DOCSLIB.ORG

Truth and Assertibility Author(S): Robert Brandom Source: the Journal of Philosophy, Vol

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Truth and Assertibility Author(S): Robert Brandom Source: the Journal of Philosophy, Vol Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Truth and Assertibility Author(s): Robert Brandom Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 6 (Mar. 25, 1976), pp. 137-149 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2025885 Accessed: 19-11-2016 14:30 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms - -__ _ 4- i I - 4 _ _ ITHE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME LXXIII, NO. 6, MARCH 25, 1976 TRUTH AND ASSERTIBILITY * T HE question I will try to answer in this paper is: What role should the study of the truth conditions of sentences play in our attempt to understand the phenomenon of language? In contemporary philosophy of language there are two major opposing schools of thought on this issue. On the one hand, a tradition influenced by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein of the Tracta- tus, Tarski, and Carnap takes truth to be the basic concept in terms of which a theory of meaning, and hence a theory of lan- guage, is to be developed. According to this view, the essential feature of language is its capacity to represent the way things are. Understanding this function in detail is thus a matter of describing the conditions under which particular sentences truly represent the way things are. Formal semantics, the study of the truth conditions of sentences of various sorts of discourse, is the natural expression of this point of view. On the other hand, there is an approach to language, shared by Dewey and the later Wittgenstein, which attributes little or no importance to the notion of truth. According to this view, language is best thought of as a set of social practices. In order to understand how language works, we must attend to the uses to which its sentences are put and the circumstances in which they are used. Dewey claimed that everything useful that could be said about language with the notion of truth could also be said with a more general and methodologically unproblematic notion of justified utterance or "warranted assertibility." He argued further that the notion of truth should be discarded, since, insofar as it cannot be so reconstructed, its use in a theory of language leads to confusions and pointless unanswerable questions., One of the * I would like to thank Richard Rorty, David Lewis, and Bruce Kuklick for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. X John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, 1938); see especially chs. 1, 6, and 25. See also Dewey's response to Russell in P. A. Schilpp, ed., Philosophy of John Dewey (New York: Tudor, 1951). I37 This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms I38 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY striking features of Wittgenstein's mature thought is the replace- ment of his earlier question "What are the facts?" by the question "What are we entitled to say?" The notion of truth plays no role whatsoever in his comments on language-use (it is mentioned only in passing in the Investigations, by way of criticizing his earlier views).2 I It is not immediately obvious why stressing the kinship of language- use to other social practices should lead to the de-emphasis of the notion of truth; so let us look a little more closely at the sort of picture with which this approach presents us. The use of a par- ticular language by a population consists in the conformity of that population to a great many regularities. There are regularities involving pronunciation, the form of utterances, the physical and social circumstances of utterance, responses to utterances, and so on. The object of a theory of that language is the characteriza- tion and explanation of those regularities conformity to which is a criterion of membership in the linguistic community. We want, among other things, to associate with each sentence of the language a set-the assertibility conditions of that sentence-which deter- mines the regularities of usage a speaker must conform to for a given sentence. (The elements of the sets associated with sentences might be patterns of retinal irradiations, possible worlds, or sets of beliefs of the speaker; for my present purposes we can abstract from the question of what sorts of elements to choose.) Now it is clear that no regularity of appropriate utterance which a speaker learns to conform to and which is reconstructed by a hypothetical theory of assertibility conditions for a language can amount to requiring that all utterances be true, for that would make infallibil- ity a prerequisite for learning the language. It is thus clear that many of the utterances of any population will be, as we should say, assertible but not true, or true but not assertible. But-to return to the question raised above in connection with Dewey and Wittgenstein-what is the significance of this observa- tion for understanding the language studied? Presumably some of the utterances are guttural or nine-worded or spoken in the sun and not assertible, or are assertible and not guttural, nine-worded, 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1958), pp. 67-68; Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), part I, secs. 22, 23; see also secs. 136, 137 for the only use of truth. This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms TRUTH AND ASSERTIBILITY I39 or spoken in the sun. Why should the notion of truth be more important to the theory of this language than these other notions? Of course we can describe the linguistic behavior in terms of truth if we like, but the redundancy characteristics of our truth predicate assure us that we can involve that notion in any description we like, even where nothing like language is being