ABSTRACT
Every conceptual framework necessarily has a prescriptive or normative dimension. Indeed, conceptual frameworks are essentially and principally normative in their being, for a conceptual framework is constituted by the valid inferences, both formal and material, and by the proprieties of response and behaviour that are licensed by it. Thus, the scientific framework itself is practically real, for there are objectively true prescriptions or rules with respect to it. Practical reality is a matter of the truth of prescriptive and normative claims, and that, in turn, is a matter of recognized, intersubjectively held, intersubjectively applicable, shared intentions. The objects of the scientific image are practically ideal. Neither Kant nor Wilfrid Sellars uses this notion of the practically real, but it is a revealing concept to add to their arsenals. For Sellars, both the manifest framework and the scientific framework are transcendentally ideal and empirically real, although, again, we need commentary to keep these claims from being terribly misleading.
