  Hegel’s famous idea that we gain self-consciousness only through a process of mutual recognition (see 1.1 above) has been taken up by some neo-Hegelian philosophers of mind. They make the socio-ontological claim that the world is always cooperatively (re)constructed by human agents (see Pinkard 1994, Pippin 2008, also the contributions in Ikäheimo/Laitinen 2011). Only mutual recognition that grants others the status of an epistemic authority allows us to construct a normative space of reasons: I know that the truth of my judgment depends on you being able to share it (Brandom 1994). Thus, such accounts try to explain how reason can enter the world in the first place—and therefore this kind of elementary recognition does not seem to depend on values or norms but rather be a source thereof. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas similarly developed their respective variants of discourse ethics stressing that the proper use of language already presupposes a certain form of recognition of all other speakers as equally authoritative (see on both Habermas 1991, ch. 2, for a critique of this argument Wellmer 1986, 108–111, for a good introduction Baynes 2015). However, human beings never create their world or the reasons they use from scratch. Rather, they are embedded in holistic webs of meanings which they jointly reproduce (and may hereby also redo). Theories of recognition hereby provide the ground for a critique of atomistic views of subjectivity (especially in Taylor 1989, part I).