discussed. We want to know what work is to be done by that notion. Notice that it is of no particular use to point out that in some language being studied not all warranted assertions of the presence of a deer result in veni- son dinners (even when nothing concrete goes wrong with the hunt, such as a badly thrown spear). For this is just to say that even if all members of the group are on their best behavior, each intending to conform to all the traditional regularities of linguistic conduct, asserting things only when appropriate and always responding ap- propriately, and even if everyone succeeds in these intentions, some- times things go well and sometimes not so well. And this is surely true of their other social practices of child-rearing, planting, and propitiating the gods as well. If no notion of truth is required to explain the occasional and otherwise random failures of a certain generally successful child-rearing practice, what is it about the lin- guistic practices which does enforce this notion? Approaching language primarily as a social practice or "form of life" thus presents a challenge to anyone who thinks that truth and the truth conditions studied by semantics ought to play a central role in our account of language. In the rest of this paper I will de- velop a precise sense in which the representationalist's concern with truth conditions can be generated within the project of the asserti- bility theorists. II Two recent authors who have recognized the challenge presented by the two points of view we have outlined, and have made explicit attempts to reconcile them are Wilfrid Sellars 8 and David Lewis.4 I will not draw upon their efforts here, though the resolution I will propose is similar in some respects to each of their proposals. The suggestion I will develop as to the proper role of truth in explain- ing language-use is that of Michael Dummett 5: a Science and Metaphysics (New York: Humanities, 1968), chs. 4 and 5. 4 "Languages and Language," forthcoming in the Minnesota Studies; also his Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1969), ch. 5, sec. 4. I believe that the view Lewis puts forward is, with minor changes, compatible with the more detailed position developed in this essay. 5 Frege: Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 451. This content downloaded from 132.174.255.116 on Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms I40 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY ... the notion of truth is born in the first place out of less specific modes of commendation of an assertoric utterance, from the necessity to distinguish between it and the epistemic notion of justifiability; and this necessity is in turn imposed by the requirements for under- standing certain kinds of compound sentence (451). "Epistemic justifiability" is a part of what we have called the "as- sertibility conditions" of an utterance. Dummett offers an example: If future-tense sentences could not come within the scope of sentential operators, there would be no place for such a distinction between justification and truth.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Mind Body Problem and Brandom's Analytic Pragmatism
    The Mind-Body Problem and Brandom’s Analytic Pragmatism François-Igor Pris [email protected] Erfurt University (Nordhäuserstraße 63, 99089 Erfurt, Germany) Abstract. I propose to solve the hard problem in the philosophy of mind by means of Brandom‟s notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation. The explanatory gap between a phenomenal concept and the corresponding theoretical concept is a gap in the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between them. It is closed if we do not neglect the pragmatics. 1 Introduction In the second section, I will formulate the hard problem. In the third section, I will describe a pragmatic approach to the problem and propose to replace the classical non-normative physicalism/naturalism with a normative physicalism/naturalism of Wittgensteinian language games. In subsection 3.1, I will give a definition of a normative naturalism. In subsection 3.2, I will make some suggestions concerning an analytic interpretation of the second philosophy of Wittgenstein. In the fourth section, I will propose a solution to the hard problem within Brandom‟s analytic pragmatism by using the notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation. In the fifth section, I will make some suggestions about possible combinatorics related to pragmatically mediated semantic relations. In the sixth section, I will consider pragmatic and discursive versions of the mind-body identity M=B. In the last section, I will conclude that the explanatory gap is a gap in a pragmatically mediated semantic relation between B and M. It is closed if we do not neglect pragmatics. 2 The Hard Problem The hard problem in the philosophy of mind can be formulated as follows.
    [Show full text]
  • Durham E-Theses
    Durham E-Theses Understanding, normativity, and scientic practice LEWENDON-EVANS, HARRY,EDWARD How to cite: LEWENDON-EVANS, HARRY,EDWARD (2018) Understanding, normativity, and scientic practice, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12780/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Understanding, Normativity, and Scientific Practice Harry Lewendon-Evans PhD Thesis Department of Philosophy Durham University 2018 Abstract Understanding, Normativity, and Scientific Practice Harry Lewendon-Evans Recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science has argued that understanding is an important cognitive achievement that philosophers should seek to address for its own sake. This thesis outlines and defends a new account of scientific understanding that analyses the concept of understanding in terms of the concept of normativity. The central claim is that to understand means to grasp something in the light of norms.
