Normativity in Languaging and Practical Activity

Abstract The paper explores some of the commonalities between language and practical activity. It focuses on the normativity involved and presents an account on two different kinds of normativity which constrain both languaging and practical doings in general. In this connection, the paper engages with the first-order—second-order distinction central to the Distributed Language Perspective and shows that there is a way for proponents of this perspective to come to terms with linguistic normativity without presupposing a dualism between, on the one hand, first-order articulations and, on the other, the second-order normative constrains that condition them.