person while
retaining its meaning or force does not get any conceptual traction.
“Close the door!” makes a specific demand upon someone in particular
(or upon several particular people) by addressing the target of this de-
mand. A “translation” into the third person, such as “Mark ought to
close the door,” is a prescriptive with a different pragmatic structure and
function; it does not constitute an order at all.
A speech act can have normative implications for someone even if it is
not structurally directed to that person as an address. For instance,
declaratives, we have argued, have normative implications for everyone.
If I take a speaker to be authoritative, I can recognize myself as having
new commitments and entitlements simply by overhearing a declara-
tive utterance of hers, even if it was not particularly addressed to me.
Prescriptives have agent-relative normative implications for the person
about whom they make an ought-claim, whether or not they are uttered
to that person. But the way in which an imperative (for instance) makes
a claim on someone by addressing her is not simply reducible to the fact
that it has normative implications for her, nor even that it has an agent-
relative output for her. If I tell Richard “Mark should close the door,” my
utterance (assuming it is properly entitled) has normative implications
for Mark, but it does not address Mark. But if I tell Mark “Close the
door!” I make a claim on Mark by addressing him (assuming, again, that
my utterance is properly entitled). Indeed, I make a constative claim on
him, imputing a commitment produced by the act of address itself. The
imperative is second-personal because its normative function is carried
by a directed address. More generally, second-personal speech acts are
those in which the act of addressing is central to the normative function
of the speech act.
But what is it to address someone in speech, as opposed to simply
speaking in a way that makes a normative claim upon her? An address
does not merely shift the normative status of its target; rather, it makes a
demand. It calls upon its target, not only to recognize the force of the nor- S
mative claims made upon her by the speech act, but also to acknowledge R
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162 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
her uptake of these claims to the speaker. As Darwall puts it, the second-
personal address is a summons to respond by recognizing the force of the
speech act.2 When we address someone, our speech has misfired if that
person does not acknowledge the address in turn. Of course, not every
address calls for an acknowledgment in the form of an explicit speech
act. As we pointed out in Chapter 6, acknowledgments often take the
form of actions; one typically (though not always) acknowledges an im-
perative by simply following it, for instance. All the same, a suitable ac-
knowledgment of an address must be a recognitive that is itself directed
at the addressing speaker.
Second-personal speech forges a transactional normative relationship
with the target of that speech, and asks that target to participate appro-
priately in that relationship. Part (though usually not all) of the partici-
pation it demands is reciprocal acknowledgment of the normative up-
take of that speech. Speech that does not call for such acknowledgment
fails to be second-personal. For example, you do not actually issue an
imperative if you whisper “Close the door” either to no one in particular
or “to” someone from whom you could in no way hope to receive ac-
knowledgment. Rather, in issuing an imperative, you must recognize an
appropriate target for your imperative, and demand something of him,
and in demanding you must call upon him to recognize himself as the
one targeted by your demand, and to respond appropriately, expressing
his normative uptake of the demand. His response to your imperative,
whether it is compliance, pointed refusal, or anything in between, serves
as a second-personal acknowledgment of your speech act.
But this is just to say that the addressing function of language is inter-
changeable with its vocative function. The vocative moment in second-
personal speech is what makes the difference between a speech act di-
rected at you and a speech act that merely has normative implications for
the person who happens to be you. If you understand the semantics of a
second-personal speech act such as an imperative, but do not practically
recognize that you are its target, you have not in fact understood its im-
port. As Darwall repeatedly points out, the address is a call for mutual
recognition. The vocative, as we saw in the last chapter, is the discur-
sive distillation of such a call. Hence all second-personal discourse per-
S
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 161. R
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forms a vocative function, albeit usually (or perhaps always) an impure

one; indeed, it is this vocative dimension that makes it second-personal.
All structurally second-personal speech acts—imperatives, ostensions,
promises, entreaties, invitations, and so forth—therefore have a vocative
function. Imperatives include a vocative call that seeks acknowledgment
in the form of uptake of that which the imperative demands. This is true
even of alethic imperatives, wherein I call you to do something you were
committed to doing anyhow. In this case, if you fail to honor your com-
mitment, you now fail me, and not just the commitment itself.
Since it turns out that the second-personal address and the vocative
call are one and the same thing, the claim that all speech has a vocative
function and the claim that all speech has a second-personal dimen-
sion are in fact equivalent. Our task, then, is to show that even speech
acts whose primary voice is not second-personal—for example, declara-
tives, observatives, and prescriptives—must at the same time function as
second-personal addresses.
7.3 Tellings, Holdings, and Transcendental Vocatives

Brandom offers us a framework for thinking about speech acts as norma-
tive functions: what a speech act does is transform the commitments and
entitlements of those who fall under the scope of its output. We have
filled in this framework by arguing that such functions must be incar-
nated within a concrete discursive space structured by first-personally-
owned normative positions and second-personally-directed speech acts.
A concrete speech act is a performance by an agent who is positioned
first-personally in discursive space, and who strives, at least partly through
directed speech, to change the status of others who are also so posi-
tioned. Furthermore, competent speakers must be skilled at recognizing
the direction of various speech acts, and concomitantly, at recognizing
when they are themselves the second-personal target of a speech act.
In such a concrete space thus articulated by owned subject positions,
a speech act succeeds in having any pragmatic force at all only when (1)
it is the kind of thing that can be concretely recognized and taken up as
having such force, and (2) it is part of the structure of the act that it
seeks to be recognized and taken up in this way. If it is not part of the
structural aim of a speech act to make a claim on someone and demand S
recognition of this claim, then that speech act fails to have any actual, R
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164 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
lived pragmatic force at all; part of what makes a speech act a claim is
that it seeks normative uptake from agents capable of recognizing nor-
mative claims.
This seeking attaches to the performance of the speech act itself, re-
gardless of whether the speech act in fact gains all the recognition it ide-
ally seeks. This is to say that the speech act strives to change the norma-
tive statuses of various agents, even though many of them will never be
in a position to recognize its claim. (As we saw, this is obvious in the
case of a warranted declarative, which rarely receives universal uptake.)
But how, then, can we maintain our core pragmatic insight, that success-
ful normative changes can never be mere shifts in Platonic status, but
must rather be registered in the embodied uptake of concrete agents?
The only possibility is that any given output of the speech act—whether
or not this output is recognized by everyone who falls under its scope—
must be constituted by someone’s concrete recognition.
Interestingly, the person who gives the speech act concrete recogni-
tion need not always be the person most directly affected by its claim.
For instance, if I tell my lawyer that Richard is the beneficiary of my es-
tate, then Richard’s normative status changes in an agent-relative way,
even if he is in no position to give my speech act recognitive uptake.
However, I have not succeeded in changing Richard’s normative status if
nobody, including my lawyer, gives my speech act this uptake. (At other
times, the person from whom a speech act seeks concrete recognition
must coincide with the person targeted by the speech act, for instance in
the case of imperatives.) A speech act, that is, succeeds in having real
normative consequences only if someone successfully recognizes it. There-
fore, speech can structurally seek to alter the normative status of anyone
by actually holding someone accountable for its uptake. (Plenty of speech
acts are unsuccessful, and strive for recognition while being taken up by
no one and changing no one’s normative status—speech acts may go un-
heard, their legitimacy may be rejected, etc. But most speech acts must
be at least partially successful in order for discursive practices as a whole
to get off the ground.)3
3. Prayer, for instance, is a type of second-person speech act that always fails to receive the
acknowledgment it seeks. If someone prays silently, or by herself with no one there to hear,
then her speech act will totally fail to be recognized. But it still strives for recognition and ac- S
knowledgment. Working out the pragmatics of prayer as a distinctive type of speech would be
interesting, for either a theist or an atheist. It is not clear if prayer is best understood as a regu- R
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But we saw in the previous chapter that holding accountable is itself a

second-personal normative act that establishes and engages others in a
normative relationship. Indeed, it is just the act that constitutes the voc-
ative call. I can alter someone’s normative status third-personally, but I
can hold her accountable for this status only second-personally, by rec-
ognizing her as a target of my speech act and calling her to recognize
herself as targeted by it. Abstract ‘scores’ become genuine normative sta-
tuses only when they are taken up in practice. In speaking in a way that
actually has pragmatic force within a discursive space structured by
first-personal positions and second-personal relations, in other words,
we speak by calling to others to recognize and take up the force of our
words for them. Whatever else speech does, including drawing upon
agent-neutral entitlements and making agent-neutral claims, it does it
by seeking to forge such a relationship of mutual recognition between
speaker and target audience through a vocative call. This is the transcen-
dental vocative moment that underwrites all other pragmatic functions
of speech. In some sense, QED.
This conclusion is hardest to accept in the case of declarative speech
acts with agent-neutral inputs and outputs, which seem to be paradig-
matically impersonal rather than second-personal. The pragmatic func-
tion of a declarative is by definition not anchored in entitlements that
are specific to any particular agent, nor is the claim it makes specific to
any particular audience. Hence it seems a stretch to claim that any con-
crete, functional declarative must involve a second-personal call. The
trick is to show how even a speech act with an agent-neutral input and
output can have a built-in vocative function. In other words, we need to
show that the vocative function of a speech act is necessary, regardless of
the primary structure of its input and output. If we can prove this neces-
sity, then that ought to be sufficient to convince us that other non-
second-personal speech acts such as observatives and prescriptives also
have an analogous vocative, second-personal dimension.
In “Getting Told and Being Believed,” Richard Moran explores the
pragmatics of telling. When I tell you something, I do not merely issue a
declarative within the range of your hearing. Rather, I offer you my word
lar attempt to converse with a (nonexistent) being, or whether it has a different structure, given
that the purported target of the speech act is omniscient, not materially embodied, etc. We S
would like to take up this analysis, whose interest was pointed out by an anonymous referee, in
a later work. R
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166 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
that something is true. I take responsibility for my words and give you
the entitlement to hold me to this responsibility. In telling you some-
thing, then, I invite you into a relationship of trust and normative re-
sponsibility. Edward Hinchman, arguing similarly in “Telling as Inviting
to Trust,” distinguishes the way that we merely make an entitlement
available in asserting, from the way that we offer an entitlement in tell-
ing. Brandom claims that assertions pass on entitlements, but he is con-
cerned only with assertions that, as it were, are offered up impersonally
into public space. Moran and Hinchman suggest instead that entitle-
ments to declaratives are actively passed on through tellings, and not
just impersonal assertions (although an entitlement can certainly be
picked up from an impersonal assertion, without it’s having been spe-
cifically offered).4
Moran points out that often my reasons for believing what someone
tells me can be internal to the second-personal relationship between us.
I may accept the call to trust that is built into her act of telling something
to me. When someone tells me something, Moran argues, I can take her
words merely as evidence for the truth of what she tells, or I can do
something quite different: I can accept the normative commitment that
she makes in her act of telling. In doing so, I perform an act that is not
just belief-formation but the establishment of a normative relationship
of commitments and responsibilities. We “place ourselves in another’s
hands,” as he puts it, rather than just adding to our evidence base. “It is
the special relations of telling someone, being told, and accepting or re-
fusing another’s word that are the home of the network of beliefs we ac-
quire through human testimony. And these relations . . . provide a kind
of reason for belief that is categorically different from that provided by
evidence.”5
Brandom and others recognize that any issuing of a declarative (or
any other speech act) requires taking responsibility for what I say. But in
Brandom’s account of assertion, we do not particularly take on a respon-
sibility to anyone in particular in asserting. In contrast, a telling, in
Moran’s sense, involves taking on a specific normative responsibility to
the person we address in speech. Telling forges a distinctive, second-
4. Richard Moran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” Philosophers’ Imprint 5 (2005): 1–29.
Edward Hinchman, “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 S
(2005): 256–287.
5. Moran, “Getting Told,” 4. R
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personal relationship that is different from the mere transfer of infor-

mation—a transfer that may perfectly well occur merely because we
overhear someone say something, though not to us. Tellings are prag-
matically structured discursive acts that presuppose and constitute a re-
lationship based not only on each party’s recognition of background
norms and authority but also on the agent-specific acts of inviting and
offering trust. Unlike pure declaratives, tellings have both agent-neutral
and agent-relative inputs and outputs: only the speaker can offer his
words as a telling, and only the person he addresses can take the ad-
dress as a telling. Some third party can overhear the telling and take it as
a perfectly good reassertable declarative, but she is not invited into the
second-personal normative relationship forged by the act of telling.6
Such acts of telling are second-personal speech acts that call for theo-
retical belief. As such, they must at the same time have agent-neutral
outputs. However, their function is to call for the uptake of these agent-
neutral outputs, and as we have seen, such uptake is always agent-
specific. Hence insofar as the teller calls upon the told to put her trust in
this particular directed speech act and the normative relationship of trust
and responsibility in which it is embedded, it also has agent-relative out-
puts; my friend may call on me to trust her telling—to take myself as
committed by her words in virtue of our relationship to one another—in
a way that she would not expect to transfer to another listener. In turn, I
may trust her because of our distinctive relationship, but this cannot
make what she tells me true for me but not for others. Indeed, I demean
and dismiss her act of telling if I claim to accept it as making a claim on
me but not on others; to do so is to fail to take it as a truth-claim. In the
language of Chapter 5, such tellings, while agent-relative in their input
and outputs, have alethic rather than constative entitlements. Like hold-
ings based on oughts, they call for recognition within the context of a
second-personal holding, but they do so on the basis of the speaker’s en-
titlement to agent-neutral public facts.
To treat the movement of normative commitments and entitlements
to belief from speaker to speaker as rooted in such acts of telling is to un-
derstand second-personal normative relationships as a primary medium
by which discourse—notably including declarative discourse—succeeds
in changing normative statuses and thereby fulfills its structural func-
S
6. See ibid., 27, for a similar point not couched in our lingo. R
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168 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tion. In contrast, Moran argues, in most contemporary philosophy of

mind and language, “speech is seen as a kind of interpretable human be-
havior like any other,” whose normative implications are accessible from
a third-personal, outsider’s perspective. Likewise, Hagi Kenaan claims
that most philosophers employ a language “whose essence is ‘instilling
information’, . . . a language indifferent to whom one speaks of, to whom
one listens.”7
In contrast with Moran and with the picture we have just drawn,
Darwall draws a sharp distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘theoretical’ claims,
and flatly denies that the latter make second-personal claims. He insists
that “moral obligations are . . . to others in a much more robust way than
those of logic are.”8 But even if this is right, it does not follow that we
hold one another second-personally only to moral obligations, and not
to logical or theoretical obligations. Indeed, we seem to do the latter reg-
ularly. From our point of view, it is not the moral/theoretical distinction
that cuts the difference between the obligations that are and are not
grounded in second-personal transactions. Ostensive speech acts, for in-
stance, can call upon you second-personally to attend to and recognize
theoretical facts. When I address another second-personally, I call upon
her to express normative uptake of my speech act through what she does
and says. Whether this is a call to take up an epistemic obligation—to
look, to infer, to reconsider, to believe—or to do something else seems
irrelevant to the basic second-personal structure of the address.
Darwall points out correctly that “by its very nature, belief is respon-
sible to an independent order of fact, which it aims to represent in a
believer-neutral way,” and thus that epistemic “authority is not second-
personal all the way down,” in contrast to the kind of moral authority he
is interested in, which “derives from normative relations that recipro-
cally recognizing persons assume to exist between them.”9 But the pub-
licity of the facts to which beliefs are accountable is a separate issue from
the pragmatic structure of the various kinds of speech acts that hold us
to these facts. We saw in Chapter 5 that moral claims, including second-
personal moral holdings, are themselves normally grounded in entitle-
ments to public facts, namely facts about normative statuses. Darwall
7. Hagi Kenaan, The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 47. S
8. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 27.
9. Ibid., 56, 57, 60. R
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is certainly right that our entitlement to utter declaratives ultimately

derives from relation-independent facts—or as we would put it, from
agent-neutral facts; indeed this has been a major theme for us in this
book. But this does not mean that in each speech act of giving reasons
for belief, the second-personal dimensions of the act can be stripped
away from its core normative function. As Moran makes clear, the call
to trust and the offer of responsibility, or the invitation to let someone
put herself in your hands with respect to her beliefs, is not reducible to
the presentation of impersonal evidence for one’s trustworthiness or
epistemic reliability. Tellings, like promises and apologies, are speech
acts that are directed to another, inviting him into a normative relation-
ship.10
Speech acts that function primarily as second-personal tellings, in
Moran’s and Hinchman’s sense, are invitations to trust based on a spe-
cific relationship between speaker and audience, even though what they
invite their audience to trust is the agent-neutral entitlements of the
speaker—entitlements that would be available to everyone, were it not
for epistemic defect. This is the kind of speaking and listening that can
go on between doctors and patients, teachers and students, parents and
children, and even political representatives and their constituents. Here
the second-personal dimension of the speech act is reasonably manifest.
But at other times, we engage in purer versions of declarative speech:
we draw upon our agent-neutral entitlements to speak not as one who
has a special normative relationship to her listeners, but simply as a rep-
resentative of the ‘we’ who has taken up a normative entitlement that,
short of epistemic defect, is available to all. Likewise, even though in
practice we can at most expect a few people to hear us speak, we may
speak to others not as particular others bound to us by a particular
second-personal relationship, but as representatives of the ‘we’ who are
inheriting public entitlements. In such cases, we are speaking as anyone,
to anyone. This is the kind of speech that we find in newspaper report-
ing, formal expert testimony, and academic writing. It is also the kind
of speech that brings us closest to pure declarative speech that is agent-
neutral in both input and output. In such cases, it is particularly tempt-
ing to deny the presence of any second-personal, vocative dimension at
all. (It is worth pausing to notice that, at this point, such speech seems
S
10. Moran, “Getting Told,” 23–24. R
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170 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
rather rarified and not particularly typical of everyday conversation, and