    [Show full text]
  • 5 Holism and Animal Minds
    WML05 12/20/2006 6:36 PM Page 251 5 Holism and Animal Minds David Finkelstein 1 It’s not unusual for influential philosophers to make statements about the minds of nonlinguistic creatures that to a nonphilosopher would seem not merely implausible, but plainly and obviously false. For example, in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty (1979, 187) defends the claim “that knowledge, awareness, concepts, . all descend on the shoulders of the bright child somewhere around the age of four, without having existed in even the most primitive form hitherto.” According to Rorty, a creature without language—whether human or nonhuman—is not aware of any- thing, and, contrary to what you might imagine when he climbs into bed with you each night, your dog has never once even noticed you. In arguing for this thesis, Rorty takes himself to be following the lead of Wilfrid Sellars. He quotes approvingly a passage from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in which Sellars (1997, 63) describes his own position as one “according to which all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities—indeed, all awareness even of particulars—is a linguistic affair.” According to Rorty, Sellars finds an innocent way to allow that brutes may be said to enjoy a kind of awareness. As Rorty (1979, 182) reads him, Sellars distinguishes “between aware- ness-as-discriminative behavior and awareness as . being ‘in the logical space of reasons, of justifying what one says.’” He goes on: “Awareness in the first sense is manifested by rats and amoebas and computers; it is simply reliable signaling.
    [Show full text]
  • Inferential Man: an Interview with Robert Brandom Jeffrey J
    Inferential Man: An Interview with Robert Brandom Jeffrey J. Williams, Robert Brandom symploke, Volume 21, Numbers 1-2, 2013, pp. 367-391 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/532830 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] INFERENTIAL MAN: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT BRANDOM JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS Analytic philosophy, at least to those in literary studies, seems an arid pursuit focused on technical problems of language, often conveyed in the mathematical symbols of formal logic. However, just as literary theory is quite different from common portraits of it, analytic philosophy differs from such images and has changed considerably since the days of Rudolph Carnap. Robert Brandom is an analytic philosopher, but while following in its rationalist tradition, he argues for a revisionary perspective, holding that we obtain meaning through inference rather than reference to a state of affairs. And rather than the compartmentalized arguments of much analytic philosophy, often captured in a single essay, he has aimed to construct a systematic philosophy, notably in his 741-page book, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Harvard UP, 1994). Another aspect of his revisionary stance is bringing several unlikely bedfellows, such as pragmatism and Hegel, into his version of analytic philosophy. Instead of disregarding the history of philosophy, he frequently evokes “the mighty dead.” Before he published Making It Explicit, Brandom gained a reputation from articles, unpublished papers, and talks as part of the “Pittsburgh School” of philosophy, which included colleagues Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and others.
    [Show full text]
  • The Pragmatic Century
    The Pragmatic Century Richard J. Bernstein There are many ways of telling the story of the vicissitudes of pragmatism in the United States. I want to begin with a brief account of what may be considered the standard story, because I intend to challenge it. The stan- dard story goes something like this. Pragmatism was popularized primar- ily through the lecturing and writing of William James at the beginning of the twentieth century. We can even date the explicit introduction of the term “pragmatism” by James in his 1898 address, delivered at the Univer- sity of California, Berkeley, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” In that address, James generously acknowledged his debt to Peirce, “one of the most original contemporary thinkers,” and he refers to “the principle of practicalism—or pragmatism as he called it, when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early 1970s.” James initially gives a rather metaphorical description of “Peirce’s principle”: “the soul and meaning of thought, he says, can never be made to direct itself towards anything but the production of belief, belief being the demica- dence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.” Furthermore, “beliefs, in short are really rules of action; and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action” (James 1967: 348). In 1898, Peirce was barely known as a philoso- pher (except to a small group of admirers like James). As James’s popular version of pragmatism spread, Peirce was so appalled and outraged that he renamed his own doctrine of meaning “‘pragmaticism,’ which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce 1931: 5.414).
