["Sociology Lens, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study is concerned with the notion of “grammar” as it was developed at the core of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's pragmatic sociology. This notion is particularly useful for articulating the normative elements that motivate and justify social action. But a specific case—that of the civil disobedience—has led us to identify an epistemological difficulty that this paradigm cannot successfully resolve in its current state. This case raises a broader question: how can we understand the fact that the common goods invoked by actors to justify their actions do not always correspond to the characteristics of the actions that sociologists are able to observe? To achieve this resolution, and thus, to reverse our fieldwork out of the theoretical impasse into which pragmatic sociology risks driving it, we suggest that the paradigm's concept of grammar should be modified by drawing on Noam Chomsky's concept of generative grammar and Ludwig Wittgenstein's reflections on rules and language games.\n"]