The article attempts to clarify the main issues underlying the debate between Richard
Rorty and Hilary Putnam, with a view to showing how it is possible to see emerging from
it a viable anti-foundationalist conception of normativity capable to eschew the corrosive
pitfalls of radical scepticism and relativism. It is argued that this conception is centred on
three key distinctions: between a physical and grammatical sense of the impossibility of
foundationalism; between a view of the universalistic aspirations of normativity as
grounds for our normative judgments as opposed to their scope; and between a view of the
transcendent aspirations of normativity as self-transcendence as opposed to self-reflexivity.