yet it has consumed the lion’s share of philosophical attention.)
Even in maximally impersonal declarative speech, it’s not quite right
to say that I speak as anyone, to anyone. Rather, I speak as someone who
has already taken up a normative entitlement that would be available to
anyone under the right epistemic conditions—for why else would I have
the authority to speak and be listened to at all? And my speech act
strives to impart this entitlement to anyone who has not yet taken up
this entitlement—for why else should I bother to speak at all? That is,
when I engage in such impersonal, declarative speech, I issue a general-
ized call to take up the normative entitlement passed on by my speech. I
recognize my audience, not as holders of a distinctive normative posi-
tion, but as generic members of the ‘we’ who serve as legitimate recipi-
ents of the public normative statuses I pass on. As such, I call for norma-
tive uptake from them. I ask them to acknowledge my call, not by
acknowledging my distinctive normative position, but by acknowledg-
ing my entitlement to speak as one who has already taken up my entitle-
ment to public reasons. In such maximally impersonal declaratives, I
speak as a representative of the ‘we’, to you as a representative of the ‘we’.
This is a generalized version of the vocative structure that is common to
all speech. Thus even in this most impersonal form of speech there ex-
ists an attenuated but genuine vocative dimension.
We must be careful not to confuse the structural second-personal di-
mension of speech in general with the (occasional) intimacy of the
speaker/audience relationship that enables it. For instance, in explain-
ing the purported essential second-personal dimension of a particular
speech act, Kenaan writes: “Your speech was not part of a neutral ex-
change between an unspecified pair of addresser and addressee who, in
this specific case, happen to be us. Rather, it grew out of a meeting
whose essence was precisely the meeting between you and I. It was born
of the singular encounter between us.”11 But this kind of intimate partic-
ularity is structurally irrelevant to the issue of voice. I can speak second-
personally in the course of neutral exchanges with total strangers (“Do
you have the time?”), to people who I have never directly encountered
(“If you have high cholesterol, try Lipitor”), and, as we have just seen, as
a generic speaker who just happens in this case to be me to a generic au-
S
11. Kenaan, Present Personal, 144. R
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dience member who just happens in this case to be you. In addition, I

can utter speech acts that make no sense at all outside the context of my
particular, concrete relation with another person and yet that are not
second-personally directed at that person—for instance when I delight
lovingly and protectively in my child’s quirks when describing her to
someone else. Our argument here has not been about the intimacy or
context-bound character of (some) speech, but rather about its inherent
directedness and its structural call for recognition and uptake.
7.4 Speech as Communication and as Calling

Given our analysis of addressing and telling, all of this is just to say that
in order to actually incarnate their defining normative functions, speech
acts must be addressed to a concrete audience, and as such they must
have a vocative, second-personal dimension. Speech is inherently di-
rected and responsive, as Bakhtin put it. But it is perilously easy to con-
fuse our claim that all speech acts must function as second-personal
addresses with an importantly different, far weaker claim, namely the
completely obvious, uninteresting point that language is primarily used
for communication. That language is fundamentally communicative was
in fact our starting point; it would be rather anticlimactic if it turned out
to be one of our main conclusions as well.
Philosophers of language, of course, never deny that language is com-
municative, in that we use it in order to have effects on particular other
people, through our interactions with them. However, according to tra-
ditional, impersonalist pictures of language, this function is strictly speak-
ing external to the linguistic act itself. On such a picture, bits of dis-
course have their identities independent from their use in conversation,
but we happen to use them almost exclusively for conversational pur-
poses, and perhaps wouldn’t have bothered inventing language if we
didn’t want to communicate (or, if you prefer, language evolved because
of the selectional advantages of communication). Bits of language are al-
most always addressed to other people, but the address is not generally
integral to their structure, on this view—it’s something we do with them.
Consider an analogy: a house is the house it is whether or not any-
one lives in it. However, we wouldn’t bother building houses did we
not intend for them to be lived in, and the overwhelming majority of S
houses are lived in. Most philosophy of language treats conversation as R
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172 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
something—indeed the main thing—that we “do with” utterances, just

as living in them is the main thing we do with houses. That the use of
language in second-personal, conversational address is external to its
structural identity, in most philosophy of language, is clear from the fact
that almost all analyses of language proceed by bracketing this second-
personal function entirely.12
In the case of philosophers who privilege semantics or syntax over
pragmatics, the meaning or syntactic structure of a speech act is taken as
self-sufficient and independent of its normal use in conversation. But
notice that even for someone like Brandom, who privileges pragmatics
and identifies speech acts by their pragmatic functions, the addressing
function of speech is external to its structure. Brandom’s pragmatic anal-
ysis of speech acts not only focuses entirely on speech acts with agent-
neutral inputs and outputs, but also employs an ideal sense of commit-
ments and entitlements; for his purposes, a (declarative) speech act
shifts the (ideal) commitments and entitlements of everyone in the dis-
cursive community automatically. In this sense, it doesn’t matter at all,
for Brandom, whether the speech act was actually addressed to or heard
by the people it targets—it achieves its function and shifts the normative
status of everyone in the community in the relevant way simply by being
uttered. Such an account requires no directionality of discourse, nor any
particular normative engagement between speakers.
Brandom does not deny that we generally do care who in particular
hears and can make use of our speech acts—it’s just that this actual up-
take is not part of his story of the pragmatic individuation and analysis
of speech acts. Likewise, the addressing function of language makes
no appearance in the work of other pragmatists such as McDowell or
Sellars. Interestingly, even Davidson, who entitles one of this papers
“The Second Person” and privileges interpretive encounters between in-
dividuals in his analysis of language, restricts himself entirely to an ob-
server’s perspective on the speech of another person, rather than discuss-
ing addresses to another.13
In contrast, we have argued that the addressing function of lan-
12. It’s hard to imagine how one could bracket the second-personal addressing function of
vocative speech; perhaps tellingly, vocative speech barely shows up on the radar for philoso-
phers of language. S
13. Donald Davidson, “The Second Person,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992): 255–
267. What these views have in common is a conception of the normativity of linguistic perfor- R
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guage is built into its defining normative structure, as a precondition for

its having whatever other function it has. Addressing others second-
personally is not something that we happen to do with language, even
all the time, nor is it even just the reason we bother to have language—
it is a transcendental condition of discourse as such. We have ana-
lyzed speech acts as holdings and demands for normative uptake, which
themselves have a second-personal, vocative structure. The inputs and
outputs that constitute the vocative dimension of speech are part of its
defining form.
To see the difference, it is perhaps helpful to look at some other acts
that we do for and with others. I throw a ball so that another may try to
catch it; I take off my clothes in order to entice someone to have sex with
me; I drop my pants in the direction of the president in order that he
might feel ashamed of his foreign-policy decisions. These are acts that
are directed and second-personal. It would be stretching the boundaries
of the notion to call these acts discursive, but they are certainly commu-
nicative. Now of course, I can throw a ball without another person there
to catch it, and I regularly take off some or all of my clothes without try-
ing to get anyone to do or feel anything. As such, these are actions that
can be directed second-personally, and can be used to make normative
claims on another that demand recognition, but they need not be. There
is nothing about the action of throwing a ball that requires that it seek
normative uptake from someone to whom the ball is thrown. The tradi-
tional picture of language treats speech acts as analogous to such inher-
ently impersonal, contingently communicative acts.
However, we can also think of these as examples of different, thicker
actions: throwing a ball to someone (passing), undressing for someone
(seducing), and dropping my pants at someone (mooning). We claim
that throwing a pass is not just the same action as throwing a ball plus
the extra intention that someone catch it, but rather a distinct activity. In
the throwing of a pass, the recognition and response of the other are in-
trinsic goals of the action and are key to its success. At least as plausibly,
undressing for someone, as an act of seduction, is a distinct action that is
mances from the point of view of a “referee.” For Davidson, it is the interpreter who gathers
data so as to postulate a truth theory, and if we do it ourselves, it is by taking on the strange
stance of external theorist toward those we talk to (or sometimes even to ourselves, for Quine). S
Brandom focuses less on the figure of the external referee, but nonetheless on the product—
universally changing scores—that would seem to be accessible only to such a referee. R
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174 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
not just the act of undressing plus the intention that this act have the ef-
fect of producing a desire for sex in someone. And so forth. These are ac-
tions that are intrinsically second-personal in their pragmatic structure.
Indeed, insofar as we consider these acts in their thicker, second-per-
sonal sense—as addresses—they are incarnating normative functions,
making claims upon and seeking recognition from a target audience,
just as speech does. We claim that discourse must be understood as sec-
ond-personal in this second, more robust sense; any act that can count
as a discursive act at all must have this thicker structure.
Now that we have argued that the vocative function is a universal, tran-
scendental component of speech acts, we need to consider some possi-
ble exceptions and determine whether any backpedaling is called for.
The most obvious type of apparent exception is a speech act that the
speaker does not intend anyone else to know about, such as an insult or
a command that I mutter under my breath, or an entry in my diary. We
do not think that these are actually exceptions, and this is precisely be-
cause the intrinsic addressing function of language is not reducible to its
extrinsic communicative function—speaking is not making noise along
with some Gricean intention to get others to react. Such speech acts
are ‘perverse’, in the sense that we design them to fail at their own struc-
tural function—but this is a common perversity we have seen before. In
Chapter 1, when we first introduced declaratives, we separated the in-
trinsic structural function of the speech act from its external social use.
We pointed out that the fact that we can utter a declarative as a secret,
for instance, does not detract from the agent-neutrality of its output
(though, we can now add, the act of telling a secret also forges a differ-
ent, special kind of second-personal normative relationship in the act of
telling). Likewise, the output of a muttered or private speech act is just
the same as it would be if it were intended to be heard.
So for instance, if I write in my diary “I found Waldo,” then my state-
ment makes a standard-issue, agent-neutral truth-claim upon anyone
who manages to read my diary, while if I mutter under my breath “Just
leave him already!” when I am listening to my friend tell me about her
horrible boyfriend, then this utterance would make an agent-specific
claim on her if (contrary to my intention) she managed to hear me. In
the latter case, it seems clear that this second-personal speech act is still S
addressed to my friend, even if (perversely) I go out of my way to prevent R
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the address from succeeding in making a claim on its target. In the for-
mer case, it seems that I am just using myself as the generic but concrete
representative of the ‘we’ to whom my truth-claim is structurally ad-
dressed.
We have to distinguish such ‘secret’ speech acts from a different type
of act that has no structural communicative function, even in the ideal.
We sometimes make sounds—including sounds that in other contexts
would constitute speech, and sounds that serve various social pur-
poses—that simply do not have the structural function of transform-
ing normative statuses. These can range from involuntary expletives
(“Ouch!”; “Oh crap!”), to singing, to practicing a tongue twister. These
may have no vocative component at all. Sometimes such acts (for exam-
ple singing) are parts of social activities, but they are not addressed to the
other participants. We claim that these are not exceptions to the tran-
scendental necessity of the vocative, because they are not speech acts at
all. As one of our referees put it, they are acts that may “exploit one’s
speech capacities.” Some sufferers of Tourette’s syndrome curse, and
only in their native tongue, for instance. But we do not think that this
makes such sounds into speech, any more than the fact that drawing
someone a map exploits my artistic capacities makes my map a work of
art. These actions do not seek to make a claim on anyone, and they have
no normative output of the sort characteristic of speech. Because they
don’t have any output, they also don’t seek to realize that output through
a second-personal address.
We can, of course, worry about borderline cases—it will not always be
clear whether or not I am singing a song in order to execute a discursive
function (calling you to shared attention, reminding you of a lost love,
conveying a coded message that the revolution is about to begin). It will
also be difficult to determine where the merely causal impact of an act
lets off and the properly discursive function begins; when does a curse,
for instance, affect others merely causally, and when does it serve a dis-
cursive purpose? But the difficulty in determining where speech begins
and ends is beside the point; our claim is that to the extent that an act
seeks to execute a discursive function, to that extent it must include a
second-personal address—though, as we just saw, not necessarily an ac-
tual intention to communicate.
We also should not be distracted by another class of speech acts that S
appear to lack an audience, namely, those in which we cast about for an R
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176 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
audience—for instance when we speak into a dark room or broadcast

over a ham radio, unsure whether there’s anyone there to hear us. Earlier
we pointed out that vocatives themselves can have this non-recognitive,
casting-about structure, but that this is a derivative form of speech act
that can be understood only as a variation on the traditional recognitive
vocative that retains its essentially vocative function. Similarly, we may
grant now that these are cases that lack the traditional second-personal
structure of an address, since there isn’t yet a determinate answer to who
it is we are addressing, if we’re managing to address anyone at all. But
such exceptions seem harmless, given their clear structural dependence
upon and kinship with standard addresses.
Finally, we will just mention here a class of complicated cases that we
also mentioned in Chapter 6 and will return to in great detail in Chapter
8. These are speech acts that do not simply address a recognizable sub-
ject, but rather play a role in constituting that individual as an address-
able subject. The most intuitive contenders are ‘speech acts’ ‘addressed’
to babies. We ‘address’ babies before they can really serve as the tar-
gets of second-personal speech acts, and in fact, such ‘addresses’ are
among the most important tools that we use to induct them into the dis-
cursive community and to help them develop into addressable sub-
jects. In Chapter 8 we will claim that to the extent that babies are not yet
addressable second-personally, things we ‘say’ to them do not actually
function as speech, but merely as causal tools for such induction and de-
velopment. In any case, as above, such quasi-addresses are clearly tight
variants on vocatives that exist and function only because they are riffs
on the general structure of addresses, and as such, we do not think they
challenge our core claim about the universality of the transcendental
vocative.
Language, then, is spoken by agents who own their normative positions

first-personally, to other agents who are called upon to take up the nor-
mative import of speech. This can seem like a conclusion that ought to
need much less argumentative buildup than we have given it. The point
may seem to verge on the trivial now, given that we have been governed
throughout this book by a typology of speech acts that began by asking
who is entitled to speech acts and at whom they are targeted. However,
the point remains invisible if we think about speech acts merely as shift- S
ing scorecards of commitments and entitlements in abstract space (or, R
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perhaps even less promisingly, as mere physical productions backed by

independent hopes that certain causal consequences will result). Given
the typology with which we began, it is not surprising that we have
ended up with an analysis that makes vivid the essential role of the
speaker-audience relationship in discourse, and likewise ended up un-
derstanding speech acts in a way that shows off their vocative compo-
nent. Once we understand discourse as essentially incarnated in a space
of first-personally-owned positions, agent-relative statuses, second-
personal and third-personal relations to others, and directed speech acts,
the status of speech acts as addresses becomes no big surprise.
In contrast, if our philosophy of discursive pragmatics doesn’t have
the resources to articulate these deictic, agent-relative, and owned di-
mensions of speech—for instance if we believe that the primacy of the
declarative is secure enough that we can base our theory only on this
type of speech act—then all of these dimensions of speech disappear
from view. The difference between first-, second-, and third-personal di-
mensions of speech acts will not show up as salient, and there will then
be no cash value to the sense in which these are my commitments and
entitlements and those are yours, and this speech act is directed from me
to you. Indeed, so deep goes the declaratival bias in contemporary ana-
lytic philosophy that—as we have seen—even an author like Darwall,
who is specifically interested in the structure of the second-personal ad-
dress, is sure that his analysis applies only to moral claims rather than to
speech acts in general.
But we have shown that speech acts essentially place agents in norma-
tive relationships structured by the claims we make upon one another.
We must speak to one another as a ‘me’ and a ‘you’ as opposed to just a
collection of normative-status-trading engines. The way in which we
make these claims upon one another is through calls to mutual recogni-
tion: we recognize others as appropriate targets of our claims, and we
call to them to in turn recognize the force of our claims upon them.
S
R
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Salvator Rosa, A Philosopher pointing to the ground; a youth beside him (1652). Image
© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics
of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
S
R
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8
This CT is different from
the CT on the CT breaks
Sharing a World list. OK as set?
TNT
We called each other Yo.

