Current anxiety about the future of news makes it opportune to revisit the notion of professionalism in journalism. Media expert Silvio Waisbord takes this pressing issue as his theme and argues that “professional journalism” is both a normative and analytical notion. It refers to reporting that observes certain ethical standards as well as to collective efforts by journalists to exercise control over the news. Professionalism should not be narrowly associated with the normative ideal as it historically developed in the West during the past century.

Can normative words like "good," "ought," and "reason" be defined in entirely non-normative terms? Confusion of Tongues argues that they can, advancing a new End-Relational theory of the meaning of this language as providing the best explanation of the many different ways it is ordinarily used. Philosophers widely maintain that analyzing normative language as describing facts about relations cannot account for special features of particularly moral and deliberative uses of normative language, but Stephen Finlay argues that the End-Relational theory systematically explains these on the basis of a single fundamental principle of conversational pragmatics.

In Critique and Disclosure, Nikolas Kompridis argues provocatively for a richer and more time-responsive critical theory. He calls for a shift in the normative and critical emphasis of critical theory from the narrow concern with rules and procedures of Jürgen Habermas's model to a change-enabling disclosure of possibility and the enlargement of meaning.

What is the function of concepts pertaining to meaning in sociolinguistic practice? In this study, the authors argue that we can approach a satisfactory answer by displacing the standard picture of meaning talk as a sort of description with picture that takes seriously the similarity between meaning talk and various types of normative injunction. In their discussion of this approach, they investigate the more general question of the nature of the normative, as well as a range of important topics specific to the philosophy of language, including the work of Quine, Sellars and Wittgenstein.