Contra Rorty, we cannot do everything—and more—with the Wittgensteinian notion of language-game that the pragmatists were trying to do with experience.
Vincent Colapietro (2010, p. 20)
Abstract
Robert Brandom holds that what we mean is best understood in terms of what inferences we are prepared to defend, and that such a defence is best understood in terms of rule-governed social interactions. This manages to explain quite a lot. However, for those who think that there is more to making correct/incorrect inferences than obeying/breaking accepted rules, Brandom’s account fails to adequately capture what it means to reason properly. Thus, in an effort to sketch an alternative that does not rely primarily on peer pressure, I draw on the work of C. S. Peirce. Peirce argued that, when we reason, we manipulate abstract diagrams in order to observe what results. Since some manipulations are barred by the self-same nature of the diagrams, I try to show that this qualitative incompatibility, which I dub “contrapiction,” is a good (non-social) reason to regard some reasoning as bad.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Robert Brandom, Henry Jackman, Erkki Kilpinen, Henrik Rydenfelt, Frederik Stjernfelt, James Burton, Francesco Bellucci, anonymous reviewers for this journal, as well as audience members at the Helsinki Metaphysical Club and the 2015 CLMPS symposium on “Tracking the Diagrammatic Turn in Recent Philosophy of Notation.” This work was conducted as part of the research project Diagrammatic Mind: Logical and Cognitive Aspects of Iconicity, funded by the Academy of Finland and the Estonian Research Council. I am especially indebted to that project’s principal investigator, Prof. Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, for his continued friendship and support.
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Champagne, M. Brandom, Peirce, and the overlooked friction of contrapiction. Synthese 193, 2561–2576 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0866-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0866-2