—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Throughout this book we have presupposed the existence of agents who

can negotiate and be claimed by norms, as well as the discursive com-
munity within which such agents reside. We have portrayed speech
acts as functional transformations of the normative statuses of such
agents, and we have assumed—as we believe any full-throated pragma-
tist must—that such normative statuses exist only insofar as they are
concretely incarnated within such a discursive community and among
such agents. We have not, however, turned our attention to the ontology
or the genesis of such agents and communities themselves. In this final
chapter we draw on the picture of language, discursive performance,
and voice that we have developed in order to sketch a picture of the na-
ture and limits of normative agency and discursive communities, and
the process by which fleshy bodies develop into normative agents and
are inducted into such communities. We do not tell an historical story,
pseudo- or otherwise, about how a world without language-users or
normative agents is transformed into a world with these things. Rather,
we begin in medias res and ask what is involved in becoming and being a
normative agent who belongs to our discursive community.
In a famous passage in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,”
Sellars claims that our recognition of someone as a person in a particular
normative position should not in fact be understood as having (merely)
the performative force of a description: “One does, indeed, describe him,
but one does something more . . . to recognize a featherless biped or dol- S
phin or Martian as a person requires that one think thoughts of the R
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180 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
form, ‘We (one) shall do (or abstain from doing) actions of kind A in cir-
cumstances of kind C’. To think thoughts of this kind is not to classify or
explain, but to rehearse an intention.”1 This recognition, for Sellars, has
the force of both a description and a normative prescription for how this
individual should be treated.
In focusing on how the recognizer intends to treat the recognized,
Sellars gives at most half of the normative picture, for taking someone as
a (particular) person clearly involves holding her to specific behaviors,
rather than just intending to treat her a certain way. With the concepts of
recognitives and vocatives available to us, however, Sellars’s point can be
made more clearly. We have distinguished between the kind of recogni-
tion we give in an observative, which expresses our receptive experi-
ence, and the type of recognition that engages the recognized in a nor-
mative relationship and demands a response. Sellars is getting at the
point that recognizing someone as a person is not merely an observative
act, but also a practical act of the second kind. We need not debate here
the primacy that Sellars gives to intentions as opposed to other kinds of
normative statuses and performance; the important claim, for our pur-
poses, is that such acts of recognizing forge practical normative relation-
ships as much as they note the character of something. Furthermore,
they must do so, because—we will argue here—it is only by being drawn
into a network of such practical normative relationships that we become
persons with specific normative positions at all.
8.1 Interpellation and Induction into Normative Space

A person or agent of the sort who can participate in a discursive commu-
nity is one that has a particular, concrete location in normative space—
a particular set of agent-relative and agent-neutral commitments and
entitlements, a particular set of normatively inflected relationships with
other people, a complicated set of normatively demarcated social roles,
and a first-person perspective on the space of reasons, as well as a non-
optional fidelity to the tribunal of the world.2 Of course, many other
1. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Robert Colodny,
ed., Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 35–
78, 39. S
2. That fidelity to the tribunal of the world is a non-optional ideal is built into the agent- R
neutrality of declarative truth-claims, as we argued in Chapter 3. The agent-neutrality of the
declarative goes hand in hand with the inherent publicity of truth, and likewise with the fact L
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Sharing a World 181
definitions of personhood or agency are possible, and might be appeal-

ing in other philosophical contexts.3 For our purposes, however, this
type of discursive, socially situated agency is the type we are interested
in, and it is what we will mean by ‘personhood’ here. It is only such an
agent who can be the subject or the target of the various practices we
have examined in this book.
In Chapters 6 and 7 we argued that concrete normative relations
among people are established and sustained through vocatives—that is,
through the Yo-claims that hold us in place in social space. We become
and remain the types of beings that have specific, agent-relative engage-
ments with others through an ongoing network of hails and acknowl-
edgments. Hence to be a person, in the rich sense we just described, re-
quires that we be recognized as one, repeatedly and specifically. This
suggests a claim about the foundational role of vocatives that goes be-
yond what we argued in Chapter 7. There we claimed that the vocative
function is essential to all discourse. Now, we are suggesting that voca-
tive discourse plays a crucial role in constituting individuals as particu-
lar, normatively positioned persons.
Louis Althusser gave the name ‘interpellation’ to what he claimed was
the process by which people are constituted as persons with particular
locations in social normative space through vocative calls and the ac-
knowledgments they demand. He argues that the vocative, or the ‘hail’ as
he calls it, is the central pragmatic mechanism by which subjects are
produced: subjects are recruited “by that very precise operation which I
have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along
the lines of the most commonplace everyday . . . hailing: ‘Hey, you
there!’ . . . The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-
hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.
Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to
him, and that ‘it was really he who was hailed (and not someone else).”4
In this parable, a hailer with the right kind of entitlement uses a hail
that truth claims are not ‘for’ anyone in particular. We will return to this issue later in this chap-
ter, but for now we simply refer the reader back to Chapter 3.
3. For another approach, which we take to be compatible with the discussion of this book,
see Mark Lance and W. Heath White, “Stereoscopic Vision: Reasons, Causes, and Two Spaces of
Material Inference,” Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (2007): 1–21. That account, which focuses on the
issue of free action, examines the structure of material inferential propriety within which dis- S
cursive agents function. R
4. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Althusser, Lenin and
Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), 174. L
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182 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
to recognize someone as a person—in general, one who can be properly

claimed by a hail and thereby bound to acknowledge the hail, and spe-
cifically as a particular individual having the right properties and bear-
ing the right relationship to the hailer to be so hailed. The hail, as we
have seen, has a double structure: it recognizes the fact that the person is
there to be hailed, and at the same time it functions as a demand that the
subject acknowledge in some appropriate way that she has been appro-
priately hailed, that it is really she who has been hailed. In being recog-
nized, the interpellated subject is called upon to respond to that recogni-
tion. In turn, in recognizing that she really is the one being called upon
to respond, she recognizes and accepts the authority and binding force
of the norms that mark out her subject position. When my colleague
calls out “hello” to me in the hallway, my recognition that it is really I to
whom he is speaking is not just a matter of my recognizing the descrip-
tive content of his recognition; rather, I also recognize the pragmatic
force of that recognition—the demand it makes upon me to respond by
upholding the norms of greeting behavior. If I hear him say “hello” but
do not respond, then I am acting as though I was not the one who was
being called, or as if the call was not entitled. The point is that recogniz-
ing the hail involves recognizing not just its presence but its binding
force, which is inseparable from taking it as really aimed at me—as mak-
ing a claim on me in virtue of having correctly identified me.
Of course, as we saw, vocatives need not have any particular surface
grammar. Any speech act addressed to a second person, asking that per-
son to recognize herself as having been recognized, is a vocative, from a
shopkeeper saying to a young girl “I bet you love pink, don’t you?” to a
police officer flashing her lights at a driver to get him to pull over.
Remember that every vocative, whether it is a simple “hello” or a se-
mantically complex utterance, calls for an acknowledgment that falls
within some specific range of acceptable behavior. When the teacher
calls out a student’s name at the start of class, the student properly ac-
knowledges the call only by, for instance, calling out “Here!,” but not
by starting a small-talk conversation about the health of the teacher’s
parents. It is because of the specificity of the response demanded by a
hail that it can play the role it does in constituting personhood, on
Althusser’s account. It is through responding to countless such hails,
and thereby recognizing the appropriateness of the recognitions that S
they represent, that an individual becomes the particular, normatively R
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Sharing a World 183
articulated person that she is. In acknowledging the hail that recognizes
him as a student in the class, the student practically takes up the social
role of student. It is by acting appropriately in response to the various
interpellative demands of studenthood (handing in papers that have
been assigned, showing up for office hours, etc.) that the student counts
as a student at all. These are relationally defined activities sustained by
mutual recognition. Engaging in them is what being a student consists
in; there is no prior, inherent, or “natural” property of studenthood that
the teacher recognizes in the student when she acknowledges him dur-
ing roll call.
On a much larger scale, we can argue that it is by responding to
interpellative hails that recognize us in terms of our gender, our class,
etc., as well as our more particularized positions such as Sarah’s friend,
Amy’s spouse, etc., that we have these identities at all. In acknowledging
herself as the little girl identified as likely to prefer pink, the girl practi-
cally takes up a gender identity. In turning around when your child calls
“Daddy!” you practically take up your place as her father. When I recog-
nize you as a student, or as a man, or as a friend, my recognition takes
you as already having these identities. But at the same time, I call forth
an appropriate response from you that contributes to this identity.5 It is
because you respond as a student, a man, and a friend should that you
are these things. Thus the vocative does not merely recognize us on the
basis of preexisting features of our identity, but rather it calls forth be-
haviors that constitute this identity.
The interpellative hail has a peculiar performative structure: it out-
strips its own recognitive content, recognizing someone as already being
a particular person with a normatively defined identity, but at the same
time helping to constitute and solidify this identity. Despite Althusser’s
hyperbolic talk of a “one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn,” this identity
is solidified by way of a vast number of little interpellative moments that
make up our mundane negotiations of the social world. Most of them
have no special personal or political interest and do next to no constitu-
5. Slavoj ÑiÒek writes: “‘Being a king’ is an effect of a network of social relations between a
‘king’ and his ‘subjects’, but . . . to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears
necessarily in inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment be-
cause the king is already in himself, outside of the relation to his subjects, a king; as if the deter- S
mination of ‘being a king’ were a ‘natural’ property of the person of a king.” ÑiÒek, The Sublime
Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 25. R
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184 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tive work on their own. Our selves are not slammed together; rather
these small interpellative moments slowly form and contour our norma-
tively defined, socially embedded identities.
In fact, every vocative plays at least a tiny interpellative role. This is
because each vocative, no matter how mundane, is both alethic and
constative, to draw on our terminology from Chapter 5. The vocative is
alethic insofar as it calls upon us to uphold norms that already bind us,
by calling us to recognize ourselves as really the one subject to those
norms—as a father, a friend, a doctor, the person who checked out this
particular library book, or the person capable of answering this ques-
tion. Even a simple “hello” calls upon me to recognize myself (1) as
the type of person bound by the norms of greeting behavior and (2) as
bearing the right normative relationship to this hailer to entitle the
hail and commit me to the acknowledgment it demands. Other, more
loaded hails—a cosmetic salesperson asking “Do you worry about pre-
mature wrinkles?” for instance—call upon me to recognize my place-
ment within a cluster of norms that target my gender, age group, class,
stress level, and more, and hold me to these norms. When we hail some-
one, part of what we are doing is calling her attention to the norms that
already bind her in virtue of her position in normative space. Interest-
ingly, because vocatives have this alethic component, every ‘Yo!’ con-
tains a kind of ‘Lo!’ (Later we will argue that every ‘Lo!’ also contains a
‘Yo!’, and not merely in the generic sense we discussed in Chapter 7.)
At the same time, the vocative is constative, at least in the minimal
sense that the speech act itself places a new normative demand on its tar-
get, namely the demand for acknowledgment. It thereby shifts the total
normative position or scorecard of the person it hails. The process of in-
terpellation draws on both the alethic and the constative dimensions of
the vocative: only because of the alethic dimension is the recognition le-
gitimate—this dimension is what allows it to be “really me” who has
been recognized. But only in virtue of the constative dimension can the
vocative do its constitutive work.
In more dramatic cases of interpellation, the vocative not only shifts
the normative status of the person hailed by demanding acknowledg-
ment of a correct recognition, but it shifts the identity of the person rec-
ognized by demanding that she recognize herself in a new way and act
appropriately. As she does so, this new self-recognition becomes more S
appropriate. For instance, consider the practice of many childbirth edu- R
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Sharing a World 185
cators of referring to the people in their classes as “moms” and “dads.”

Any pregnant woman in the class knows that it is “really she” who is be-
ing addressed when the teacher says, “Okay, moms, now lie down on the
floor.” Acknowledging this call plays a part in her beginning to take
on an identity as a mom, with all of the normative baggage that comes
with it. Thus the interpellation is constative, not only in giving her a
new burden to respond, but in helping to give her the commitments and
entitlements that come along with motherhood more generally. Such
interpellations can be used strategically and manipulatively (as this one
often is), but they need not be; recognizing one another as inhabiting
certain normative positions—such as that of an expert in a particular
field, that of a loyal friend, etc.—more completely than we do, and
thereby solidifying these positions, is a common currency of everyday
social interaction. Normally, such interpellative moments happen with-
out conscious purpose or instrumental motivations, simply as part of
the ongoing stream of social transactions that engage us in normative re-
lationships and hold us in normative place.
None of this is to say that in being interpellated as inhabiting a cer-
tain normative position, we are automatically constituted as obedient to
these norms. Calling a pregnant woman a mom doesn’t make her one,
and sales pitches for wrinkle cream do not determine that I will begin to
worry about premature wrinkles. Indeed, the possibility of refusing or
rejecting a hail is inherent to its vocative character. We cannot engage in
normative practices at all unless we are the sorts of beings who can rec-
ognize the claims of norms, but this is not possible unless we can trans-
gress or fail to live up to these claims, because the binding force of
norms makes sense only in the face of a possible gap between what we
do and what we ought to do.
Further, we are not truly responsive to norms if we are merely subject
them and cannot author or resist them. Norms make claims on us only
insofar as they are legitimate, and hence we must be capable, not only of
violating them, but of challenging their legitimacy in order to count as
able to recognize their binding force. Since a vocative seeks to make a
normative claim on the one called, it builds in the presupposition that
the one called may refuse or fail to take up that claim. Even if I accept
that a hail identifies me correctly and legitimately demands acknowledg-
ment, this can’t mean that I am stuck accepting all of the norms that S
make a claim on me in virtue of that identity, without resistance or cri- R
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186 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
tique. Not only can I refuse to be hailed as a mother (at least while I am
still pregnant), but I can accept the mantle of motherhood while resist-
ing various norms of motherhood, and so forth.
On the other hand, as we’ve seen previously, vocatives can have a cer-
tain kind of inescapability. Rejecting or resisting an identity or a norm is
not the same as completely failing to recognize the claim it makes.
When I resist being interpellated by the label of “mom” in a prenatal
class, the name doesn’t merely bounce off me and leave me unscathed.6
Rather, it puts me into a tense, partially antagonistic relationship with a
particular identity and set of norms. When I challenge a hail—by deny-
ing its appropriateness altogether or by denying the specificities of what
it demands from me—I still acknowledge its attempt to make a claim on
me. I treat it as a second-personal speech act that calls for some ac-
knowledgment out of a range of possible responses from me; given the
nature of norms, contestation and refusal always count as part of this
range. Thus by recognizing the hail as having targeted me, rightly or
wrongly, I already give it an acknowledgment that grants some legiti-
macy to the original recognition.
Individuals are interpellated long before they are in fact self-recognizing

subjects capable of properly acknowledging a hail. Althusser points out
that, indeed, babies are ‘expected’ even before birth; if nothing else, they
already have a (typically patrilineal) name that comes with a cluster of
normative positionings.7 With the advent of prenatal testing, not only do
we gender-code babies’ rooms before they are born, but we often “no-
tice” personality traits on ultrasound screens, and in fact it is standard
for ultrasound technicians to talk “to” the fetus as they scan, comment-
ing upon these “traits” (“My, you’re quick—you’re going to be an athlete
like Daddy, aren’t you?”).8 On a massive scale, interpellation is one of the
main tools we use to bring babies through the transition from sentient
animals outside the space of reasons to normatively positioned beings
with first-person perspectives who are capable of second-person dis-
6. The children’s retort “I’m rubber and you’re glue. . .” and the perniciously dismissive
parenting chestnut “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you”
are thus profoundly wrong.
7. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 132. S
8. Lisa Mitchell, Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2001), 93. R
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course and are responsive to normative claims. We induct babies and

young children into various identities by “recognizing” them as already
having them (by painting a baby boy’s room blue, telling a baby that he
is “a real lover” or a “funny little joker,” etc.), and we teach them respon-
siveness to the claims of various norms—moral, social, rational, etc.—
by treating them as if they already are responsive to them (“We don’t
want to hurt your sister, do we?”).
Early on, these can at best count as quasi-vocatives. A true voca-
tive seeks acknowledgment based in self-recognition, but when we first
start talking to babies and young children, they are in no position to
have such self-recognition. We are faking it, as it were, for the purpose
of bringing it about that such discourse will no longer be a pretense.
Slowly, retroactively, children come to find themselves (partially, with re-
sistance, and so forth) in these recognitions of them, precisely because
we demand appropriate acknowledgment from them in advance of their
ability to give it.
When a vocative plays an interpellative role in constituting an adult’s
identity—when I am called to recognize myself as a mother during a
prenatal class, for instance—the adult is normally fully capable of recog-
nizing herself as bound by various norms. Even if I do not yet actually or
fully occupy the position that the hail recognizes me as occupying, I can
recognize that I have been recognized, and put into question the norma-
tive statuses that are imputed to me in that recognition. Interpellation
can succeed in constituting me when I recognize myself in how I have
been recognized.
In the case of very young children, on the other hand, we use the voc-
ative as a causal tool for creating an identity and set of normative com-
mitments out of creatures not properly in normative space at all. Part of
what our quasi-vocatives do is help them to develop the capacity to rec-
ognize themselves as recognizable subjects bound by norms in the first
place. Until this happens, they cannot properly count as the targets of
hails—or, for that matter, of any speech acts, given that speech acts are
in the business of seeking to make normative claims that are taken up by
others.
Hence these quasi-vocatives are not only not real vocatives; insofar
as they are directed at the baby, they are not really speech at all, be-
cause they are not targeted at the kind of being who can enter into the S
relationship of mutual recognition called for by the vocative dimension R
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188 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
of speech. We often say things “to” babies for the benefit of others. I can
say “Well, aren’t you cute!” to a baby first and foremost as a means of
flattering her beaming father, for instance, or I may say “We don’t hit the
dog!” as much to demonstrate responsible parenthood to others as to
train my baby not to hit the dog. These are speech acts—they just aren’t
addresses to the baby. While they are perfectly real interactions with the
baby, they are not discursive interactions with him. At least at the start,
we should see these quasi-vocatives as playing a merely causal role in
producing a hailable subject. Later, when they serve to hone and solidify
a child’s subject position, they will come to have genuinely vocative as
well as causal elements. At some point after infancy, we begin genuinely
demanding self-recognizing acknowledgment from our children, even
when we know they are not yet able to give it (“You know better than to
judge your friends by the color of their skin, don’t you?”). Only after the
fact will the child be able to recognize herself properly in such hails, if
they are successful.
The transition from the quasi-vocative to the full vocative is surely
gradual and incomplete. As we have seen, vocative discourse has an
avant la lettre constitutive character even among adults. Furthermore,
interpellation is an ongoing process that helps sustain the concrete cur-
rency of social life; it is not a process that inducts us into a determinate
form of personhood and then stops. As we move through life, we are
ushered into new identities and claimed by new sets of norms at every
turn. This is not only because the hails that apply to us change as we
change—we become rightly recognized as parents, friends, leading fig-
ures in our field, alcoholics, etc.—but also because normative space it-
self changes. The norms that claim me in virtue of my gender identity (as
a man, let’s say) are constantly developing and under negotiation. This
means that vocatives that recognize me on the basis of this identity (my
colleague asking me which team I like for the Super Bowl, for instance)
are constantly calling me to recognize myself as (already) bound by sub-
tly different, evolving norms. In each case my acknowledgment will con-
tain at least a small creative moment, as I accept, resist, or transform the
expectations embedded in the hail.9
9. Judith Butler has developed this point about the ongoing and creative character of our
responses to interpellation in detail. See in particular Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). S
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Sharing a World 189
Although our negotiations of our practical social identities serve to

