In this article I offer a brief sketch of the traditional view about normative terms as expressing deontic modalities and the standard possible-worlds semantics for conditional norms, confronting the first with some possible objection. I then compare the “modality” conception of normativity with Robert Brandom’s inferentialist conception of the logical function of deontic and practical vocabulary, showing how it falls short of accounting the combination of normativity and conditionality.
