Rationality and the variety of language games

One of the most striking clashes between the results of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on language games and Robert Brandom’s normative analysis of pragmatics concerns the pride of place granted by the latter to assertional practices. While Wittgenstein believes that there is no privileged language game, Brandom maintains that the game of giving and asking for reasons is fundamental for the possibility of any linguistic practice to be properly meaningful. Recently, Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance proposed to generalize Brandom’s normative pragmatics in order to provide a more fine–grained analysis of the normativity that governs discursive practices. It is a courageous enterprise that challenges the predominance of the cognitive approach in pragmatics by underpinning a different way to understand the notion of meaning. Their proposal, however, requires to take into account many different sorts of speech acts on a par and, by doing so, it is in tension with Brandom’s approach. This paper explores the shape of this tension in order to see whether or not a unitary characterization of rationality can be envisaged in Wittgenstein’s and Brandom’s way of accounting for the ability to deploy conceptual contents in linguistic practices.