    [Show full text]
  • Some Strands of Wittgenstein's Normative Pragmatism, and Some
    Some Strands of Wittgenstein’s Normative Pragmatism, and Some Strains of his Semantic Nihilism ROBERT B. BRANDOM §1. Strands of Normative Pragmatism FIRST READ THE TRIUMVIRATE of classical American pragmatists as an I undergraduate, under the tutelage of Bruce Kuklick. He saw them as instituting a vibrant philosophical tradition that was visibly continued not only by C. I. Lewis, but by his students Goodman and Quine. (More controversially, but I believe, also correctly, he further saw the semantic holism Quine shared with Sellars as picking up a central strand of the idealist tradition —represented in the Golden Age by Lewis’s teacher Josiah Royce— with which pragmatism had always been in conversation.) My Doktorvater Richard Rorty then made familiar to me an understanding of pragmatism sufficiently capacious to include such disparate and reciprocally unsympathetic philosophers as the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, as well as Sellars, and Quine’s student Davidson. I came to think of pragmatism as a house with many mansions, comprising a number of more or less closely related but distinct and separable commitments, relating various thinkers in the way Wittgenstein made famous under the rubric of “family resemblances.” Excavating the conceptual antecedents of those various pragmatist views led me to see some of the most central among them as rooted firmly in the thought of the German Idealists, Kant and Hegel —as Peirce and Dewey had explicitly avowed1. Among the most important of these antecedents is a thought that I take it serves as a fundamental orienting insight for the later Wittgenstein. This is the idea that intentionality is through and through a normative phenomenon.
    [Show full text]
  • What Is Inferentialism? Jaroslav Peregrin Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic & Faculty of Philosophy, University of Hradec Králové
    What is inferentialism? Jaroslav Peregrin Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic & Faculty of Philosophy, University of Hradec Králové Inferentialism and Representationalism Inferentialism is the conviction that to be meaningful in the distinctively human way, or to have a 'conceptual content', is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules. The term was coined by Robert Brandom as a label for his theory of language; however, it is also naturally applicable (and is growing increasingly common) within the philosophy of logic1. The rationale for articulating inferentialism as a fully-fledged standpoint is to emphasize its distinctness from the more traditional representationalism. The tradition of basing semantics on (such or another variant of) the concept of representation is long and rich. (Note that what is in question is representationalist semantics, viz. the idea that linguistic meaning is essentially a matter of representation; not a general thesis about the role of representations within the realm of the mental.) The basic representationalist picture is: we are confronted with things (or other entities) and somehow make our words stand for them (individual philosophers vary, of course, about what is to be understood by stand for). Within this paradigm, the ‘essential’ words of our language are meaningful in so far as they represent, or stand for, something, and if there are other kinds of words, then their function is auxiliary: they may help compose complex representations etc. Many philosophers of the twentieth century took some form of representationalism for granted, seeing no viable alternative basis for semantics; others had more specific reasons for entertaining one or another form of it2.
    [Show full text]
  • European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, XII-1 | 2020 Two Forms of Realism 2
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy XII-1 | 2020 Rethinking Rorty’s Pragmatism Two Forms of Realism Making Sense of Rorty’s Controversy with Brandom and Ramberg over Objectivity Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1868 DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.1868 ISSN: 2036-4091 Publisher Associazione Pragma Electronic reference Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi, « Two Forms of Realism », European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XII-1 | 2020, Online since 16 June 2020, connection on 26 June 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1868 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.1868 This text was automatically generated on 26 June 2020. Author retains copyright and grants the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Two Forms of Realism 1 Two Forms of Realism Making Sense of Rorty’s Controversy with Brandom and Ramberg over Objectivity Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi AUTHOR'S NOTE This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement N°832636. 1 Brandom’s volume Rorty and His Critics (2000) is famous due to, as Jeffrey Stout puts it, “the most startling passage in Rorty and His Critics and one as surprising as any in the entirety of Rorty’s published writings” (Stout 2007: 16). In this passage, Rorty agrees with Ramberg that the use of “getting things right,” which Ramberg promotes based on Davidson, is fully compatible with his own approach, and declares the intention to use it in the future (Rorty 2000c).
    [Show full text]
  • Essay on Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit Daniel Dennett July 31, 2006
    Essay on Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit Daniel Dennett July 31, 2006 The Evolution of AWhy?@ 1. The descent of content. Which way is up? I have recently completed the bracingBand long overdueBexperience of reading Making it Explicit, and trying to superimpose my own views on it to see where the disagreements stand out. Mainly, there is agreement. Claim after claim, page after page, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Brandom, and this is not just on matters about which philosophers in general agree. Brandom and I are on the same page about many issues that divide the profession. Moreover, on a few points where Brandom explicitly objects to positions I have maintained, I think he is, in the main, right, and I will acknowledge this in more detail below. What then is left to argue about? There is a fundamental difference of direction in our work. But I will try to show that our residual disagreementsBwhich at first make us appear poles apart on some very central thesesBmight quite easily be nudged into consonance if Brandom can take on what I view as a few friendly amendments. We both learned a lesson from Wilfrid Sellars that still hasn=t sunk in with many of our colleagues. I quote, not for the first time, what I consider to be the pithiest expression of it in Sellars: My solution is that A>. .= means - - -@ is the core of a unique mode of discourse which is as distinct from the description and explanation of empirical fact, as is the language of prescription and justification.
