Pragmatism and inferentialism
In Bernhard Weiss & Jeremy Wanderer (eds.), Reading Brandom: On Making It Explici (2010)
| Abstract | One of the central themes of Brandom’s work is that we should construct our sematic theories around material validity and incompatibility, rather than reference, truth, and satisfaction. This approach to semantics is motivated in part by Brandom’s pragmatism about the relation between semantics and the more general study of language use—what he calls “pragmatics”: Inferring is a kind of doing. . . . The status of inference as something that can be done accordingly holds out the promise of securing an appropriate relation between pragmatics, the study of the practices, and semantics, the study of the corresponding contents. (MIE, 91)1 Although Brandom does not go so far as to say that a pragmatist attitude to the relation between semantics and pragmatics requires an inferentialist semantics, his motivating arguments strongly suggest that a pragmatist ought to be an inferentialist. In what follows, I discuss the connections between Brandom’s pragmatism and his inferentialism. I’ll argue that pragmatism, as Brandom initially describes it—the view that “semantics must answer to pragmatics”—does not favor an inferentialist approach to semantics over a truth-conditional one. I’ll then consider whether inferentialism might be.. | |||||||||
| Keywords | inferentialism pragmaticism semantics | |||||||||
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Lionel Shapiro (2004). Brandom on the Normativity of Meaning. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1):141-60.
Catherine Legg (2008). Making It Explicit and Clear: From "Strong" to "Hyper-" Inferentialism in Brandom and Peirce. Metaphilosophy 39 (1):105–123.
John McDowell (2005). Motivating Inferentialism: Comments on Making It Explicit (Ch. 2). Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (1):121-140.
Jaroslav Peregrin (2005). Brandom and Davidsom: What Do We Need to Account for Thinking and Agency? Philosophica 75.
Daniel Whiting (2007). Between Old and New: Brandom's Analytic Pragmatism. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (4):191-205.
Tom Rockmore (2002). Brandom, Hegel and Inferentialism. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (4):429 – 447.
Gabor Forrai (2009). Brandom on Two Problems of Conceptual Role Semantics. In Barbara Merker (ed.), Vertehen nach Heidegger und Brandom.
Mark McCullagh (2005). Motivating Inferentialism. Southwest Philosophy Review 21 (1):77-84.
Robert Brandom (2011). Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary. Harvard University Press.
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