SYMPOSIUM Who gets to play recognitional tag? Terry Pinkard Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA Correspondence Terry Pinkard, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA. Email: terry.pinkard@georgetown.edu Abstract With regard to the sociality of agency and the role that second-person address plays, I propose to contrast and develop (1) a Fichtean-Darwallian account that seems to tie agency to mutual recognition but tacitly presupposes a more fundamental agency independent of it that enables us to enter the circle of recognition. (2) A Brandomian account that although initially proposing a more robustly social account of agency, ultimately remains entrapped in a game of mirrors. (3) Hegel's own approach recasts the issue by giving up the idea that the sociality of agency can be under- stood in terms of what I call a game of recognitional tag. Instead, we are inhabiting a practice that involves a social struggle about the very form of this practice, and it is this that Hegel has termed a “struggle for recognition.” Hegel's concept of the struggle for recognition has long had resonance and for obvious reasons. It suggests that what we think of as moral and social claims and obligations on us not only have a logic to them—an idea, which has especially attracted philosophers of the modern period—but also a social and political dimension that may or may not be subject to a more traditional rational reconstruction. Hegel's concept has, for all that, also has lacked resonance. Even the most cur- sory inspection of mainstream Anglophone literature on moral philosophy shows that Hegel's concept of struggles for recognition has until recently been left virtually unmentioned, except for the literature itself directly concerned with Hegel's ethical thought. However, the Hegelian struggle for recognition has more recently come back into its own as more interest has grown in the social dimensions of agency, fueled in large part by the emergence of, among many other things, feminism and critical race theory in even the most “mainstream” of departments. The idea of the “sociality” of practical self-consciousness can be taken in an anodyne or more robust sense. In its anodyne sense, it just means that what we determinately are as self-conscious agents is due to our upbringing, our language, and the mores and traditions of the societies into which we are born and grow up. In its more robust sense, it is a more or less metaphysical thesis that our status as individual subjects is itself a social status, like that of statesman or postman, and that all conceptions, which abstract away from this are to that extent either false or par- tial abstractions out of a more fundamental truth. Becoming an agent on the part of a human organism is an achieve- ment requiring recognition by others. You are not born a statesman or even an agent. You have to become one, and you cannot become one without being recognized by others as being one. Received: 13 December 2019 Accepted: 26 May 2020 DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12673 Eur J Philos. 2021;1–11. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ejop © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1