provide (what we hope are) juicy and vivid examples of interpellation at
work, we should not forget that our position in normative space in-
cludes our position in theoretical space: our mastery of concepts, our
commitments to truths, and so forth. Accordingly, we can often witness
the process of interpellation at work as we master and negotiate and
sometimes expand or change this space. One of the main ways in which
we come to grasp a new concept is by plunging in and using it as if we
had already mastered it; one of the main ways in which others teach us
new concepts is by treating us as though we are already capable of using
them. Think of John, Sellars’s hapless necktie salesman in Empiricism
and the Philosophy of Mind; his fellow salesmen point out to him that the
ties he is calling “green” don’t look green in natural light, as if he were
already a master-user of the concept ‘green’ (see section 4 of this chapter
for an extended discussion of this point). We ask our student a question
about Davidson’s critique of Quine, thereby demanding a demonstration
of her theoretical mastery of the issues involved. And for a very long
time with such questions—perhaps forever—we do not suppose that the
student is actually capable of adopting a coherent position within the
normative space of analytic post-empiricism. But just as with the baby’s
induction into discourse in general, so induction into particular cor-
ners of conceptual space operates at this constative level. We assign sta-
tuses to others so as to make them capable of deserving those statuses.
As Wittgenstein famously made clear, concept-mastery cannot be ex-
hausted by memorization of rules; instead, an ineliminable part of grasp-
ing a concept is developing the practical skill of putting it to use. For
this reason, using a concept before we are fully ready, as if we already
can, is often the only way to learn it.
Being a member of a discursive community, having a normative position

that gives us a distinct roster of agent-relative commitments and entitle-
ments, and being hailable—that is, recognizable by others with a voca-
tive—are equiprimordial phenomena. Later we will argue that being re-
sponsive to an objective world also belongs on this list. Agent-relative
commitments and entitlements attach themselves to us in virtue of our
normative position, including our relations to others, and these rela-
tions are forged during second-person interactions with others in our S
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190 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
discursive community—they do not somehow inhere in us waiting to be

expressed in our interactions.10 At the same time, when we recognize
someone with a hail, we presuppose that she can be claimed by our
speech act, and hence that she belongs to our discursive community and
has a normative position within it. Furthermore, if someone were not
recognizable as a distinct person with a normative position within the
discursive community, and thus could not be hailed, then he could not
engage in the kind of second-person transactions that establish our posi-
tion in normative space. Hailability is therefore a precondition for being
a person (in our sense) and a member of the discursive community.
Interpellation—including the quasi-interpellation that begins before
we are properly hailable—is a primary mechanism through which indi-
viduals become hailable discursive community members. As we just
saw, we must be hailable in order to be normatively positioned sub-
jects, while we must be normatively positioned subjects in order to be
hailable. The constitutive structure of interpellation is what saves this
apparent chicken-and-egg problem from being pernicious; functioning
both alethically and constatively, it calls us to recognize ourselves in rec-
ognitions of us that (slightly) exceed the reality at the time of the hail.11
It is through the many interpellative exchanges of mutual recognition
that slowly position us in social space that we come to be a person with
agent-relative commitments and entitlements.
8.2 Membership in the Discursive Community

We have argued that membership in a discursive community is a pre-
condition for normative agency, and we have depended heavily upon the
presupposition of such membership throughout this book. For example,
we cannot understand speech acts with agent-neutral outputs, such as
truth-claims and observatives, without appeal to the notion of member-
ship in a discursive community, for such speech acts, we have argued,
have ‘public’ output and are ideally ‘for everyone’. But the public or the
10. Though of course it is quite likely that various sorts of capacities to successfully enter
into such relations are part of our biological inheritance.
11. Jacques Lacan argued repeatedly that we always and necessarily recognize ourselves as
having a more unified and solidified identity than we actually have, and that these (mis)recog-
nitions are part of the process by which we come to have an identity that is (imperfectly) uni- S
fied and solidified. See, for instance, “The Mirror Stage,” in Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce. Fink
(New York: Norton, 2004). R
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Sharing a World 191
‘everyone’ here is the discursive community, and one is the target of such
a speech act if and only if one is a member of that community. We have
deferred the question of what makes something a discursive community
and what it takes to belong to one, but we turn to it now.
In one sense the answer is straightforward. A discursive community,
in the sense useful to this book, is a community that serves as the (ideal,
functional) domain for the inputs and outputs of speech acts by commu-
nity members. For instance, a speech act with an agent-neutral output
targets everyone. The ‘everyone’ here is the discursive community. Who
is ‘everyone’? When I declare that Florida is hot in July, I am not at-
tempting to change the commitments and entitlements of my pet ferret,
even in the ideal. However, the ‘everyone’ extends well beyond the scope
of my fellow English-speakers who could understand the declaration di-
rectly; it is as true for a Norwegian that Florida is hot in July as it is for
me. The scope of my speech acts—and of my discursive community—
extends as far as the network of people to whom I belong who can trans-
form one another’s normative statuses through speech, either directly or
via intermediate speakers. One is a member of the community if one can
do this and have it done to one by the others.
In order for this to be possible, one must meet at least two crite-
ria. First, one must be hailable—that is, recognizable through vocative
speech acts (“Yo!”) by (at least some) other members of the community.
If one cannot be recognized in this way, then one cannot be targeted by
speech acts, as we saw in Chapter 7. Second, one must be capable of ob-
serving the same public objects and being sensitive to the same public
facts as others, and of being called by others to shared attention to these
facts and objects (“Lo!”). We will argue for this second criterion in detail
later. For now, just notice that in order to participate in declarative dis-
course with others—the giving and asking for reasons, in the traditional
Brandomian sense—one must be able to call others’ attention and have
one’s own attention called to empirical evidence for or against various
truth-claims. Without this ability to invoke shared sensitivity to the tes-
timony of the world, meaningful declarative agreement and disagree-
ment, and with them meaningful declarative discourse, are impossible.
(See Chapter 3 for our argument that declarative discourse must ‘termi-
nate’ in observatives.) Individuals do not share a public, intersubjec-
tively available world to which their discourse refers without this ability, S
and hence they need it in order to share a discursive community. R
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192 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
But this leads to the question, What sort of beings can in fact be recog-
nized as members of a discursive community? Or, in other words, who
can be successfully hailed? This is a version of a question that has re-
ceived a great deal of attention from both ethicists and philosophers of
mind. Ethicists have asked what features an entity must have in order to
count as member of the moral community, worthy of the specific form of
respect due to persons. Philosophers of mind have asked which features
an entity must have in order to count as having a mind, or representa-
tional or conceptual capacities. For both groups, arguments over bor-
derline cases—animals, babies, people in a persistent vegetative state,
etc.—have ensued. However, an advantage of our normative pragmatic
account is that we can answer our version of this question the other
way around: we need not look for any inherent features or properties
that are the markers or conditions of personhood. Rather, someone is
a person (in the relevant sense) if he is in fact caught up in a network
of discursive holdings—that is, if others successfully recognize him,
through speech acts containing vocative moments, as a user and receiver
of speech acts, or as the kind of being who can transform the normative
status of others and have his own normative status transformed through
discourse with other community members. Likewise, to be a member of
the community is not, in the first instance, to have some feature in com-
mon with other community members. Rather, the ‘we’ is constituted and
sustained through the transactions among the various mutually recog-
nizing subjects who make it up. The community is not a predefined
space into which candidates may fit or fail to fit; it is a space created and
given its character and its boundaries by the discursively interacting in-
dividuals who make it up—individuals who can speak from a first-per-
son perspective to others in a second-person voice.12
In order to determine whether someone is a person or a member of
12. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), Hegel famously develops such a vision of the community as constituted through mutual
recognitions among subjects who can make normative claims upon one another in discourse.
On the one hand, he contrasts such a picture with understandings of the community as defined
by shared blood, shared cultural traditions or ethical commitments, or other such contingent
unifying features. On the other hand, he contrasts it with a merely formal conception of a com-
munity as an association of autonomous individuals. Our understanding of the discursive com-
munity constituted in and through concrete second-person interactions that are responsive to S
reasons is explicitly intended to be Hegelian, although we do not mean it as a reading of Hegel,
and hence are not concerned if it differs from Hegel’s account in the details. R
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Sharing a World 193
the discursive community, then, we need not look for some special cog-
nitive, bodily, or other characteristic that makes him an appropriate in-
terlocutor. Rather, success at hailing him and involving him in dis-
course is proof of personhood, and global failure at doing this places
him outside the discursive community by definition. We can constitute
personhood through interpellation where none exists to begin with, as
we do with infants, but whether our interpellations are constitutive of
personhood or merely play-acting will depend on our eventual success
or failure. When we are confronted with a case of marginal personhood,
the best we can do, both morally and epistemically, is to do our very best
to recognize and engage that individual as a person in our discursive
community, at least minimally or intermittently. By this standard, people
in persistent vegetative states and fetuses are not persons, but most pa-
tients with dementia are. Animals may or may not be. In deciding such
cases, it is our pragmatic criterion of personhood—success at recogniz-
ing someone as a specific person and receiving acknowledgment—that
is ultimately definitive, as opposed to any theoretical story about the
conditions of personhood that we seek to apply. Of course, there is noth-
ing philosophically or empirically illegitimate about trying to figure out
which capacities or features a creature must have in order to be a candi-
date for induction into personhood. However, we should not confuse
the causal prerequisites for personhood with its defining criteria.
Although all of this sounds almost analytically obvious, it commits us
to the rather strong thesis that only beings who are recognized as mem-
bers of a discursive community count as normative subjects capable of
having agent-relative commitments and entitlements. Such normative
subjectivity cannot exist merely in the form of potential recognizability.
For if a being has never engaged in the relevant type of normative trans-
actions with others, then she isn’t a locus of normative activity, bound
up in a concrete network of holdings, and she has no particular, concrete
normative position. And since, as we have discussed repeatedly, all such
transactions contain a vocative moment of mutual recognition, a being
who is not recognized as a normatively positioned person simply is not
one. Once we give up the “Platonic scorecard” vision of normative space
as an abstract network of commitments and entitlements, we can be be-
ings with normative statuses only if we are treated as such and act as
such in practice, and this requires that we participate in exchanges of S
mutual recognition. R
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194 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Now, someone may have the potential to be such an agent, but because
of her community’s extreme bigotry, neglect, or some other reason, this
potential may never have received the interpellative uptake it needs in
order to be actualized. We can count such a being as a moral victim; she
has been prevented from having access to the community of persons,
and this is a terrible loss. Likewise, those of us who are already moral
persons commit a terrible moral wrong by neglecting a potential person
in this way. However, we cannot take her as a moral person who has
been disrespected by not having this personhood acknowledged.
Consider, for instance, what used to be our standard practice of con-
signing infants with Down syndrome to institutions where they received
minimal physical care and virtually no stimulation. These children gen-
erally failed to develop any recognizable discursive or social capacities.
We now know that most children with Down syndrome are capable of
quite sophisticated cognitive development if they are given the right
kind of stimulation and normal, loving social interaction. Thus it turns
out that our old practices were deplorable, and that we inflicted a terri-
ble harm upon these children. Yet one should bite the bullet and say that
(in general) the harm that was done was that of not giving them what
they needed in order to be inducted into normative personhood, rather
than the harm of failing to acknowledge the personhood they already
had, “on the inside,” as it were.
On the other hand, refusing to hail or acknowledge the hails of some-
one who is already a person—shunning her, or casting her out of the
community—is a quite different kind of moral harm. As we discussed in
Chapter 6, shunning and intentionally ignoring are complicated actions
that in some sense must acknowledge or recognize the very normative
status they seek to deny. Just as refusing or resisting an interpellative hail
is still a complicated kind of engagement with it, likewise a refusal to
hail involves a kind of normative engagement with the object of that re-
fusal.
In claiming that normative status is constituted in second-person
transactions involving mutual recognition, we are in agreement with
Darwall’s account in The Second-Person Standpoint. However, there are
important differences between our pragmatic account and Darwall’s
contractarianism. Contractarianism requires subjects who can enter into
contracts and forge commitments and entitlements prior to being nor- S
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Sharing a World 195
matively positioned beings. In contrast, we claim that one can be a sub-

ject capable of such transactions only once one already inhabits norma-
tive space. Furthermore, we are not saying that each commitment or
entitlement must be recognized in order to exist. Rather, our point is
that, globally speaking, one can be a subject with agent-relative commit-
ments and entitlements only if one is actually recognized as such a sub-
ject by others in one’s discursive community (we will return to the ques-
tion of whether such social placement is required for having agent-
neutral commitments and entitlements, such as entitlements to declara-
tives and commitments to truths, later in this chapter). Once a structure
of mutual second-personal recognition is up and running, surely the
normative space that it institutes will far outstrip the set of normative
claims that we actually make upon one another.
8.3 How Many Discursive Communities Are There?

Throughout this book we have spoken of ‘the’ discursive community, re-
maining intentionally vague on the question of whether there is only
one. Now in an obvious sense there are of course many, many discursive
communities—communities of people who share a language or a dialect
and recognize one another as doing so. Davidson had to insist upon a
narrow and rarified definition of a language in order to plausibly deny
the obvious fact that various ones exist.13 But for our purposes, the scope
of the discursive community is broader than this, as we have seen; it in-
cludes everyone who is capable of entering into direct or indirect mutu-
ally recognizing discursive interactions with other community mem-
bers, and is capable of responsive sensitivity to the objects and events in
the public world that community members share. Thus the real question
concerning the number of discursive communities is this: Is it possible
for there to be bounded clusters of mutually recognizing agents who
share a world, such that recognition and shared attention (‘Yo’s and ‘Lo’s)
13. “I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like
what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be
learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure
which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.” Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of
Epitaphs,” in Lepore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald
Davidson (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 446. S
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196 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
are not possible across the boundaries of these clusters? Or, to put the
point another way, can there be speech acts with agent-neutral inputs or
outputs that range over different sets of agents?
On the face of it, it seems that there are three possibilities:
1. There are multiple discursive communities. Putting aside the possi-
bility of one individual having membership in more than one com-
munity, members of one community cannot enter into relation-
ships of mutual recognition with members of other communities,
and the claims of one community have no import for the members
of the other. Discursive agents are separated into groups that in-
habit “different worlds.”
2. There is only one discursive community. To be a normative, discur-
sive agent at all is to be responsive to a single public world and to
be able to enter into mutually recognizing normative transactions,
at least indirectly, with any other such agent. All agent-neutral in-
puts and outputs have exactly the same, completely universal
scope. Surely the boundaries of this community are negotiable and
not sharply demarcated, and of course full participation in this
community—sensitivity to every truth and reason, the capacity to
enter into mutually recognizing transactions with all other com-
munity members, etc.—is a regulative ideal that agents will rarely
if ever meet. But the discursive community, like the space of rea-
sons and norms this community negotiates, is essentially unitary.
3. There is one, fundamental, discursive community, but there can be
provisional and derivative discursive communities within that. All
discursive agents must share an Ur-discursive community that al-
lows us to recognize our common personhood and refer to a single
objective world. However, against this background, a subdiscourse
can be indexed to a subcommunity. Only members of the
subcommunity can hail one another in the subdiscourse, and so
forth.
We will dispense with option 1 fairly quickly. The interesting question is
whether option 2 or option 3 is correct. Option 3 is substantially more
complex than the others and will need clarification.
Option 1 leads to an unacceptable form of extreme relativism. If dis-
cursive communities can be cut off from one another, then, by defini- S
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tion, all the entitled agent-neutral declaratives in each community are

targeted only at members of that community. In other words, the truth-
claims of one community have no import at all for another community,
which is just to say that the communities do not share a world about
which agreement and disagreement is possible. Nelson Goodman ex-
plicitly defended this idea that different communities inhabit different
worlds.14 Some ‘standpoint epistemologists’, who argue that different
groups have access to different warrants, also defend such a line.15 Ian
Hacking approvingly describes the kind of discursive segregation that
accompanies this view:
We cannot reason as to whether alternative systems of reasoning are
better or worse than ours, because the propositions to which we reason
get their sense only from the method of reasoning being employed.
The propositions have no existence independent of ways of reasoning
toward them.16
But we have already committed ourselves to the view that truth is abso-
lutely public and not indexed to a perspective in this way. The indexical
view seems to fundamentally undermine any possibility of objectivity,
because it implies that any purportedly objective claim we might make
would be neither compatible nor incompatible with any of the purport-
edly meaningful things said by people in the alternative “world.” So it
seems inescapable that we would not in fact be claiming truth for our as-
sertions, but merely some sort of entitlement-for-us. It has been a central
presupposition of this work that negotiation of the space of reasons es-
sentially involves responsiveness and fidelity to the claims of a genu-
inely public world that sets a tribunal of truth independent of our vary-
ing perspectives and discursive positions. Hence we insist that truth-
claims, at a minimum, must seek to make the same normative claim on
14. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).

