ABSTRACT
In Being and Time Heidegger grants a certain kind of ontological priority to the being of equipment over the being of "objects that are merely present and of their matter-of-factual, nonnormative properties". Normative pragmatism is the position that results from turning the philosophical tradition upside down by asserting that a certain kind of norm is in some sense more basic than facts, and that implicit proprieties of practice are in a certain sense more basic than action informed by appeal to explicit rules: Heidegger treats as primitive a certain kind of social normative articulation and seeks to define the factual as a special case picked out by subtracting something, namely, kinds of relations to human projects. As Brandom articulates the disagreement between us, it has to do with the autonomy of a certain level of intentionality. The layer cake metaphor is appropriate for Brandom's opponents because they read Heidegger's priority theses as asymmetrical, while Brandom takes them to be symmetrical.
