“Being a pragmatic metavocabulary is the simplest species of the genus I want to introduce here. It is a pragmatically mediated semantic relation between vocabularies. It is pragmatically mediated by the practices-or-abilities that are specified by one of the vocabularies (which say what counts as doing that) and that deploy or are the use of the other vocabulary (what one says by doing that). The semantic relation that is established thereby between the two vocabularies is of a distinctive sort, quite different from, for instance, definability, translatability, reducibility, and supervenience. My basic suggestion for extending the classical project of analysis so as to incorporate as essential positive elements the insights that animate the pragmatist critique of that project is that, alongside the classical semantic relations between vocabularies that project has traditionally appealed to, we consider also pragmatically mediated ones—of which the relation of being a pragmatic metavocabulary is a paradigm. I will introduce an apparatus that recursively generates an infinite set of such pragmatically mediated semantic relations. In fact, I will eventually argue that unless we take steps along these lines, we cannot properly understand the expressive roles played by some of the kinds of vocabulary with which the analytic tradition has been most centrally concerned: logical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabularies.”
— Robert B. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism