ABSTRACT
Normative inferentialists from Sellars to Brandom and Peregrin develop a sophisticated logical and semantic apparatus to serve a broader social-rationalist vision. They treat the human world of meaning and understanding as a social space of mutual recognition among concept-users. Speakers are rational agents who track and respond to interactively instituted commitments and entitlements. The resulting "space of reasons" is the net outcome of many local discursive performances and assessments. That space is first and foremost a social space. It is also world-involving, through the discursive significance of reliable perception and action. The motivating telos of their versions of inferentialism is a maximally inclusive community of rational speakers and agents, whose performances are accountable to a common world in being rationally answerable to one another. Language, equipmental complexes, images, and other expressive practices are publicly accessible elements of normal human developmental environments. Scientific understanding of nature is neither an alien appendage to human life nor a "mere" social or cultural construction.