15. See for example Susan Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Re-
visited,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22 (1997): 341–365. One of us has ar-
gued at length that standpoint theory need not lead to such relativist, anti-objectivist conclu-
sions. See Rebecca Kukla and Laura Ruetsche, “Contingent Natures and Virtuous Knowers:
Could Epistemology be ‘Gendered’?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2002): 389–418; and
Kukla, “Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical Knowledge,” Episteme 3 (2006): 80–95.
16. Ian Hacking, “Language, Truth, and Reason,” in Steven Lukes and Martin Hollis, eds.,
Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 48–66, 65. S
R
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198 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
all rational, discursive agents; they must not only be agent-neutral in

their output, but the domain of this output must include all inhabitants
of the space of reasons. This is sufficient to rule out option 1.
We will consider one more reason to reject option 1. If option 1 were
correct, then there would be normatively responsive, discursive agents
from whom ‘we’ were utterly discursively cut off. This would mean that
we could not hail these agents with vocatives, nor receive acknowledg-
ments from them. It seems we should not take it as a defect in our discur-
sive practices if we cannot use our language to acknowledge and engage
people who are, in other contexts—or other worlds, perhaps?—per-
fectly acknowledgeable and engageable. The defect would appear to be
both moral and linguistic: a language that cannot be used to hail every-
one who is hailable seems to have fewer resources than it ideally should;
more important, the speakers of such a language seem to be missing a
morally significant capacity to respond to some agents who are in fact
genuine, normatively responsive, discursively able moral persons, as
such. These persons would have to inhabit a different world from ours.
But presumably, if they are actual, they have to show up somehow as ma-
terial objects in our world. And if this is so, it seems that—morally and
epistemically—we ought to be able to recognize and respond to their
real features and normative statuses. But if this is a defect in our discur-
sive practices, it is because our discourse ideally strives to include these
others in its scope, in which case option 1 is false. This may count only
as an argument from intuition, but it strikes us as powerful nonethe-
less.17
Let us move on, then, to options 2 and 3. If there exists one and only
one discursive community, then the “we” that provides the scope of dis-
course is simply all inhabitants of the space of reasons. It seems that
there are two main, related reasons why one might worry about this
option.
17. To insist that option one is false is to extract a core lesson from Davidson’s paper “On
the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association 47 (1973): 5–20, by insisting on the unity of truth and the possibility in principle of
discursive interaction and mutual recognition among all agents. It is not, however, to accept
Davidson’s strong conclusion that all conceptual schemes are intertranslatable. Davidson has
twigged onto the ideal universality of truth-claims, as well as the impossibility of discursive
agency that receives no uptake from other speakers. But he has no basis for his move from there S
to the conclusion that, in actuality, all discourse is intertranslatable and everyone is responsive
to the same features of the empirical world. R
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Sharing a World 199
First, there are many contexts in which a community—based on class,

ethnicity, profession, friendship, etc.—will address a claim to ‘every-
one’ or make a claim about ‘everyone’ that includes only the members of
that community. “Everyone these days sends their kids to Kaplan prep
classes before the SATs” and “Everyone goes to the Copa Cabana on Fri-
days” are clearly not claims whose scope is all rational agents. When the
chair of a faculty meeting asks if “everyone” is ready to vote, she clearly
does not mean to include the staff member refilling the coffee urn at the
back of the room. These are cases, one might think, in which the im-
plied domain of our speech acts is a community smaller than that of
the inhabitants of the space of reasons. Second, we have learned from
Kuhn and similar writers that different subcommunities can share prac-
tices, standards, and techniques that afford sensitivity to different ob-
jects, events, and features of the empirical world. We might think that
discourse about such specialized entities targets only the members of
that particular subcommunity. Assuming we have rejected option 1, such
thoughts may lead us to option 3, namely, the idea that there can be
provisional or context-specific discursive communities that provide the
scope of some of the agent-neutral claims made within them, even though
such communities exist only within the frame of our most general, uni-
versal discursive community and its shared world.
At first blush, we can accommodate claims about or to ‘everyone’ that
seem to have a restricted scope much more straightforwardly. We can
take declarative claims about ‘everyone’ such as “Everyone goes to the
Copa Cabana on Fridays” (or, as Yogi Berra purportedly once said, “That
place is so crowded nobody goes there anymore”) as simply elliptical for
more restricted claims, such as “Everyone [who lives in this city and is
able-bodied and cool] goes to the Copa Cabana on Fridays” or perhaps
“Everyone [who is worth hanging out with at all] goes to the Copa Ca-
bana on Fridays.”18 At most, we might say, this phrasing indicates a self-
centered lack of interest in what other groups of people do, not a literal
exclusion of them from the discursive community, even provisionally.
18. Neither need we assume that such uses of ‘everyone’ are explicitly definable in terms of
other predicates. It may well be that the proper understanding of a given restricted use of ‘ev-
eryone’ is something that must be picked up in context and that cannot be defined in other
terms. But still, this is merely a semantic phenomenon governing certain uses of ‘everyone.’
Even if the ‘everyone’ in “Everyone goes to the Copa Cabana on Fridays” is not precisely synon- S
ymous with any other phrase, the function of the declarative is nonetheless to claim of a certain
class of people that they go to the Copa. R
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200 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
Claims addressed to a restricted ‘everyone’, such as “Everyone be here by

8:00 tomorrow!,” simply have kind-relative agent-relative outputs: “For
those of you who are members of this committee, be here by 8:00 tomor-
row!” None of this challenges the singularity of the discursive commu-
nity. As we have seen, various people can hail one another in various
ways, so the existence of insiders’ ways of hailing one another doesn’t
prove much. Furthermore, the mere fact that members of a group tend,
in certain contexts, to acknowledge and address one another without ac-
knowledging that anyone has been left out does not show that their dis-
course cannot accommodate a wider range of acknowledgment and ad-
dress.
What of the worry that people involved in different sets of practices,
such as different scientific paradigms, have access to different kinds of
objects and facts? In contrast to option 1, here the claim is not that peo-
ple in different paradigms “inhabit different worlds” and cannot speak to
one another, but the more limited claim that within our shared public
world and shared discourse, there are clusters of people who can speak
to one another about some limited objects and events that others do not
have access to.
Limiting this kind of relativism to a particular domain of discourse
does not help with the fundamental problems that we raised when we
rejected option 1. It is a central tenet of this book that observatives
and truth-claims must be absolutely (rather than provisionally) agent-
neutral in their output, because we—all of us rational, normatively re-
sponsive agents—must be able to share one public world about which
we can agree or disagree in ways that can be held to the tribunal of that
world. Even though people differ in their sensitivity to facts and features
of the world, this does not mean that their claims about these facts and
features are only for others who can detect them. If claims about objects
visible to the community had import only for community members,
then these would not be objective parts of the public world at all. Rather,
such claims are for everyone, but most of us are deficient observers in
various ways and will not be able to see or understand or claim entitle-
ment to what some others can see or understand. Whether or not I un-
derstand the claim, whether or not I’m capable of knowing one way or
another, and whether or not I have the relevant perceptual abilities, it is
easy enough for me to foolishly deny a true claim made by a theoretical S
physicist. And if I do so, I’ve said something false, made an error, chal- R
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Sharing a World 201
lenged the claim of the physicist without grounds. All of this demon-
strates that I’m in the scope of the normative output of the claim by the
physicist.
We have said all along that the universal reach of agent-neutral dis-
course is an ideal, and that not everyone will be in a position to take up
every entitlement that discourse seeks to impute to her. While agent-
neutral claims within such scientific communities are ideally for every-
one, the social reality is that only those with specialized training are in a
position to be sensitive to the phenomena in question or to understand
claims about them. Remember John, Sellars’s perceptually challenged
necktie salesman. John did not have the ability to see that objects were
green, because he had not learned how to separate standard from mis-
leading conditions for viewing colors, and his co-workers helped edu-
cate him. But before he developed this ability, green neckties were green,
agent-neutrally, whether he knew it or not. His inability was a defect in
him, and it did not compromise the universal validity of the declarative
“This tie is green.” The defects of some perceivers damage neither the
absolute agent-neutrality of observatives or declaratives nor the univer-
sality of their ideal reach.
Adding restricted discursive communities to our ontology is compli-
cated. There would be strict limits on the type of discursive practices
that they could support. We have already argued that all declarative
truth-claims must take the universal community of all rational agents as
their domain, for otherwise they cannot be hooking on to an objective
world. If a claim made within a subcommunity is applicable only to
members of that community, then it is not a truth-claim. In our example
“Everyone goes to the Copa Cabana on Fridays,” the restricted sense of
‘everyone’ occurs in the subject position. Presumably it is still true, for
those of us sitting at home with our children and our computers on Fri-
day evenings, that ‘everyone’ named by the claim is at the Copa Cabana.
Hence the scope of the output of the claim is still universal.
If there are genuine discursive subcommunities, then their discursive
practices do not include issuing declaratives; insofar as members of the
community make declarative claims, they thereby revert to speaking as
members of the larger community (albeit, perhaps, members who are
only socially interested in conversing with fellow subcommunity mem-
bers). Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for observatives: in expressing S
recognition of public facts, objects, etc., and thereby grounding infer- R
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202 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ences to declarative truth-claims, observatives must be referenced to a

world shared by all negotiators of the space of reasons. You can’t recog-
nize a rabbit in the bush unless it is true, for the unrestricted everyone,
that there is a rabbit in the bush.
At the same time, it is difficult to see what would compel us to index
any speech acts with agent-relative outputs to a discursive subcommu-
nity. Since it is in the nature of such speech acts (imperatives, vocatives,
etc.) to be specific about whom they address, the fact that not everyone
is addressed by them seems benign. For speech acts with agent-relative
outputs to be examples of the discursive practices of a subcommunity,
we would need them not only to target a restricted audience, but some-
how to structurally require a background reference to a restricted com-
munity of ‘everyone’ standing behind this restricted audience. We can-
not think of any examples of speech acts that compel such a reading, nor
can we imagine what they might look like, although we have no princi-
pled reason for rejecting their possibility. Hence we have reason to think
that discourse indexed to a subcommunity, if it exists, does not include
declaratives, observatives, or speech acts with agent-relative outputs.
Instead, such discourse would have to consist of speech acts with
agent-neutral outputs (belonging to box 1 or box 2 of our grid) that are
not in the business of making or grounding truth-claims, but rather
serve some other pragmatic function. This would have to be a function
that we can understand only by construing the output of the speech
act as genuinely agent-neutral, even though its scope is restricted—as
opposed, for instance, to merely having a kind-relative output. Such a
discursive practice would have to appeal to a pragmatic, structural sense
of ‘everyone’—rather than a semantic sense of ‘everyone’—that is, a self-
contained ‘we’ within the larger, background discursive community.
Proper use of Occam’s razor seems to require that we find a compelling
example of such a type of speech before we add discursive subcom-
munities to our ontology and start figuring out how to track their com-
plicated dependence relationships with the larger discursive community,
and how to understand them as having any kind of self-contained exis-
tence, given that their members would have to constantly ‘exit’ the sub-
community whenever they made declarative assertions and other such
routine utterances. Without such an example, we have no reason to
plump for option 3 as opposed to option 2. S
Although we are not at all convinced that the idea of provisional dis- R
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Sharing a World 203
cursive subcommunities is ultimately useful or coherent, we can think

of two sorts of discursive practice that might seem to meet the require-
ments we just described and to be best understood as the practice of
such a community.
Consider, first, a predominantly white cotillion in the southeastern
United States, at which the hostess taps her glass and calls out, “Let’s ev-
eryone raise our glasses for a toast!” Now, it is clear that the predomi-
nantly black staff members who are waiting the tables are not addressed
by this superficially universal request. Why not just interpret this, again,
as elliptical for a kind-relative box-4 speech act? Well, we might think
that this social context sets up a provisional situation in which the black
waitstaff are not merely not included in the request, but are rather not
hailable or recognizable as persons at all. The hostess and guests really
see ‘everyone’ at the party as white, ‘everyone’ as there to celebrate, etc.
Of course, the hostess can perfectly well step out of this context in order
to address declaratives, imperatives, or other speech acts to the staff, and
if a fire breaks out and she yells “Everyone out!” her imperative will pre-
sumably include them. She is not incapable of recognizing and address-
ing them as persons. Yet we might think that for some purposes within
that context, the waitstaff are not merely excluded but invisible. The call
for a toast isn’t intended to target some people at the party and not oth-
ers; rather (the tentative intuition goes), the toast occurs within a back-
ground context in which the members of the staff do not show up as
persons at all. In an importantly restricted sense, we might think, the re-
quest is structurally agent-neutral; it is addressed to everyone who is rec-
ognizable as an agent within this limited and easily exitable practical
context.
And yet, it is difficult not to interpret such a phenomenon as reflect-
ing either a mean-spirited bigotry or a kind of blindness or ignorance on
the part of the hostess and guests. In the first case, they intentionally ex-
clude from their addresses and practices of recognition agents who they
understand could be included. But to do so is already to acknowledge
these agents, if only in rejecting or shunning them, and hence it does not
meet our criterion for constituting a subcommunity. In the second, more
interesting case, the hostess and guests are guilty of somehow failing to
see agents in their midst, at least for certain purposes. (It is not uncom-
mon to see people become blind to the personhood of those in the ser- S
vice industry in this way.) They take the waitstaff for granted to such an R
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204 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
extent that they are incapable of understanding that their practices are
exclusionary and deny recognition. In this case, we would have to say
that the speakers misunderstand their own speech acts and their prag-
matic import, and miss the fact that the domain to which those speech
acts are referenced is universal. Since all speech acts strive to realize an
ideal function but may fall short of doing so, this kind of misunderstand-
ing does not detract from the true universality of the discursive commu-
nity in these cases.
Consider another, more challenging case. What are we to make of le-
gal pronouncements concerning “everyone’s” rights and responsibili-
ties? Think, in particular, of laws that try to formulate basic principles of
justice, such as constitutional laws. Let us take as an example Item 2 of
the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) Freedom of conscience and religion;
b) Freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including
freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) Freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) Freedom of association.
Now on the one hand, laws explicitly bind and grant rights only to the
citizens that fall under their scope. A non-Canadian cannot use this text
in order to claim that his legal rights have been violated. On the other
hand, the intended force of the text seems to be inherently universal.
The point of the passage is to specify what people are owed simply as
agents, not as particular agents within a specific social context, and in
particular, not as Canadians. There seems to be an agent-neutrality built
into the very structure of a document that establishes such basic rights.
The text says what’s right, not what normative status this or that agent,
or kind of agent, has.
There is no interesting tension or pragmatic structure here if we in-
terpret this bit of text as a declarative assertion. The text can tell us
(everyone, all rational agents) a truth about what freedoms should be
protected for all rational agents, while at the same time we can all under-
stand that the Canadian laws apply to and protect only the Canadian
people. But this seems to flatten the pragmatic texture of the speech act.
A founding legal document like this does not merely describe; it estab- S
lishes legally protected rights. Arguably, the speech act that establishes R
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them does so for its own citizens, by ostending the agent-neutral force of
its own normative claims. The voice of constitutional law, perhaps, is in-
herently agent-neutral—the law is “inherently general,” we often say—
while the scope of the output of that voice is inherently restricted to the
citizens under its jurisdiction. If so, then such a founding legal pro-
nouncement may have the structure of a categorical imperative, albeit
one whose effective scope is restricted to a particular group of citizens.
We would need to do vastly more work on the performative structure of
the legislative voice in order to convince ourselves or our readers that
this is the correct analysis, or that such speech is genuinely best under-
stood as indexed to a discursive subcommunity. However, we are tanta-
lized by this direction of exploration.
Ultimately, we are not compelled enough by such possible recherché

counterexamples, at this point, to be convinced that adding discursive
subcommunities to our ontology is worth the complications. We thus
suggest, tentatively, that there is really only one discursive community—
only one ‘we’ made up of rational, mutually recognizing agents who are
sensitive to the claims of a public world.
8.4 Sharing a World and Learning to See

