Many philosophers working today on the normativity of language have concluded that linguistic activity is not a matter of rule-following. These conversations have been framed by a conception of linguistic normativity with roots in Wittgenstein and Kripke, however, and in this chapter, I use conceptual resources developed by the classical American pragmatists and their descendants to argue that punctate linguistic acts are governed by rules in a sense that has been neglected in the literature. In doing so, I show that this work draws on themes from German idealism discussed in the Introduction. I also argue that, in order to account for the development and propagation of (proto-) linguistic norms within hominid communities, our ancestors’ capacity for shared practical picturing – discussed in chapter 2 as a physiological basis for shared intentionality – gave rise to a capacity for deontic picturing, which involves the exercise of affective and reactive evaluative attitudes across different points of view within a community. In closing out part 1 of the book, chapter 3 thereby both clears the ground for using the ability to speak a rule-governed language as a basis for constructing an account of discursive cognition – beginning in chapter 4 ’s formal semantics for the deontic modalities – and reinforces my claim that this project has its roots in American appropriations of German idealism directed at making naturalistic sense of our existence as norm-governed rational animals.