Since Rawl’s A theory of justice, political philosophy has been haunted by the moral and
epistemic problem of justification. The growing awareness of the irreducibility of human
disagreement has increased a sense of uneasiness towards the ambivalence of pluralism (a
requirement for the flourishing of individuals and a constant source of conflict) that, in
turn, has fostered the hope that rationality, in its public use, could help us in grounding
the social order on more stable basis. Although Stanley Cavell is not usually considered a
significant participant in this debate, through his work he has developed an original and
strong interpretation of the nature of justification and rationality. Cavell’s search for a
new conception of rationality starts from an analysis of the rationality immanent to the
use of ordinary language. This model of explanation, whose origins are to be found in the
teaching of Wittgenstein and Austin, is then extended and articulated through an analysis
of aesthetic judgment. This vantage point is successively used by Cavell in order to redefine
the epistemological categories of political and moral philosophy. Cavell’s moral
and political philosophy is based on an original account of practical rationality and justification
built over the concepts of claim, articulation and expression. As Cavell himself has
never offered a complete account of his theory of rationality, in this paper I provide a
wide reconstruction of the linguistic, aesthetic and moral steps through which this theory
has been developed
