Haven't figured yet, but my tendency is to think about it as the normative structures that implicitly regulate our behavior. In the vein of Lacan's dictum, 'the unconscious is structured like a language', but from a Brandomian perspective.

Absolutely. My point is that sometimes levels of analysis are confused. If we talk about non-linguistic creatures, ecological psychology allows explanations of these phenomena without appeal to propositional content. Anscombe and Ryle develop good non-factualist accounts of intention or action in which patterns of behavior can be explained intentionally (for example, as a behavior caused by fear), but understanding the intentional idiom as a discursive ticket that permits a better scale of explanation, rather than assuming there's an entity-like fact under some category (emotions for example).

The problem I see there is assuming that empathy requires prepositional attitudes. Not that once you engage in linguistic practices it doesn't acquire conceptual content, but I think that the cognitive/perceptual basis of empathy doesn't need propositional content. In eco psych terms it can be analyzed through the sharing of attention and intention, and in sociocognitive terms with some forms of mindshaping that doesn't necessarily require prepositional attitudes.

I'm on that side. Being anti-representationalist, I don't think we can ascribe propositional attitudes/content without the capacity to develop linguistic practices. Highly recommenf Zawidzki's book on it.

Which makes even more sense if you understand mindreading as a linguistic byproduct of mindshaping practices.