 Hart claimed that a legal system is a system of power-conferring and duty-imposing rules, which are validated by a ‘rule of recognition’. That rule is not made valid by another rule; it is a ‘social rule’. In explaining that crucial notion of a social rule, Hart turned to the use of words to explain the normativity of law. He claimed that a social rule is a regular pattern of conduct accompanied by a ‘distinctive normative attitude’, which ‘consists in the standing disposition of individuals to take such patterns of conduct both as guides to their own future conduct and as standards of criticism’ (Hart, 2012, 255). In accounting for that disposition, or ‘internal attitude’, Hart’s emphasis was on speech acts—on the use that participants in the practice make of normative language.