We saw in Chapter 3 that observatives are essential to discourse, because
they are the necessary points of contact with the empirical world in our
truth-directed game of giving and asking for reasons. But in order for
observatives to serve as anchors to the world in this way, speakers must
be able to use Lo-utterances as well. Observatives anchor our discourse
to a public world because others can also be brought to see what we see;
we can not only express that we have seen x, but also call others’ atten-
tion to x so that they can see it for themselves. Now, of course, observa-
tion can anchor entitled declaratives even if not everyone can, in fact,
see for herself. This is the whole point of passing on declarative entitle-
ments. Mark can legitimately declare that it is ridiculously hot in Florida
in July on the basis of Rebecca’s observative expression of this fact—he
need not experience the heat for himself. However, if someone purport-
edly observed x but could never call shared attention to x with a “Lo!”—
if x were somehow just not shareable in this way—then we would have S
to say that x was not observable. And if a declarative x could not trace its R
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206 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
justification (in the way discussed in Chapter 3) to observatives sharable

with Lo-claims, then it could not be functioning to make an objective
truth-claim about the public world. Correspondingly, it is through suc-
cessful calls to shared attention that we establish, in practice, that we do
share an intersubjective world that serves as the tribunal of our empiri-
cal claims, and were this not established in practice, then we would not
count as a discursive community that shared such a world. Hence the
“Lo!,” while not a necessary component of every observative utterance,
is a globally necessary element of discourse, and anything that is observ-
able must also (sometimes) be Lo-able.
Throughout this book we have made the point that agents generally
suffer various epistemic defects that make them unable to take up enti-
tlements they would ideally have, and that this does not hurt the univer-
sal scope of claims with agent-neutral outputs. But in the previous sec-
tion we saw a kind of epistemic defect that we have not discussed before.
While we have repeatedly discussed how agents may fail to be entitled to
a public fact because of ignorance, poor reasoning, etc., in that section
we introduced the literal inability to observe certain public, objective
facts or objects or events, because of an inadequate set of cognitive or
perceptual resources. To the extent that some of us cannot see x when
others can, those of us who cannot are defective in our normative re-
sponsiveness to the empirical world. Furthermore, we are deficient par-
ticipants in the discursive community, because participating essentially
involves negotiating and responding to the empirical world, as well as
being the successful target of Lo-claims.
The kind of ignorance under consideration here is not the sort where
someone has merely failed to hear a public fact or to draw an available
inference. Rather, even if the defective observer encounters the relevant
state of affairs with her own eyes, she will not be in a position to recog-
nize it. There are many examples of this phenomenon, both recherché
and mundane: only those trained in reading ultrasounds or MRIs can see
the meaningful information they contain; people with autism often can-
not perceive common social cues; music experts detect features of musi-
cal performances that others cannot; many people are unable to recog-
nize various forms of sexual harassment, class bias, racism, etc.; some
people cannot detect happiness or anger in Scandinavians. Changes in
our own bodies or even the bodies of loved ones will change our percep- S
tual dispositions and sensitivities—for example, new impairments in R
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Sharing a World 207
our own body or that of someone we care for can develop our ability to
see which spaces are and are not accessible to bodies with these impair-
ments. Thus not all of us are capable of the same observatives, and when
we call one another’s attention to something in the world, sometimes
these Lo-utterances will fail because the person whose attention they
call does not have the capacity to observe that to which she is being
called to attend. This signals a defect in that person, and not a compro-
mise of the objectivity or publicity of the object.
Differences exist in our ability to observe because our observational
capacities are, at least in part, skills that take work to develop. Sellars of-
fers an account in which all observational capacities are skills that must
be developed. He argues that if perception is to be able to provide any
warrant, its contents have to have conceptual structure sufficient to al-
low them to bear rational relationships to other conceptually articulated
judgments. We must be able to perceive that x is F, rather than just tak-
ing in brute sense data. But, he contends, our ability to perceive that
some perceptual fact of the form ‘x is F’ holds requires that we grasp the
conditions for the appropriate application of the concept F. That is, we
must understand the conditions under which things that appear to be F
are F, and vice versa. To use his example, I cannot see that a necktie is
green unless I understand facts such as that green things look green un-
der natural lighting, that they don’t look green when seen on a black and
white television, and so forth.19
Now, grasping such conditions for property recognition involves un-
derstanding under what conditions various inferences (such as the infer-
ence, in a certain context, to x’s actually being F) are or are not licensed
by appearances. Without this normative and inferential mastery, we can-
not distinguish between seeing that x is F and it merely looking as though
x is F, in which case, according to Sellars, we cannot drive the crucial
wedge between appearance and reality that is necessary for our percep-
tual states to count as properly epistemic states. Hence for him, the abil-
ity to recognize a piece of evidence cannot be neatly separated from
the ability to use it in inference, and thus perception cannot be taken as
a capacity for discovery that lies outside the context of justification. In
Sellars’s terms, perceiving that x is F requires that our recognitional epi-
S
19. Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1997), §18. R
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208 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
sode be placed “in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being
able to justify what one says.”20
For Sellars, perceptual capacities are inculcated through our contin-
gent histories, “involving a long history of acquiring piecemeal habits of
response to various objects in various circumstances.”21 This is the his-
tory of our mastery of the ability to recognize instantiations of various
concepts, in and through our mastery of their normative and inferential
relationships. Thus if x is indeed perceptibly F for a particular agent, this
fact is dependent upon the agent’s contingent past. Only if she has the
right history will she have developed the capacity to perceive that x is F,
and only then will her empirical confrontation with x warrant beliefs
and inferences based on the fact that x is F. An agent’s particular history
of observational situations and learned responses will inflect the topog-
raphy of the recognitional concepts she brings to bear in perception, by
giving these concepts their life and hence their content within differ-
ently inflected spaces of reasons. Our contingent history of concerns,
experiences, and conditions of observation helps determine which facts
and properties can show up for us and what counts as normal and aber-
rant behavior for objects of different sorts. Thus these contingent histo-
ries will help constitute what evidence is available and which inferences
are warranted in the face of worldly objects and events. Sellars writes:
“For we now recognize that instead of coming to have a concept of some-
thing because we have noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice
a sort of thing is already to have the concept of that sort of thing, and cannot
account for it.”22
Developing the ability to observe takes work and experience, as Aris-
totle taught us. We must learn to see features of the world—patterns in
ultrasound images, happiness in Norwegians, it seems even green on
neckties. How do we do this? Sellars has provided a partial answer: our
conceptual understanding of what we see and its inferential relations to
various facts (and, we might add, its practical relations to action) cannot
come after our perceptual capacity; it must predate it or at least develop
in tandem with it. But at the same time, a conceptual understanding of
20. Ibid., §36.

21. Ibid., §19.
22. Ibid., §45, italics in the original. Sellars’s use of the language of recognition here sug- S
gests that, in his view, this kind of theoretical insight can also be thought of as a kind of obser-
vation. R
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Sharing a World 209
something does not suffice to give us the ability to see it. I might under-
stand the significance of various kinds of information without being able
to detect this information myself.23 We are taught to put our conceptual
knowledge into observational practice by other community members,
who direct our attention in ways that train up our perceptual capacities.24
Thus, just as “Yo!” not only recognizes someone with a settled identity
and normative position but also serves as a tool to constitute this iden-
tity and normative position, likewise “Lo!” not only calls others to at-
tend and observe, but also serves to constitute others’ capacity to attend
and observe.25 We cannot teach one another to see through explanation
alone, as Kant argued in the Schematism chapter of the First Critique,
and then again in section 8 of the Third Critique; rather, we can only
guide others in their use of their own senses, helping them confront
something in the right way with their own eyes.
While all discursive agents share the same public world, sensitivity
to this world and its normative claims comes in different degrees and
forms. For beings who are subject to the normative claims of truth, be-
coming more accurate, more complete perceivers is a built-in ideal of ra-
tionality. Qua members of the discursive community, full and competent
participation in this community, including the ability to respond appro-
priately to any legitimate Lo-claim or other second-person call, is also a
built-in ideal. Regardless of the fact that none of us are such perfect ob-
servers or interlocutors, our discourse functionally presupposes a poten-
tial community of ideal participants, who can take up every entitlement,
respond appropriately to every feature of the world, and universally rec-
ognize and acknowledge one another. Luckily, discourse itself can play a
constitutive role in bringing us closer to this ideal.
23. In this regard, Sellars’s focus on detecting colors may be misleading. Since color is in-
herently something we see, it’s hard to know what it could mean to understand the concept of a
color without having the skill of detecting it. However, this doesn’t generalize. We can under-
stand the concept of a twelve-bar blues chord progression without being able to notice one, or
understand the concept of fetal nuchal thickening without being able to detect it on an ultra-
sound screen.
24. And of course more brutely physical capacities differ as well. Wade Boggs famously
claimed to be able to see the direction of rotation of a baseball’s seams while it was traveling
from the pitcher toward him at ninety miles per hour. We assume that, if this is true, it signals a
difference in hardware from that of an ordinary human.
25. For a detailed comparison of these two constitutive processes see Rebecca Kukla, S
“Myth, Memory and Misrecognition in Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’,”
Philosophical Studies 101 (2000): 161–211. R
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210 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
8.5 On the Equiprimordiality and Entanglement of ‘Yo!’

and ‘Lo!’
At this point we have argued for the fundamental importance of both
vocatives—‘Yo!’s—that draw us into normative relations with one an-
other and place us in social space, and ostensive observatives—‘Lo!’s—
that establish our responsiveness to a shared empirical world and make
possible reasonable debate about that world. In fact, however, we can tie
these two forms of speech act tightly together. Every hail involves an
ostension, and vice versa.
Unlike the straight observative, an ostensive speech act has an agent-
relative output: The ‘Lo!’ calls a particular person to attend to something
in a second-person voice, and demands acknowledgment from that per-
son in the form of an observative (“Lo, a rabbit!”; “Oh, yeah, there he
is!”). Thus any ‘Lo!’ also functions as a vocative—not just in the generic
sense that every speech act has a vocative moment, as we have argued,
but in the much more direct sense that it recognizes someone second-
personally as a potential observer of something, and calls for that person
to acknowledge this recognition by attending. The shift of attention is
the kind of acknowledgment this hail demands, just as raising a hand
and saying “Here!” is the kind of acknowledgment that having one’s
name called during roll call demands.
At the same time, hails are material events, and people (even in their
virtual incarnations on an instant-messaging screen) are perceptible ob-
jects. Whether a hail occurred, what its character was, and whether it
was legitimate are all empirical questions that have to be answerable and
debatable with reference to the testimony of the senses. The recognitive
call of the vocative is a call for recognition in return. Hence any vocative
functions to call the attention of the target of the hail to the one doing
the hailing. In other words, the hailer must ostend himself, qua material,
observable entity, in hailing. Thus every ‘Yo!’ functions at the same time
as a ‘Lo!’26 We can generalize the point: we have already argued that ev-
ery speech act contains a vocative moment. Correspondingly, given that
speech is made up of concrete, material transactions among observable
agents, every speech act calls the attention of the agents to whom it is
26. We saw earlier in this chapter that the hail also calls its target’s attention to the norms S
that govern her response. This, as we pointed out, is also a kind of a ‘Lo!’, although one that
calls for a less concrete form of observational attention. R
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Sharing a World 211
spoken to the speaker.27 We cannot speak to one another unless we can

perceive one another (where, again, this perception may be mediated in
various ways); the recognitions that we have argued are fundamental to
all discursive transactions are literal receptive encounters.28
Thus our capacities to utter and to be the target of ‘Lo!’s and ‘Yo!’s are
equiprimordial and fundamentally entangled. More generally, we can
now see that our social placement as agents within the discursive com-
munity and our responsiveness to the normative claims of the empirical
world are interdependent. I can have a place within social space and en-
ter into discursive transactions with others only if I can recognize those
others as specific material beings and their speech acts as specific mate-
rial events—the kinds of things about which I can stand corrected by
the empirical testimony of my senses. But at the same time, we have
seen that the notion of truth is an inherently intersubjective notion,
in that it makes reference to a public world—the type that we share
with one another and can disagree about. To be normatively respon-
sive to the truth—and hence to inhabit the space of reasons—I must be
able to judge what belongs to the public world and what does not, or
in other words, I must be able to tell which things can properly be
ostended (Lo!-ed) for other members of the discursive community, as-
suming that their perceptual capacities are up to snuff. This is another
way of putting Sellars’s point about the relation between looks and
seeings-that, which he in turn inherits from Kant’s notion of objective va-
lidity: in order to be a truth-discerner, we must be able to distinguish be-
tween x looking F to me and my seeing that x is F, and this requires my
ability to determine whether x and its F-ness belong to a public world
and can serve as targets of shared attention.
We are far from the first philosophers to argue that genuine normative
agency requires both placement within social space and sensitivity to the
claims of the empirical world. Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sellars,
Haugeland, and others have argued for the interdependence and ne-
cessity of these two forms of normative placement. Heidegger in par-
27. In Chapter 7 we discussed a variety of uninteresting qualifications and exceptions—

speaking to one’s self, calling out to see if anyone is listening, etc.
28. See Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Explaining Philosophical Naturalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), for an excellent discussion of the embodied S
character of discourse and the corresponding fundamental inseparability of discourse and per-
ception. R
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212 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
ticular has identified Dasein with discursively articulated being-in-the-

world, where such being is essentially both with-others and responsive
to empirical phenomena; Mitda-sein, or being-with-others, is “existen-
tially constitutive for being-in-the-world.”29
However, we believe that the second-personal, vocative dimension of
normative agency has been lost in all of these accounts. While Heidegger
paid careful attention to the role of the first-person perspective (remem-
ber that Dasein is “in each case mine”), his description of Mitda-sein in
Being and Time is oddly passive. Others are “there with” Dasein, and one
is “among” them and “encounters” them, and is concerned for them,
but there is no talk, in this text, either of vocative discourse or of the
phenomenological form of the second-person encounter. In reading Be-
ing and Time, one could get the impression that we necessarily speak and
act surrounded by one another, but not to one another. A similar criti-
cism can be leveled against all the other authors we just mentioned. But
we have argued in this book that it is only through second-person dis-
course that we establish a place in normative space and are engaged in
responsive normative relations to others. Vocatives call us into relations
of mutual recognition, while ostensions establish our shared normative
sensitivity to the features of a public world. An account that leaves out
this second-personal dimension of our being-with-others will have no
tools for explaining how we make real, concrete claims upon one an-
other and speak to one another about a shared world.
8.6 Fugue
In the end, almost all the work we have done in this book has been a
matter of spelling out the consequences of clarifying three distinctions:
between the input and the output of speech acts, between agent-relative
and agent-neutral normative statuses, and between the different voices
and directions (first-personal, second-personal, impersonal) that form
part of the pragmatic structure and import of speech acts. We have cy-
cled through these three distinctions over and over again and put them
together in various ways. The speech acts that have been central for us,
but have played little or no role in mainstream philosophy of language—
S
29. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), para-
graph 121. R
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Sharing a World 213
such as observatives, prescriptives, vocatives, and acknowledgments—

are functions that are built out of combinations of these different scopes
and voices. In turn, these functions have been the basis for our accounts
of various phenomena such as holding, calling attention, and observing.
We hope we have shown that once we have these three distinctions
clearly in view, various formerly resilient philosophical puzzles in epis-
temology, philosophy of mind, and metaethics dissolve, while our capac-
ity to describe and understand the pragmatic texture and topography of
speech is enhanced. We hope in particular that seeing these distinctions
can make our capacity to respond to normative claims and engage one
another in discourse that is held to the testimony of a shared empirical
world seem less philosophically opaque. Certainly our typography and
distinctions are not uniquely useful in teasing out the pragmatic topog-
raphy of the space of reasons, and we make nothing like a claim to have
captured the subtlety and character of this space exhaustively. Yet we are
surprised at the extent to which one can articulate and appreciate its
complexity with just this small repertoire of conceptual tools.
We began by charging the philosophical tradition with a pervasive
and tenacious propensity to commit the declarative fallacy. This fallacy
single-handedly masked all three of these distinctions quite effectively.
In a legitimate declarative speech act, the input and the output are both
agent-neutral, and they are identical to one another: a speaker is entitled
agent-neutrally to a truth claim, and the speech act strives to pass on en-
titlement to this same claim agent-neutrally. As long as we philosophers
focused almost all our attention on such speech acts, it is not surprising
that we did not think to worry about the distinction between inputs and
outputs, since in these cases they coincide. Nor is it surprising that
we failed to focus on the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-
relative statuses, since we encountered only the former in the course
of our philosophical work. Finally, declarative speech is distinctive in
its impersonality. It is part of the character of the declarative that the
first-person perspective and the second-person target drop out as func-
tionally irrelevant. Truth-claims are not voiced or indexed to perspec-
tives. Our discipline’s insistent and nearly exclusive focus on declarative
speech has not only masked the significance of voice and perspective to
discursive pragmatics, but even made these considerations almost un-
seemly, as they threaten to sully the objectivity of such speech. Indeed, S
in writing this book, we have struggled to find ways of articulating these R
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214 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’
dimensions of language. For example, linguistics and philosophy of lan-

guage have not provided us with resources for discussing the direc-
tion and the pragmatic voice of speech, as opposed to its grammatical
voice. When we avoid the declarative fallacy, it becomes undeniable that
speech varies in its voice, direction, and scope, and that its entitlement
can be different from its import.
Ultimately, we are less invested in convincing you that our particular
arguments and conclusions are correct than we are in saying: Lo, the
wide variety, importance, and rich texture of non-declarative speech!
S
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Appendix
Index
S
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Appendix: Toward a Formal

