I think you may have in mind the problem of reconciling subject's productive role in the acquisition of knowledge, recognized since Kant, with having an input from reality to it. McDowell called reality's contribution to knowledge its "objective purport" in his book Mind and World, which instigated the wide-ranging current debate on the issue. See also collection of essays Reading McDowell, two chapters on him in Pippin's Persistence of Subjectivity, and Sachs's Ideology of Modernity and the Myth of the Given). McDowell frames the existing approaches as a philosophical oscillation between the Myth of the Given and "frictionless spinning in the void", the self-legislated Hegelian coherentism (although his coherentist protagonist is Davidson rather than Hegel).
The Myth of the Given is the traditional belief that the mind "receives" sense impressions (possibly also intellectual intuitions) from the "outside", and they then serve as the basis for more complex concepts and inferences. This belief turned out to be problematic for several reasons. First, to enter inferences impressions/intuitions would have to be judgements, which they are not (the difference between seeing red x and seeing x as red). Second, it is implausible that we have to learn the "impressions" of red or pain, while the colloquial use of "red" and "pain" is most certainly learned. And finally, mastering a concept requires mastering a web of other concepts, that relate to it, and such relating can not be grounded in atomic encounters with "impressions".
In short, the reality simply can not perform the conceptual delivery services that the Myth of the Given asks of it, the conceptualized "objective reality" is a historical and developmental artifact, and one that developed holistically, not piece by piece. This does not mean that we can not or should not use these conceptualizations, indeed we can not do otherwise, but it does mean that we can not have a fundamental epistemological account that posits them, we have to perform a "phenomenological reduction", to use Husserl's term. This applies to objectifying conceptualizations of the community, the "public world", as well. Although the above critique of "immediately given" can be traced to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (§§ 90-110), in the analytic philosophy its import came to be broadly accepted only after Sellars's classic, Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind.
But rejecting the Myth leads to an opposite conundrum: if impressions can not enter propositions of knowledge what possible role can the reality play in its generation? According to Davidson's coherentism, a remote descendant of Hegel's self-legislation, concepts can rationally relate only to other concepts, see Can Perceptions Justify Beliefs? by Atkins, who also discusses "Peirce’s prescient reply" to Davidson. The relation between concepts and reality is purely causal, reality simply causes us to have the concepts we have. There can be no reasoning from sensibility to understanding, the rational aspect only enters in maintaining the overall coherence of the conceptual web. This is what McDowell terms "frictionless spinning in the void", which leads to philosophical recoil back into the Myth of the Given, restarting the oscillation.
The general approach in pragmatism is to diagnose the root cause of the Myth of the Given as the representational theory of meaning, and to replace it with an instrumentalist one. There the basic notions are actional rather than representational: Peirce's "habit", the "ultimate interpretant", Ryle's knowledge-how, Wittgenstein's "custom" and "rule-following", etc. Then it becomes intelligible how reality can act as a constraint on our spontaneous productions without there being any reality intake, in the spirit of impressions and givens. Our actions, individual or social, meet a pushback, which leads to us adjusting them (Peirce called it "insistency of the real"). In the special case of sense perception this process is so routine (in routine situations) that we conflate self-generated but multiply adjusted conceptual reports (which are seen more fundamentally as truncated action templates) with "impressions" that accompany them.
There are variations in emphasis concerning action and adjustment, from more individualist Kantian versions, like McDowell's, to more social Hegelian ones, like Brandoms's. But even McDowell does not assign cognitive autonomy to a single individual (as perhaps Kant did), social norms and customs still exert their influence as internalized "second nature" (the term he borrows from Aristotle). An individual conceptual web would face serious "private language" problems. In the end one could say with Hegel that the "self-legislating" spirit is social, and while it "being itself only as it comes to itself as such a product of itself", it is not as a sole result of itself.
