Meaning, Dispositions and Supervenience

In this paper I raise some doubts about Brandom’s pragmatic strategy of explanation of norms. I argue that Brandom’s attempt to explain normative statuses through recourse to normative attitudes does not succeed in preserving a hiatus between norms and regularities of behaviour. Since calibrating one’s own behaviour as a consequence of normative assessments can be described, at least in principle, in non-normative vocabulary, the upshot of Brandom’s pragmatism about norms is an account of normative phenomena—and especially of semantic phenomena—that does not require reference to normative notions.