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According to a standard criticism, Robert Brandom's “normative pragmatics”, i.e. his attempt to explain normative statuses in terms of practical attitudes, faces a dilemma. If practical attitudes and their interactions are specified in purely non‐normative terms, then they underdetermine normative statuses; but if normative terms are allowed into the account, then the account becomes viciously circular. This paper argues that there is no dilemma, because the feared circularity is not vicious. While normative claims do exhibit their respective authors' practical attitudes and thereby contribute towards establishing the normative statuses they are about, this circularity is not a mark of Brandom's explanatory strategy but a feature of social practice of which we theorists partake.

The question whether a constitutive linguistic norm can be prescriptive is central to the debate on the normativity of meaning. Recently, the author has attempted to defend an affirmative answer, pointing to how speakers sporadically invoke constitutive linguistic norms in the service of linguistic calibration. Such invocations are clearly prescriptive. However, they are only appropriate if the invoked norms are applicable to the addressed speaker. But that can only be the case if the speaker herself generally accepts them. This qualification has led critics to argue that if an addressed speaker's acceptance is a necessary condition for legitimate prescriptions (and reproach for failure to adhere to them), then the account becomes unable to underwrite actual normativity. Moreover, critics argue, a danger of vicious circularity arises from the calibration account. This paper shows that once a vantage point within the calibration practice is accepted, the criticisms lose their force. It then explores why a theorist might reject such a perspective and suggests, as a plausible candidate, implicit Humean assumptions about the proper explanation of (linguistic) action. The paper ends by sketching a way forward for the debate on the normativity of meaning in light of this diagnosis.

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