When discussing normative reasons, oughts, requirements of rationality, motivating reasons, and so on, we often have to use verbs like believe and want to capture a relevant subject's perspective. According to the received view about sentences involving these verbs, what they do is describe the subject's mental states. Many puzzles concerning normative discourse have to do with the role that mental states consequently appear to play in normative discourse. Tim Henning uses tools from semantics and the philosophy of language to develop an alternative account of sentences involving these verbs. According to this view, which is called parentheticalism, we very commonly use these verbs in a parenthetical sense. These verbs themselves express backgrounded side-remarks on the contents they embed, and these latter, embedded contents constitute the at-issue contents. This means that instead of speaking about the subject's mental states, we often use sentences involving believe and