Commentary on Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit (1994) characterizes the book as a milestone in theoretical philosophy for its successful execution of an innovative program in the philosophy of language that combines formal pragmatics with inferential semantics & furnishes the Kantian view of the mind with a new pragmatic vocabulary. Brandom's central train of thought is critically reconstructed by expounding his question of why utterance content may be objectively valid & his answer, in which an anaphoric manner of speaking complements a treatment of actions & perceptions as transits of the boundaries of discourse. Brandom's nonnaturalist explanatory strategy is argued to force a background assumption of conceptual realism that makes his surprisingly objectivist view of discourse comprehensible but ultimately undermines his discourse-theoretic analysis of linguistic content. By assimilating norms to facts, Brandom's conceptual realism has problematic consequences for his deontological understanding of morality. 23 References. Adapted from the source document.