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This treatment of linguistic meaning as radically normative is insightful, and will play a role in our later discussion. Even more interesting for our present project, however, is Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s discussion of praxis. This occurs in the course of their argument in favor of their “Constitution view” of translation against its two rivals, the Transcendental view and the “Traditional” view. The ultimate purpose of this analysis is to show that meaning is not simply or even primarily a matter either of conforming to a transcendental pattern or of merely maintaining a traditional pattern. To illuminate their point Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne discuss the normative developments in American professional basketball usually known as “The Chamberlain Rules.” In essence, the player Wilt Chamberlain was so unusually talented that he radically disrupted the prior structure of the game of basketball. In order to maintain the integrity of the game the league elected to ban various actions that no one prior to Chamberlain had attempted, at least regularly, including goal-tending and jumping from the free throw line on free throws to dunk the ball. The authors contend that this action on the part of the NBA cannot be appropriately explained by appeal either to some sort of Platonic form of basketball or to mere past practice. Instead, in order to continue the game of basketball, the officials changed from past practice in order to maintain something more closely like past practice, legislating a “translation” between the pre- and post-Chamberlain games.

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Mark Lance and his co-author John O’Leary-Hawthorne further develop a Pittsburgh Hegelian account of the relationship between language, praxis, and meaning in their The Grammar of Meaning. Through most of this book the authors focus even more on language rather than on linguistic praxis or praxis as such than do Sellars and Brandom, yet ultimately they provide the most elaborate and intriguing analysis of praxis of the three sources. Agreeing with and providing new emphasis to the central Sellarsian contention that meaning is normative, Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne treat meaning claims — that is, claims about what some bit of language means — as more closely related to ethical and political judgments than to statements of fact made in one of the natural sciences. They go so far as to say that in proposing a translation, one effectively licenses a sort of constitution designed to bind two linguistic communities together. The force of such a declaration is, the authors contend, inherently one of “should” (this word should mean that) rather than of “is” (this word does mean that).