ABSTRACT
Robert Brandom grounds normative statuses in normative attitudes: being right or wrong in whatever one says is explained (in part) by our community to avoid mysterianism about the norms governing linguistic activity. Normative attitudes are instituted via training regimens involving positive and negative reinforcement schedules, or what the peoples might call flocktending and stickbeating. Human children engage in norm-governed shared intentional activity from an early age, and it appears that shared intentionality emerges ontogenetically prior to the emergence of norm-enforcing. More complex forms of shared intentionality with conventional fact-creation emerge from the end of the second year, in particular, in form of joint pretense and other games. From this time on, children also show the first signs of actively tracking and enforcing the socially constituted norms of such practices. Butterfill argues that a philosophical appropriation of the motor representations that underlie shared action can be used to model shared intentionality in a way that avoids the requirement for higher-order intentions.
