A “Pragmatist” Among Disputed Pragmatists: Robert Brandom's

A “Pragmatist” among Disputed Pragmatists: Robert Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism

Joseph Margolis

Robert Brandom’s book Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism does not incorporate the larger views of any of the “pragmatisms” he deliberately invokes, such as those of the classical American pragmatists, apart from an “analytic” cohort of Wittgenstein-inspired pragmatisms that he himself favors.

Robert Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing (2008) is a strenuous but rewarding book: not exactly what unguarded readers might expect but fair enough, given Brandom’s use of such terms as “pragmatic,” “pragmatics,” “analytic pragmatism.” Brandom does not attempt to extend, here, the innovations of classic American pragmatism or the mode of analysis of figures like Dewey or the later Wittgenstein or Kuhn – or Hegel, for that matter – all of whom he reads as “pragmatists” of a sort congenial to his intended contribution to formal semantics (familiar from the work of Frege, Tarski, Sellars, Kripke, David Lewis and others) extended (here) by attention to the “pragmatics” or “the proprieties [of the] use [of linguistic expressions beyond what counts as the analysis of] the “meanings of expressions” (p. xii). Brandom does indeed name the enlarged account “analytic pragmatism”; but thus far at least, the picture sketched does not incorporate (in any easily legible way) the larger views of any of the “pragmatisms” he deliberately invokes (apart from the “analytic” cohort he himself favors). His “pragmatism is,” as he says, “inspired [italics added] by ... the later Wittgenstein, who situates concern with the meanings of expressions in the broader context of concern with proprieties governing their use” (p. xii). I think this is quite precisely put. Brandom explains throughout the book the sense in which he pursues his own innovations by co-opting lessons (like this one) from the “history of philosophy” (embracing Hegel, Wittgenstein, the pragmatists, Heidegger, and similar figures – very unlikely advisors to any strictly formalist cause) along the lines of mitigating, by exploring the prospects of an inferentialist modeling of “use” (as Brandom understands use) ranging over vocabularies (intentional, 184 JOSEPH MARGOLIS deontic, also holistic, historicized, embedded in habituated practice) that classical formal semantics usually ignores. There is, I think, a deeply equivocal cast to Brandom’s “pragmatist” project, which Brandom cannot (as yet) completely dispel. You can feel it in the following opening lines of the book:

Pursuing those pragmatist ideas [regarding the linkage between meaning and use just mentioned] in an analytic spirit is rejecting the anti- theoretical and anti-systematic conclusions that are often drawn from them. Instead, we can, the claim is, think about the relations between meaning and use every bit as rigorously and systematically as it has proven possible to think about the sorts of relations between meanings that are codified and explored in classical formal semantics, for instance as developed within the dominant Tarskian model-theoretic and possible worlds frameworks. (p. xii)

This is too sanguine, given what Brandom has actually produced; or it’s too lax, given what formal semantics claims to have accomplished apart from Brandom’s own proposal. “Classical formal semantics” tends to regard its own analyses as capturing, literally or by a needed idealization – assuming the inherent logical imperfections of ordinary discourse: a thesis Wittgenstein excoriates, having Frege in mind – the formal structure of natural-language discourse. It would regard its efforts as a failure if its formal model served essentially to help us “think about,” understand – by heuristic application, in inferentialist terms, what regarding its pragmatist features cannot, on the evidence, actually be expected to yield to any literal algorithmic modeling. Brandom acknowledges that it’s too early to promise to deliver on any undertaking of the first sort; and skeptics will say that we understand well enough the semantic and pragmatic (and inferential) subtleties of ordinary discourse precisely by way of contrasting what the champions of formal semantics advocate and what an understanding of ordinary language requires: notably, an analysis of the holist, contextual, societally embedded, historicized, tacit, profoundly informal, improvisational, consensually tolerated, and practically effective forms of discourse. But I find it more than unlikely that Brandom would be satisfied with the verdict that his conception was hardly more than a heuristic prop catering to the interests of a stubborn cohort of skillful specialists who are committed nevertheless to a project that was probably impossible. You grasp the point of my mentioning the difference if you acknowledge that Brandom does not explore, say, the details of Wittgenstein’s sense of what he means by replacing “meaning” with “use” or the counterpart proposals of figures like Dewey or Peirce or Hegel or Heidegger or Gadamer or Derrida – to collect a pertinent “motley.” It would be a mistake to suppose that Brandom’s