Pragmatics of Normative Statuses
With Greg Restall
In this book we have focused almost exclusively on the pragmatics of

language, and resolutely on a pragmatist approach to pragmatics—that
is, an approach that attends always to the concrete embodied charac-
ter of language. This is not to indicate that we think semantics uninter-
esting, or that we think no insight into language can be had from ac-
counts that look at it from an abstract point of view, even from the point
of view we have uncharitably called a scorecard changing in Platonic
space. Our objection was to the supposition that language could be un-
derstood entirely in terms of some abstract normative structure, and not
meant to imply that such a structure could give no illumination of any-
thing.
With this in mind, we turn in this Appendix to the preliminary devel-
opment of a scorekeeping semantics that begins with the broader field of
vision that is opened up when we eschew the declarative fallacy and
make use of abstract versions of the pragmatic distinctions developed in
this book. In so doing, we take on in many ways the point of view that
we have been at pains to resist, that of the detached theorist characteriz-
ing features of the abstract significance of performances by agents in a
community in which we do not participate. Our primary concern here is
to reassure. Many in the pragmatist tradition, often following Brandom’s
work in this regard, are keen to develop formal inferentialist accounts,
and we insist that nothing we do here should be seen as preventing
such investigation. Indeed, we claim that such projects look much more
promising against the broader field of possibilities opened up by our
more systematic pragmatics. That is, we show that a notion of proposi-
tional content and inference is straightforwardly definable in terms of S
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218 Appendix
the normative transitions between acts that we discuss throughout

the book, and we give one example of how to develop other types of
speech acts.
The underlying idea throughout this book has been to understand lan-
guage as a prescriptively constrained social practice. Thus, in laying out
its structure, one naturally begins with a representation of the kinds of
prescriptive significance that can be practically conferred upon actions,
and then attempts to understand language in general, and semantics in
particular, as a special sort of structure of instituted relations arising out
of such a generic system.
The most detailed such program is Brandom’s, and it is his approach
that we aim to make contact with here. Our account will arrive at the
point at which we can cut and paste the semantic work of Making It Ex-
plicit. But our account has far more general application. The pragmatic
back-story could, with fairly minor modification, be adapted to generate
truth-conditional contents, verification conditional, or what have you.
Our back-story gives an account of how a practice in which agents
evaluate one another’s actions can be seen to include actions such as
declarings and prescribings, and we give an account of the normative
structure of such a practice. We do not prescribe how you might go on
to account for the “semantics” of these declarations and prescriptions.
The basic picture within which we place our formalism is this: we are
the theorists; those creatures over there, engaged in social practice in
their natural environment, are what we are interpreting. We interpret
them by taking them to be scorekeepers, that is, creatures who both en-
gage in actions and assign prescriptive statuses to their own acts and
those of their fellow creatures. Of course we don’t think they do this us-
ing our vocabulary, or any vocabulary at all. Rather, we interpret their
practice as implicitly involving such attributions and undertakings of
prescriptive statuses. This picture, we note again, looks very different
from the typical context of communicative speech that we discussed
in the book; it requires taking up an impersonal, outsiders’ stance for
the purposes of interpretation. This is not to go back on anything we
said earlier in the book. Instead it is to acknowledge a difference be-
tween a stance that may be productive for the purposes of doing inter- S
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Appendix 219
pretive semantics and a stance that enables actual communicative en-

counters.1
We offer no reductive account of these takings in terms of behavior.
Indeed, for present purposes we simply help ourselves to notions such
as, roughly, “a practice such that x is committed to taking y to be entitled
to z” and the like. But we can say various things about typical manifesta-
tions of assignments, defeasible connections between behavior and sta-
tus, and so on. Thus, a creature who takes another to be committed to
doing something will generally expect the other to take that action, and
will be surprised if he doesn’t. She will also typically engage in some
form of censoriousness toward one she takes to be committed to some-
thing that he doesn’t do, and perhaps offer encouragement or reinforce-
ment to one who discharges his commitments. Similarly, acts that are
taken to be performed without entitlement will receive some kind of
negative sanction, while attempts by others to sanction an entitled act
will be resisted. (Think of such rules of thumb as akin to the sorts of
things Davidson points to as relevant evidence regarding the assignment
of occasion sentences to speakers in radical translation.) In the end, one
would like an epistemological account of how one comes to exhibit the
understanding constitutive of such implicit assignments of significance,
but for purposes of developing the semantic framework, all this is sim-
ply assumed.
Now what sorts of things are on scorecards? Well, there are various
agents and actions they perform. Acts by agents, actual or potential, are
the things one assigns status to. And the scorecards will assign to these
acts-by-agents various prescriptive statuses. Which statuses? Here we
are faced with a choice, for there are clearly a wide range of prescriptive
statuses that agents can and do assign to one another’s actions. The
framework we develop puts no constraints on which of these could be
modeled, but we aim to begin simply, taking on board a few selective ex-
amples, including the two prescriptive flavors employed by Brandom—
commitment and entitlement. So Jones’s prescriptive position in practice
will be represented by a scorecard which lists things such as that Smith
1. Other philosophers who have described interpretive contexts, such as Brandom and
Davidson, have not made this distinction; however, their descriptions of the attitude appropri-
ate to doing interpretive semantics are deeply unsatisfying as descriptions of the attitude appro-
priate to speaking to and with others. S
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220 Appendix
is entitled to collect acorns today, and that Williams is committed to

cleaning the nest.
Several points need to be made about these scorecards at the outset.
• As we said, for us interpreters to assign such a score to Jones—say
that he assigns a certain commitment to Smith—is not for us to
suppose that Jones has the conceptual ability to form beliefs about
Smith. We do not begin our account by postulating anything with
the structure of a speech act.
• The set of prescriptive statuses that can be assigned to acts must in-
clude one more than the pair of commitment and entitlement. As
we noted, a paradigmatic exhibition of taking someone to be com-
mitted to something is to sanction him if he doesn’t do what he is
committed to. But this highlights the fact that there is little sense to
a practice in which we keep track of one another’s commitments,
but don’t keep track of which commitments are acted upon. Nei-
ther does entitlement have a point if we don’t keep track of when
someone has performed an entitled action, or one to which he was
not entitled. So we include the status of “done,” emphasizing that
it is a normative status, rather like having scored in a game (suc-
ceeded according to the rules).
• Scorecards should be coherent. This is not to deny that
scorekeepers can be incoherent (locally, and to a certain extent).
But for us to have an interpretation that makes sense of what they
are doing—even if what they are doing is incoherent—we must be
coherent. Sometimes, for example, writing down that Jones has
scored things one way requires us to write down that he has scored
things another. (Think of assigning to Jones the status of being
married to Smith without assigning to Smith the status of being
married to Jones.) And sometimes there will be two scores which it
makes no sense to write down on the same card.2
• A word is in order about how we are understanding the notion of
entitlement here. One could certainly define this status in such a
way that it applies only to actual performances, that is, to things
that are done. On this definition, an actual act is either entitled or
2. Of course once we have a recursive specification of an infinite range of actions, the impli- S
cation relation requires us to cease taking “write down” literally. Then we think of implication
as telling us what we have implicitly written down in virtue of an explicit writing. R
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Appendix 221
not, but potential acts simply are not at issue. This is not the only
thing one could mean by entitlement. One could think of agents as
having entitlements that they keep in their pockets, as it were, a
sort of performance coupon. In this sense, entitlement, like com-
mitment, applies to potential or actual acts. This understanding,
which is the one we employ, raises a further question of whether
the coupons are “combinable with any other offer.” That is, we
need to ask whether entitlement to A and entitlement to B implies
entitlement to do both. Though either answer can be stipulated,
generating a coherent normative status, “no” is the more intuitive
answer and the one we follow. Mark can be entitled, in the usual
sense of this word, to marry Sam and entitled to marry Kelly, but
not entitled to marry both. (This question does not arise for the no-
tion of entitled performances, when both actions have been per-
formed.) Another issue will then arise for our definition of entitle-
ment incompatibility below. One could stipulate that A is
incompatible with B iff one cannot be entitled to A and entitled to
B. On this reading, ‘Mark marries Kelly’ is compatible with ‘Mark
marries Sam’. Since it seems more intuitive to treat these as incom-
patible—in part because we generally would like to say that if two
things cannot be coherently assigned the status of “done,” then
they can’t be compatible in the entitlement sense, but more impor-
tantly because this is the notion that is useful in developing seman-
tic inferential relations—we define incompatibility in terms of the
impossibility of entitlement to perform the joint act A and B. That
is, we say that two acts are incompatible if it cannot be the case
that one performs both and is entitled to both.
• We note that though normative statuses apply to act-types, these
can be as specific as one likes. One can be committed to taking out
the trash, to taking out the trash between 8:00 and 8:05 with a
shovel, etc. But however specific, we think of these as one-off com-
mitments rather than as “standing commitments.” That is, we
think of a commitment as the sort of thing that is taken care of, or
discharged, when one does what one is committed to doing. This is
not true of all commitments, of course. Greg’s commitment to be
collegial toward Rebecca is not something that is “discharged”
when he performs some collegial act. It is an ongoing commitment, S
demanding frequent vigilance against uncollegial behavior. How R
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222 Appendix
one would represent these standing commitments in a more com-

plicated system—perhaps as a set of conditional commitments of
the form “if this situation arises, one is committed to acting colle-
gially there,” or no doubt something more complicated—is not
something we take up in this Appendix.
• We see these statuses as applying to acts in general. We neither
make nor assume any sort of distinction between speech acts and
other acts. That distinction will be constructed in due course. But
there is a second form of generality that requires more explanation.
That is, no serious distinction is made in the abstract practice be-
tween “agents” and “objects.” We begin our characterization of so-
cial practice at a level rather like what Sellars refers to as the “Orig-
inal Image,” an image in which there are not as yet conceptual or
practical resources to distinguish agents from mere objects. This is
the point of view we begin with, allowing in the formalism that one
can attribute commitment to the clouds to bring forth rain and of
course one then also keeps track of which of these commitments
have been carried out. Just as with assignments to humans, such
attributions are implicit in our expectations, exhortations, (alleg-
edly) punitive or censorious responses, etc.
That events in the world play a role in determining the normative sig-
nificance of our own acts is a crucial element of a genuinely embodied
practice, and this is something that we want to have represented in
the formalism. Of course this is not to deny that the prescriptive in-
volvements of non-agents in our linguistic practice ought to be circum-
scribed. The rising of the sun plays a role in generating my entitlement
to the speech act “Lo, the sunrise!” but is not something the sun can
genuinely be entitled to perform. But the fact that the sun does not per-
form actions is a substantive fact. It is something to be argued for within
the space of reasons, not something to be legislated in our definition of
that space. Further, the difficult task, as it happens, is not to circum-
scribe non-actions, but to get them into the language game to begin
with. We should draw the agent/object and act/event distinctions, to be
sure, but only from within a space of normative significance in which
each has a logically antecedent function. S
Just as Sellars speaks of the Manifest Image as arising out of the Origi- R
nal Image as we strip away agential content from our conception of non- L
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Appendix 223
human entities, so a notion of agent—and non-agent—will emerge here.

But the stripping away of these statuses is something one can only do
within a practice that has sufficient conceptual resources to utter speech
acts, specifically prescriptives, and to make explicit underlying norma-
tive statuses with that speech. Thus, one will say things like “Stars don’t
have commitments.” But although stars are not agents, their inclusion in
the practice of normative attribution leaves a trace on the prescriptive
role of happenings involving them in two ways.
First, relations between statuses give content to act types. And those
relations hold whether or not the entity in question is actually capable of
having that status at all. So commitment to picking something up is
commitment to moving it. And this leaves a trace in the fact that to say
that the wind picks up our trailer is to say that the wind moves it, even
when we develop the conceptual wherewithal to distinguish the wind’s
picking something up from a genuine doing.
Second, we continue right to the end to assign statuses of doing to
non-agents. To say of the cloud that it carried out (did) its commitment
to rain upon the ground need not, however, imply that it was literally
committed to doing this or to its being a genuine agent. It is, rather,
merely to take the cloud to have, as if were, done what would count as
that commitment were it to have it, or to have changed in a way that,
were it an agent, would be a doing of what would be a carrying out of a
commitment to rain, were there such a commitment. In short, a space of
doing arises as a space articulated by the roles happenings are fit to play
in relation to commitments and entitlements, but roles they need not al-
ways actually be playing. Taking something to be a mere happening is
taking it to be a doing minus the agentive commitment.
Our aim, then, is to provide a formal vocabulary in which we can discuss

prescriptive pragmatics of action in a rigorous way. This requires three
basic kinds of things:
• A non-empty set of agents (AGENT),
• A non-empty set of action-types (ACTION),
• and a non-empty set of prescriptive statuses (STATUS).
We will call a triple consisting of a choice of sets AGENT, ACTION and

STATUS a field of play. We will use lowercase Greek letters , , , , etc., S
as variables ranging over the class AGENT of agents. When we wish to R
use concrete examples of agents, we will use Mark, Rebecca, and Greg. F, L
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224 Appendix
G, H, etc., range over the class ACTION of act-types, and s, t, etc., are
statuses—the canonical examples are commitment (c), doing (d), and
entitlement (e), though the formalism leaves room for any number of
other prescriptive statuses should they prove useful.
Here is how the different aspects of a field of play may combine. Sta-
tuses are used to evaluate act-types relative to agents: given any action in
ACTION it makes sense to evaluate it with respect to each person. This
makes sense whether or not the action is one that is, or even could be,
carried out. So the basic unit of our analysis is a triple of the form
s〈F, 〉
where s ∈ STATUS, F ∈ ACTION and ∈ AGENT. We will call such tri-
ples prescriptive assignments. When our formal syntax allows, we will ab-
breviate this language: instead of always writing s〈F, 〉 we may write
sF
if this expression is not ambiguous.3 So a field of play is the basic raw ma-
terial that a theorist may use in giving an account of the prescriptive be-
havior of some community of agents.
A scorecard appropriate for a field of play will be some collection of

prescriptive assignments. However, not every collection of assignments
3. Here are some examples of prescriptive assignments:
c〈help the homeless, Greg〉
This records Greg’s commitment to help the homeless (which is a commitment that Greg
may or may not manage to meet, or even to recognize).
e〈assert that R has 3,088 Ackermann constants, Rebecca〉
This records Rebecca’s entitlement to assert that the relevant logic R has 3,088 Ackermann
constants.
d〈ask for directions to the Baillieu Library, Mark〉
This records that Mark has asked for directions to the Baillieu Library. Any kind of action,
whether a straightforward bodily movement or a complex multi-stage project, whether an inar-
ticulate doing or a highly structured verbal speech act, may count as an action in a field of play,
since it makes sense to judge agents to be committed to or entitled to each of these different
kinds of act-types.
Notice that nothing in our picture so far makes reference to any restriction of the capacity of
an agent to carry out each act-type in ACTION. If the class ACTION contains suitable actions,
it makes sense to ask the question of whether or not S
c〈square a circle with ruler and compass, Mark〉 R
even though this commitment is one that he will never, and can never, discharge. L
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Appendix 225
counts as a scorecard: there are a number of constraints governing the

interaction of different statuses.
The general form of a structural constraint on scorecards has the form
XX dY
where X and Y are sets of assignments. A scorecard respects the con-
straint X d Y if and only iff it contains each assignment in X only when it
contains some assignment in Y. That is, it does not contain every assign-
ment in X and no assignment in Y.
Notice that scorecard constraints satisfy the usual structural rules gov-
erning consequence relations. Every scorecard respects the constraint
sF d sF , and more generally, any constraint X d Y in which some as-
signment sF is in both X and Y. This is an identity constraint. Simi-
larly, if a scorecard respects X d sF ,Y and it respects X,sF d Y then X d
Y as you can check. This is a transitivity condition, also called the cut
rule.
An important special case of such a constraint is the form Xd, where
the right-hand side is empty. A scorecard violates this constraint when it
contains every assignment in X. It respects this constraint iff there is
some evaluation in X that it avoids. So to say Xd is to say that the assign-
ments in X are jointly incompatible, since no scorecard containing every
element of X is correct. We will also write “z X” for this. In the very spe-
cial case where X = {A, B}, we write “A z B.” Incompatibility notions
will play a central role in the rest of this Appendix.
Given our original notion of incompatibility z between assignments we

may define a weaker, but equally important, incompatibility relation.
Consider two actions F and G , both of which can be done, but which
cannot be jointly entitled. As noted above, we mean by this not that one
cannot be entitled to the one and also entitled to the other, but that one
cannot be entitled to both. For example, it is a good thing to conserve
natural resources for future generations. Rebecca and Greg might be
trawling the ocean for fish. Rebecca takes a load of fish, and so does
Greg. Jointly, their haul endangers the survival of this species, and so we
take it that Rebecca’s action and Greg’s action are not both entitled.
Though it may well be that either of them would have been entitled if
the other had not done what s/he did, it is impossible that both perform S
their actions with entitlement. Given what both did, one of them (if not R
both) has overstepped the mark of her or his entitlement. (Perhaps the L
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226 Appendix
first to get the catch was entitled but the second wasn’t. On the other
hand, they may both have been in error.)
Regardless of the details, even though we have both
d 〈catch n fish, Rebecca〉, d 〈catch m fish, Greg〉
the two actions are incompatible in another sense: they are entitlement in-
compatible, since the following assignments are incompatible:
e〈catch n fish, Rebecca〉, d 〈catch n fish, Rebecca〉,
e〈catch m fish, Greg〉, d 〈catch m fish, Greg〉
In general, we will say that a set X of d-evaluations are entitlement in-
compatible if and only if the union of X and the set X[d := e] of corre-
sponding e-evaluations (found by replacing each d by e in X) is incom-
patible in our original sense. That is, for any set X of d-evaluations,
ze X iff z X[d := e] ∪ X
We may do the same thing for commitments.
A collection of commitments may also be jointly incompatible, this
time in different ways. Firstly, commitments may be undercut because
“the world fails to cooperate.” To return to our fishing example, if
flushed with success, Rebecca and Greg return to sea with plans to fish
more,
c〈catch 2n fish, Rebecca〉 c〈catch 2m fish, Greg〉
but in waters where there are fewer than 2n + 2m fish, then their com-
mitments will not be jointly discharged. We can say that these commit-
ments are d-incompatible, since d〈catch 2n fish, Rebecca〉 z d〈catch 2m
fish, Greg〉. In general, given a set X of c-evaluations,
zd X iff z X[c := d]
In a similar fashion, it makes sense to extend the definition of e-incom-
patibility to cover arbitrary sets of evaluations (d, e, and c). Such a set X
is e-incompatible if and only iff X[c := e, d := e] ∪ X[c := d, e := d] is
ordinarily incompatible. A set of commitments, entitlements, and do-
ings is e-incompatible in this sense just when (joint) entitlement to all
those actions is not available.
S
For evaluation to be genuinely social we not only need to be able to take R
creatures to be taking each other to be committed, doing what they are L
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Appendix 227
committed to, and being entitled in their actions (or not), but we also
need to take these creatures as acting in their assignments of prescriptive
statuses to actions. If these assignments are not themselves seen as ac-
tions, then they will not themselves be the sorts of things that can be en-
titled or not within the practice, and so not the sort of thing that could
be brought within the space of reasons as fodder for argument. That is,
once we think of a creature as taking to have been committed to F, then
we can think of this very taking as yet another act-type, to which it can
be entitled or not. So, let’s call a family ACTION of act-types in a field of
play 〈AGENT, ACTION, STATUS〉 an assignment-rich set of actions if for
each α ∈ AGENT, F ∈ ACTION, and s ∈ STATUS, there is an act-type
sF ∈ ACTION. This is the act-type of ‘taking ’s F-ing to be s’. In the
cases that concern us, the relevant actions are taking ’s F-ing to be a
commitment, or to be done, or to be entitled.
Given an assignment-rich set of actions in a field of play, it makes
sense to consider what kinds of constraints are appropriate. It seems
quite appropriate to hold agents to exactly the same criteria to which we
hold ourselves in theorizing about them. In other words, if we take it
that X d Y for some sets X,Y of assignments, then this should not only
constrain our account of the statuses of creatures—it also constrains
theirs. If I cannot take F to be an entitled doing, then neither should
or any other creature in AGENT. To state this in its generality, we add a
constraint of ‘sociality of assignments’, which requires the simple idea of
a ‘lifting’ of an assignment. Given a set X of assignments its ‘d-lifting to
the agent ’ is the following set of assignments:
X dβ = {d 〈sF , 〉 : sF ∈ }
In other words, given a set of assignments, its d-lifting to is the set of