    [Show full text]
  • Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America
    Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg, CSMN, University of Oslo [email protected] To cite this paper, please refer to the published version: Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America. In Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 430-448. 1. The fight against metaphysics has been a hallmark of much philosophy during the last century and a half. The fight has been futile, and it is by now well established that metaphysics, like capitalism, co-opts all opposition. Nietzsche railed against metaphysics, while Heidegger, in the end, simply wanted to leave it alone, but neither the railing nor the leaving has turned out to yield viable research programs. The logical positivists did try to do serious philosophy against metaphysics, but managed thereby to establish only that metaphysics is pretty much inevitable. Contemporary mainstream Anglophone philosophy is happy to acknowledge this; whether one is a realist or an anti-realist in ethics, a reductionist or an anti-reductionist regarding the mental, a naturalist or an anti-naturalist in epistemology, and no matter what one’s view of truth, she proceeds content with the thought that metaphysics and philosophy are one. True, there remain pockets of right-wing Quineans who hold that any question of fact in the end is—or must be converted into—a properly scientific question. The common attitude, however, is sensible, relaxed, enlightened; what, in the end, was all that anti-metaphysical fuss about? What were those self-castigating Europeans so afraid of? In the present chapter, I will consider one recent, last stab at metaphysics.
    [Show full text]
  • Analytic Philosophy: What It's About and What to Read
    Analytic Philosophy: What it’s about and what to read Some hints for students by Holger A. Leuz At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position to look back on Analytic Philosophy, one of the most dynamic and influential schools of philosophic thought in that century. Although there has been an Analytic approach to virtually any subject matter of philosophy, particularly so in the second half of the 20th century, Analytic Philosophy was dominated by a few central disciplines: logic, philosophy of language, analysis of language and thought by intensional logic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. (I am leaving out discussion of moral philosophy and aesthetics here because I have no competence in these fields, but let me say this much: During the first half of the 20th century the predominant attitude towards ethics and aesthetics in Analytic Philosophy was reductionist or eliminitavist. As for ethics, this situation was changed almost single- handedly by John Rawls and his classic monograph A Theory Of Justice, which is required reading for anyone intending to study analytic ethics.) The aforementioned core disciplines of Analytic Philosophy seem to have developed by the following dynamic: Analytic Philosophy was initiated by Gottlob Frege and the modern formal logic he invented/discovered. Frege also sparked analytic philosophy of language and linguistic analysis via logic, particularly so by his essay Über Sinn und Bedeutung. The new logic was subsequently applied to analyze the logical structure of mathematics (the monumental three-volumed book Principia Mathematica by A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell was the breakthrough in this area), and more importantly for mainstream Analytic Philosophy, the logical structure of the theories and the progress of the empirical sciences.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert B, Brandom
    Review of Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas Timothy Williamson [Times Literary Supplement, 5579 (2010), pp. 22-23] Humans have a predictable liking for theories of what makes humans special, far above mere beasts and machines. Robert Brandom backs one of the most popular candidates, reason, in a specific form indicated by the word ‘reasoning’: making inferences, reaching conclusions from premises. Are we really the only reasoners? A dog traces its quarry to a place where it could have gone any of three ways, sniffs at two of them and rushes off along the third without sniffing. The Stoic Chrysippus interpreted the dog as reasoning ‘It went this way, that way or the other way; it did not go this way or that way; therefore it went the other way’. Far more complex logic is routine for computers. Such examples would not convince Brandom. For him, they lack a normative dimension essential to genuine engagement with reasons. When humans make a judgment, we incur both a responsibility to provide our reasons if challenged and a commitment to endorse consequences of what we claimed or else withdraw the claim. Dogs and computers incur no such responsibilities or commitments. Brandom labels his view ‘normative rationalism’. Distinguishing humans from others is just one of many achievements attributed to normative rationalism. Brandom is going for broke. In the first half of this short book, ‘A Semantic Sonata in Kant and Hegel’, he depicts normative rationalism as the rightful inheritor of the best and deepest in the German idealist tradition. His argument ranges boldly over norms, selves, concepts, autonomy, community, freedom, history, reason, reality.
    [Show full text]