Although Brandom is critical of some features of narrowly conceived classical pragmatism, at the same time he explicitly embraces a version of pragmatism, both in his overall philosophical outlook, and in his philosophy of language. Brandom’s distinctive theoretical approach is based on what he calls rationalist pragmatism, which is a version of fundamental pragmatism. Within the philosophy of language it takes the form of semantic pragmatism. The paper briefly discusses Brandomian version of fundamental pragmatism and its semantic underpinning, and subsequently (...) formulates a basic dilemma it encounters there. (shrink)

The British philosopher Michael Dummett (1925–2011) not only had a massive influence on the development of analytical philosophy within the philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics, but also contributed significantly to historical and metaphilosophical debates about the nature of this philosophical movement and its proper account. He proposed to define analytical philosophy as philosophy whose aim is the analysis of the structure of thought by way of the analysis of language. Hence, it is philosophy the gist of which (...) is the linguistic turn. A number of critics of this proposal (including Barry Smith, Peter Hylton, and Hans-Johann Glock) emphasised that Dummett’s proposal captures merely some features of this diversified and multifaceted philosophical tradition, and is far from being historically adequate. (shrink)

Most current theories of meaning and mental content accept externalism. One of its forceful exponents is Ruth Garrett Millikan. She argues that externalism leads to the abandonment of "the last myth of the given", that is, of the idea that identity of meaning and mental content is somehow unproblematically given to us, and that we can easily recognize the sameness of meaning and mental content. If one refuses such a "mythical" giveness or meaning rationalism, one has to admit that there (...) is no logical possibility known a priori . The paper tries to show that even if one abandons meaning rationalism one can still hold that there are logical possibilities known a priori . The claim is defended by arguing that a priori knowledge is not completely independent from experience and does not demand the absolute transparency of meaning from the first-person point of view. A priori knowledge requires only a priori justification, that is, such a justification that is based merely on relations between meanings or contents. (shrink)

It is quite widely assumed that at the beginning of his career Richard Rorty was an orthodox analytic philosopher, working in its then current mainstream, and especially fascinated by the linguistic turn taken by this tradition. Subsequently he supposedly radically and dramatically changed his views, turning himself from a staunch analytic philosophers into a vigorous critic of the analytic tradition and ultimately paradigmatically postmodern and continental thinker. It is argued in the paper that this common picture exaggerates changes in Rorty’s (...) philosophical views. He certainly has never become fully postmodern and continental philosopher, whatever it means. And what seems more important, he always had a lot of reservations about analytic philosophy and had less hopes of it than one or two passages from his early writings suggest. (shrink)

Although analytic philosophy and pragmatism are two distinctive philosophical movements, they are in various ways related. The paper is an attempt to provide a selective historical account of these relationships. The following five episodes are presented and discussed: the criticism of pragmatism by G.E. Moore and B. Russell, pragmatic ideas in the philosophy of F.P. Ramsey and conceptual pragmatism of C.I. Lewis; real and apparent pragmatic tendencies in the philosophies of L. Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine; the return to pragmatism initiated (...) by R. Rorty and H. Putnam; analytic pragmatism of R.B. Brandom, M. Williams, and H. Price. The picture that emerges from this historical account is that of unruly coexistence and inspiration. Key words ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY, PRAGMATISM. (shrink)

This is a new major and systematic monograph on the realism debate, written by a very skillful and sophisticated defender of anti-realism. The realism debate is conceived here as a primarily semantic controversy concerning the possibility of forming propositions or sentences about the world whose truth or falsity might be unknowable to us. Realists of various persuasions take it to be perfectly possible, while nonrealists of all sorts deny this. Tennant distinguishes two basic forms of nonrealism in his book: irrealism (...) and antirealism. According to semantic irrealism, there are no such entities as propositions, or objective and determinate meanings for sentences to possess. Semantic antirealists generally do not agree with such a radical conclusion. They argue for the objectivity and determinacy of meaning, although at the same time they insist that both meaning and truth attributable to propositions or sentences has to be epistemically constrained, that is, grasping a meaning has to be manifestable and truth has to be in principle knowable. While developing in greater detail his own version of antirealism that respects those two constraints, Tennant combines the knowability requirement with the claim that truth need not be bivalent, which in turn leads him to replace classical logic based on bivalence by a nonclassical constructive logic, namely, intuitionistic relevant logic. Tennant attempts to show that this logic has much wider application than one might suppose. It suffices not only for mathematics but also adequately captures the basic inferential practices of empirical sciences. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of that attempt, since if successful it undermines the charge that anti-realism is a doctrine that cannot really be extended beyond the domain of mathematical discourse. The general strategy taken in this respect by Tennant is not, as has been common so far, to strengthen the notion of empirical verification or confirmation of a sentence in such a way as to make it a close analogue of the notion of mathematical proof. “Rather, one should attend to the main feature of natural scientific theorizing to which Popper drew our attention: our scientific theories can at best be falsified, not verified”. In other words, in the case of empirical discourse the perfect analogue of the antirealist notion of constructive provability is the notion of constructive falsifiability. (shrink)

It is often assumed that any attempt to undermine the so-called correspondence theory of truth is motivated by the conviction that truth is an idea which should be more or less forgotten in our postmodernist period. However, this is not always the case. One can believe that truth is one of our indispensable concepts but at the same time argue that the correspondence theory of truth is not a proper and illuminating theory of that concept. This position is reasonable, since (...) - as it has been shown (e.g. by Huw Price and Michael Dummett) - without the notion of truth one would not be able to provide a coherent and satisfactory account of our discursive practice and linguistic meaning. Moreover, as it has been recently argued by David Lewis, the correspondence theory is not a stable account of that concept, and it faces the following dilemma: either (putting aside some minor and irrelevant differences) it turns into a minimalist or redundancy theory of some sort, or it becomes a (mostly) metaphysical theory about various kinds of things which make our statements true. Defenders of the correspondence theory have made some efforts to meet the challenge posed by Lewis, but those efforts do not seem successful. Hence we should perhaps not longer consider the correspondence theory as a major and clearly specifiable contender in the debate about truth, and thus significantly reshape it. (shrink)

Epistemic conceptions of truth, for which truth is defined in terms of justifiability or assertibility in properly idealized conditions, are very often considered as unavoidably linked with relativism. The paper argues that such a link is not unavoidable. The reason is that there are accounts of justification that do not have relativistic consequences, and therefore one may propose an epistemic conception of truth that does not have those consequences either.

In his latest book, Adam Grobler gives an ingenious account of the main issues of contemporary epistemology, and puts forward an original sandwich theory of knowledge. The paper brings to light pragmatic threads of Grobler’s views, including his approach to scepticism, to the justification of induction, and to the notion of truth. It is suggested that the idea of relative truth, currently rigorously elaborated by John MacFarlane, would be more useful for his purposes than the notion of truth as superassertibility (...) proposed by Crispin Wright. (shrink)

The article explores the concept of scientific philosophy as understood by members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. The author argues that according to Twardowski and his students, philosophy should be done as an exact discipline which ought to be pursued in critical and collaborative spirit. Selected views on scientific philosophy are analyzed, including ideas of Ajdukiewicz, Zawirski, and Dąmbska. It is claimed that though the conception of scientific philosophy is beset with crucial and fundamental ambiguities, it was far more important for (...) the Lvov-Warsaw School than the idea of analytic philosophy. (shrink)