accomplished actions performed by to make those assignments. Now
the sociality constraint is easily stated:
If X d Y then X dβ d Y βd
So now, we consider a field of play with an assignment-rich set of ac-

tions, satisfying the sociality constraint. Not only do we the interpreters
take the agents to be taking each other to be committed, entitled to ac-
tions, and to be doing them, but now we have the resources to describe S
the agents doing the same. R
* * * L
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228 Appendix
We are now in a position to characterize speech acts formally. As one

would expect, our characterization of the declarative will depend cru-
cially on the agent-neutrality of input and output. As it happens, the
formal property that corresponds to agent-neutrality is quite simple,
namely that some incompatibilities are ideally universal. There is some
picking and choosing at work here, both in terms of how abstract a char-
acterization to give of the various elements of concrete practice, and in
terms of what particular elements to represent in the formalism. In
Chapter 1 we noted that when one utters a declarative, one takes up a
normative position of opposition to anyone who utters a declarative in-
compatible with it. This normative stance is, in some ways, an abstrac-
tion. One certainly won’t be aware of everyone who denies what one
says. One may not even recognize that certain declaratives are incompat-
ible with what one says. But nonetheless, the universality of one’s stance,
in this sense, is a crucial constitutive goal of the act of declaring.
Another important dimension of speech acts with agent-neutral out-
put is that they strive to make entitlement available universally. Here, as
we argued, the distance between practical import and structural ideal is
even greater. Rebecca may be entitled to believe P, while Greg is commit-
ted to denying P, and hence not in a position to take up that entitlement,
and Mark may simply be unaware of Rebecca’s entitlement. Nonetheless,
we urged that it is a constitutive feature of declarative assertion that it
strive for universal uptake of entitlement. In our formal theory below,
we make use only of the former abstraction, for a reason no more princi-
pled than that this is the feature that is needed for the construction of
the relevant sort of propositional content.
With this in mind, we now characterize a declarative speech act, an
act type D(F, ) of a declarative: saying of that it F-ed.
Declaratives
An act type D(F, ) is a declarative (saying that did F) if it satisfies the

following three conditions:
d〈D(F, ), 〉 d d〈dF , 〉
e〈D(F, ), 〉 d e〈dF , 〉 S
If d〈D(F, ), 〉 z e〈D(G, ), 〉 then e〈D(F, ), 〉 z e〈D(G, ), 〉 R
L
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Appendix 229
Consider these constraints in turn. The first two connect declaring

that something is the case with practically taking it to be the case. For
to perform the declarative D(F, ) is, in part, for to take to have F-ed.
Indeed, it is in many ways the central function of a declarative to mark
explicitly and publicly the taking of something to be the case.4 Similarly,
entitlement to the declarative implies entitlement to the corresponding
practical attitude.
The third constraint is our notion of agent-neutrality. Since our goal is
to reproduce incompatibility and entailment relations, the crucial aspect
of agent-neutrality is that, in declaring something, we take up a stance of
rhetorical opposition to anyone who has endorsed a claim incompatible
with ours. If Rebecca would contradict herself in uttering two declara-
tives, then she and Greg have disagreed if they each assert one.
Recall that it is just these entitlement incompatibilities that Brandom
makes use of in his semantic constructions. Though an assertion, for
Brandom, is the undertaking of a justificatory commitment, the incom-
patibilities between such undertakings are not commitment incompati-
bilities. The idea of incompatibility he is working with does not preclude
asserting both that an object is red and that it is colorless. Obviously one
can assert both. It precludes, rather, the idea that one could be entitled
to both, in the sense that one could assert both with entitlement.5
The reader may wonder why our second condition above is not
strengthened to a biconditional. The answer draws once again upon the
agent-neutral nature of declaratives. When someone says something,
she places herself in a normative position of opposition to anyone who
4. Of course one can do this disingenuously. (For example, by lying.) And in this case there
is a psychological sense in which one who says that something is the case doesn’t “take it” that
it is. But what is at stake here is normative status, not psychological description. And regardless
of whether or not the action was sincere, if we take to have performed the declarative, we are
thereby ascribing to that taking.
5. Brandom himself often defines incompatibility as a normatively mixed statement: in-
compatibility of P and Q is defined as commitment to P precludes entitlement to Q. But it
is hard to see how this relation holds generally among even paradigmatically incompatible
claims. Suppose someone is looking at a red can and so asserts that the can is red. Suppose she
also has endorsed a complicated and systematic quantum theory of color, that unbeknownst to
anyone implies that no object can be red. Given this, she is also (implicitly) committed to the
claim that the can is not red. But does the latter commitment mean that she isn’t entitled to
claim that the can is red? Certainly not. It is the theory to which she isn’t entitled. So commit- S
ment to the claim that a can is not red does not (always) preclude entitlement to the claim that
it is. Thus, on Brandom’s definition, the two propositions are not incompatible. R
L
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230 Appendix
denies what she says. In representing the ideal to which declaratives

strive, we must see them as normatively universal. Entitlement to the
claim is “our” knowing, or “one’s” knowing. But we cannot assume that
such a requirement applies to all mere takings. Recall that the notion of
a taking with which we began did not depend upon the institution of
any structure of public speech acts whatsoever. Thus, there are prelin-
guistic takings that do not constitute issuances of a universal re-taking
license. So not all entitlements are ideally universal. Hence mere entitle-
ment to a taking is weaker than entitlement to a declarative.
Finally, we note that the first and third conditions imply the following
condition:
If dF z dG then e〈D(F, ), 〉 z e〈D(G, ), 〉
So the third condition above means that we have an incompatibility
role that is independent of agent, and hence amounts to the reproduc-
ible content of an act type. Since incompatibility of declaratives is invari-
ant under who is doing the declaring, we can talk simply of the declara-
tives themselves as being incompatible. This means that we can begin to
look simply at the incompatibility role of these declaratives as itself a
kind of inferential content (defining inference in the familiar ways in
terms of normative incompatibility).
And now, as promised, we can cut and paste!
That is, at this point we simply can take on board the Brandomian se-
mantic project with only minor revisions. Given incompatibility roles,
we define inferential relations. Given inferential relations, we then de-
velop substitution inferences, (de)compositionally combinable subsen-
tential content, conceptions of predicates, singular terms, logical vocab-
ulary, and quantification.6
We have shown how practice can institute linguistic meaning. But the
meaning instituted by properly constrained practice does not stop with
6. For substitution inferences, subsentential content, singular terms, predication, and logi-
cal vocabulary, see the relevant sections of Making It Explicit. For more details on the logical
structure of the formal inference relation, see Mark Lance, “The Logical Structure of Linguistic
Commitment III: Brandomian Scorekeeping and Incompatibility,” Journal of Philosophical Logic
30 (2001): 439–464; and for quantification see Lance, “Quantification, Substitution, and Con-
ceptual Content,” Nous 30 (1996): 481–507. Readers may suspect that we have only instituted
propositional contents for one-place predicates. Though we do not pursue the matter here, it is S
not hard to define relations in the terms of this Appendix. This and many other technical issues
will be pursued in a future work. R
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Appendix 231
the declarative. The advantage of the current framework is not that it re-
derives familiar semantic constructions starting a step earlier, but that it
does so from a broader context that allows a richer range of construc-
tions. Thus, for example, the structure of imperatives can be clarified
with only a small alteration on the account of declaratives. The main
change is that we do not require that incompatibility relations be agent-
neutral, either regarding entitlement to the imperative or regarding the
commitments that follow from warranted imperatives. That is,
e〈I(F, ), 〉 d cF
Though we do not pursue the issue here, the latter agent-relative com-
mitment generates, via agent-relative incompatibilities, an agent-relative
consequence relation as well, one that is quite distinct from the relation
of declaratival consequences. Thus, if Rebecca orders Greg to help the
homeless, and does so with entitlement, Greg is committed to helping
the homeless. But whereas the declarative content ‘Greg helps the home-
less’ entails that there are homeless, Rebecca’s imperative was not an or-
der that the homeless should exist, that Greg should see to it that they
do, etc. If we develop the “content” of an imperative in terms of what is
normatively licensed by the output commitment, we can expect this to
fall out quite naturally.7
Before closing, we work the analysis through one more of our prag-
matic speech act types. Consider prescriptives, which include ought-
7. The fact that we build in normative agent-relative transitional appropriatenesses from

the beginning is a huge formal advantage in developing logics of action, deontic logics, and the
like. Even Belnap, we would claim, falls prey to a version of the declarative fallacy in his STIT
work. See, for instance, Nuel Belnap, Michael Perloff, and Ming Xu, Facing the Future: Agents
and Choices in Our Indeterminist World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Though the
embedding within a temporal structure makes for a sophisticated treatment, each element of
the structure is given by the set of declarative facts true there. This has unfortunate conse-
quences in various cases. Imagine that Jones hits a deep fly ball. Smith decides to run in, realiz-
ing too late that he cannot reach the ball. Had he run out, he could have made a leaping catch
of the ball above the wall, but now it falls over the wall for a home run. Any nontheoretical
characterization of this case will hold that Jones hit a home run. But the STIT analysis holds
that he didn’t, since his act did not make it determinately true that a home run would result.
Only the corporate body of Jones and Smith hit the home run. We would diagnose this problem
as arising from an attempt to build normative attachments to particular agents out of agent-
neutral facts and causal significances of those facts. The normative individuation of action is
taken up in ways that are broadly in line with the account of this book in Chauncey Maher, S
“Counting What We Do: A Normative Functionalist Approach to Action Individuation” (Ph.D.
diss., Georgetown University, 2008). R
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232 Appendix
claims and similar deontic claims. (Since we are working at the moment
only with commitment and entitlement, the ought-claim will be our
only example of a prescriptive. If we were to introduce weaker deontic
statuses, we could characterize other prescriptives.) As we argued in
Chapter 5, prescriptives are characterized by agent-neutral inputs and
agent-relative outputs. Thus, prescriptives share the agent-relativity of
their output with imperatives. If Mark is justified in saying that Greg
ought to help the homeless, then Greg is committed to doing so, just as
with an imperative. But Mark’s entitlement to the speech act is agent-
neutral, like a declarative and unlike an imperative. This is the sense in
which one must justify an ought-claim via reason and receptivity, rather
than secure social status. Mark saying that Greg ought to do x and
Rebecca saying that Greg ought not to do x are incompatible in the typi-
cal (agent-neutral) declarative sense. More precisely:
Prescriptives
An act type P(F, ) is a prescriptive (such as saying that ought to F) if it

satisfies the following three conditions:
d〈P(F, ), 〉 d d〈cF , 〉
e〈P(F, ), 〉, d〈P(F, ), 〉 d cF
If e〈P(F, ), 〉 z e〈P(G, ), 〉 then e〈P(F, ), 〉 z e〈P(G, ), 〉

The possibility of a prescriptive act—one that draws entitlement from
the socially instituted space of giving and asking for reasons in order to
justify commitments on one or more agents—is essential to our account,
and to the idea of building genuine semantically significant normativity
from an “original image” form of interaction with the world. So far, we
have spoken as if the normative statuses undertaken by various agents in
a field of play, together with the constraints on scorecards, are simple so-
ciological facts. But if one builds semantic content out of such norma-
tive statuses, such an understanding will not do, since semantic content
must be rationally and empirically assessable. But assessing the norma-
tive statuses that institute semantic content requires the ability to distin-
guish between declarative judgments to the effect that, say, everyone S
takes it that an act is entitled, and claims that such entitlement is genu- R
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Appendix 233
ine. And it requires as well the ability to draw justification for the latter
from the space of reasons, and ultimately from the world.
We have built the idea of a prescriptive around the assumption that
entitlement to it arises in generically the same way as does entitlement
to a declarative. It is entitled agent-neutrally in virtue of moves within
the common linguistic practice—moves constrained by the agent-
neutral incompatibility and inferential significances of the practice. But
the difference between a prescriptive and a declarative is that the for-
mer does not amount to a performance that is merely attempting to
achieve entitlement to a position in inferential space, but rather it at-
tempts to place substantive commitments on others. To successfully de-
fend a claim that x ought to do y is to place a social commitment upon x.
In formal terms, we distinguish the two contents as follows:
d〈D(cF ,We), 〉
d〈P(F, ), 〉
In the first of these, we use ‘We’ to indicate a quantification over every-
one or perhaps a reference to the community as a whole. Given this, we
record the score that declares that everyone scores as committed to
doing F. The second involves prescribing that perform F. Entitlement
to the former is an agent-neutral achievement in the space of reasons, a
linguistic accomplishment, from which other declarative entitlements
can be drawn inferentially. Entitlement to the second actually places a
social onus upon .
If we combine the pragmatic category of the prescriptive with the abil-
ity to make linguistic statuses explicit, we can throw away the “agentive”
ladder of the original image. Doing so again involves borrowing from
Brandom. Once declarative and prescriptive contents are on board, the
ability to make substantive normative distinctions between agents and
non-agents should involve “merely” inferential complexity. A practice
complex enough, that is, to include both prescriptives and the semantic
resources for making explicit its own structural elements will have the
resources to claim that one is not entitled to assign commitments to
clouds, or entitlement to the sun. One justifies the agent/object and act/
event distinctions within the practice which is a particular and particu-
larly rich instance of a general framework—the Original Image—that S
fails to make such distinctions. R
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234 Appendix
We have left an enormous amount of work to do in pursuing logical

semantics from the perspective of normative pragmatics. This work is
exciting since we have given ourselves an apparently much richer set of
resources with which to account for semantic phenomena than is avail-
able to an inferentialist hampered by the declarative fallacy. But all that
is far too much to address here. For now, we content ourselves with hav-
ing shown that nothing is lost with respect to standard accounts that be-
gin with propositions—that propositional contents standing in inferen-
tial and incompatibility relations are constructible out of the resources
of normative proprieties applying to acts in general.
S
R
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‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kukla, Rebecca, 1969–

Yo! Word up!

You talkin’ to me?

1 Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse: Mapping the Terrain 1

2 Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception 42

3 The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity 66

4 Anticlimactic Interlude: Why Performatives Are Not

5 Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims 95 S

5.3 Two Alternative Accounts 113

6 Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the Pragmatics

7 The Essential Second Person 153

8 Sharing a World 179

Appendix: Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Normative

‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and

2 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

Sellarsian space of reasons is a provocatively richer and perhaps more

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 3

1.1 Varieties of Pragmatism

4 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

epistemological attention to local and contextual epistemic practices,

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 5

many—though not all—philosophers who work on formal pragmatics

6 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

in philosophy of mind and language, namely an account of the role that

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 7

only insofar as they are properly situated within a body of discursive

8 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

us on the side of Sellars and Brandom over against most theorists of

11. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 234.

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 9

tism, ironically, at least implicitly agree that embodied and discursive

10 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 11

Nuel Belnap accused traditional philosophical semantics of commit-

12 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

1.2 Two Distinctions among Normative Statuses

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 13

so forth. As already mentioned, we are not committing ourselves, here,

14 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

tempts to reduce pragmatic function to intention or convention, and we

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 15

whereby Rebecca orders, “Mark, revise this example!” The normative

16 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

agency to them, nor to plump for any particular metaphysics of striving,

Our ﬁrst key distinction among normative statuses—that between in-

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 17

ment or a commitment, we can ask whether it is in virtue of its pragmatic

18 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

personally available, even if (though) not everyone will be in a position

1.3 A Typology of Speech Acts

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 19

in box 4, and that declaratives, properly understood and restricted, al-

20 ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’

particular normative position, we perform a box-4 speech act. One way

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse 21