In my contribution I want to describe a notion of autonomy in social terms namely in
discursive practices. I already presented autonomy as grounded on the Sellarsian
“metaphor” of the game of giving and asking for reasons reinterpreted by Robert Brandom.
The model was centered mostly on practices of justification starting from an inferentialist
view of the propositional content. However, I think that together with speech acts in
ordinary language we must provide a description of the role of prelinguistic practices for
autonomy. This further step is implied by the fact that it is important to clarify the
dimension of “readiness” to give or ask for reasons on which Swindler rightly insists in his
Introduction to my book Autonomy. A Matter of Content. Autonomy develops in a language
game that is connected with cooperation. The language game I want to point out is similar
to the functional approach of Wittgenstein but starts from a Fregean perspective and takes
into consideration neurobiological processes which bridge the gap between brain and world
and represent the “motor” of our activity in the world.
