Abstract

Jaroslav Peregrin’s project in Normative Species: How Naturalized Inferentialism Explains Us is to provide an account of the emergence of normativity. He takes the project to be essential for understanding the kind of creatures we are, namely, normative creatures whose lives are governed by rules. My focus in this response is on linguistic meaning, and on the kind of explanation of language that Peregrin puts forward. While I agree that meaning depends on the intersection of many cognitions, I have doubts about some aspects of Peregrin’s conception of this intersection.