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Metaphilosophical Reflections on the Idea of Metaphysics

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Notes

  1. It is important to distinguish this very strong claim about understanding from the weaker (though already substantially committive) scientia mensura of Sellars: “In the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not.” §42 of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind edited, with a Study Guide by Robert Brandom [Harvard University Press, 1997]. The latter claim is compatible with claiming also, as Sellars does, that distinctive forms of understanding are involved in the use of vocabulary that is not principally in the business of describing and explaining: for instance, normative vocabulary (and therefore, according to Sellars, also semantic and intentional vocabularies).

  2. Proposition 4.111.

  3. The analogous postulation of intentional states to explain behavior Sellars calls “philosophical behaviorism,” by contrast to the “logical behaviorism” that is committed to defining the states in terms of behavior. In the case of meaning and use, the corresponding non-theoretical move is a semantic instrumentalism that insists, as Dummett used to do, that every aspect of meaning be manifestable in use.

  4. See the discussion in Michael Thompson’s astonishing, original, pathbreaking book Life and Action [Harvard University Press, 2008].

  5. Thought of in this framework, in the case of empirical scientific theorizing, the base claims and the target claims are formulated in the same antecedent vocabulary—which may be, and must include, observational claims in the strict sense of those elicited by the exercise of reliable noninferential differential responsive dispositions, but which also include statements couched in the vocabulary (including theoretical, that is, only inferentially applicable vocabulary) of other scientific disciplines, for instance, those that address the workings of measuring instruments and the ranges of counterfactual robustness of various collateral premises.

  6. In his 1685 ms. “Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multiplicatio nullo, divisio vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur.”

  7. In the third, methodological, chapter of Tales of the Mighty Dead, and again in “Hermeneutic Practice and Theories of Meaning” [SATS Nordic Journal of Philosophy Vol 5 No. 1 2004] I offer some more specific and systematic ideas about how the different aspects of discourse addressed by these two sorts of understanding and their associated disciplines complement one another.

  8. First published in 1950; reprinted in Aspects of Scientific Explanation [Free Press, 1970].

  9. See for instance “Pragmatism as Anti-authoritarianism.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53:1 (207) (1999): 7–20, and “Universality and Truth” Chapter One of Robert Brandom (ed.) Rorty and His Critics [Blackwell’s Publishers, 2000]. I offer an assessment of this argument in Section III of “When Philosophy Paints its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment” boundary2 Vol 29 No 2, Summer 2002, pp. 1–28.

  10. In Chapter Three of Between Saying and Doing.

  11. I say something about this in the first chapter of Tales of the Mighty Dead.

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Correspondence to Robert Brandom.

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This essay is adapted from my Afterword to Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism [Oxford University Press, 2008].

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Brandom, R. Metaphilosophical Reflections on the Idea of Metaphysics. Philosophia 40, 13–26 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9332-7

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