ABSTRACT
Jeremy Wanderer’s clear and constructive paper shows that focusing on challenges is indeed a useful tool for thinking about a variety of pragmatic issues that in Making It Explicit I did not pursue as far as he has here. Two ideas that prove particularly helpful are the distinction between speech acts that are targeted (in that they in a distinctive way alter the normative statuses of some who might overhear them) and those that are addressed (in that the reciprocal acknowledgement of the address is an essential part of its being the act that it is). I accept his argument that challenging must be understood as being second-personally addressed, in order for it to play the role it is envisaged as playing in the practice of giving and asking for reasons described in MIE. So understanding it acknowledges a crucial second-person dimension to the model that both helps to vindicate the motivating rhetoric that contrasts its “I-thou” conception of sociality1 with traditional “I-we” conceptions and offers a satisfying response to some of Habermas’s worries on this score. More generally, I think the conception of the second person that emerges from Wanderer’s discussion (contrasting as it does with the one Habermas is working with) is worthy of further exploration in its own right, quite apart from the good it does when recruited to address these technical issues inside the system of MIE.
