Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment

"Like Pike’s book, it’s enormous. It’s a very large, 750 page, incredibly detailed presentation of what he calls ‘inferentialist semantics’. Unlike Pike’s book, the words all seem to be necessary; it doesn’t seem that you can cut this book down much. I’ve read some of the reviews that said you could have cut it in half, but that’s like when the emperor of Austria told Mozart that his piece had too many notes and Mozart said “which ones should I take out?” I’m not comparing Brandom to Mozart but it’s a really important book. Basically, the idea is we don’t know a concept unless we know how to use it. Stop and think about the implications of that. There’s another book on concepts by Sue Carey in which she doesn’t dispute that knowing how to use a concept is important but argues it’s native and that concepts are inborn. Brandom makes it difficult to think of concepts as inborn because if you don’t have a concept unless you know how to use it, then you can’t be born knowing how to use it; you’ve got to learn how to use it, in inferences. That’s wherer the ‘inferentialist’ in ‘inferentialist semantics’ come from. He doesn’t refer to culture but it fits very nicely with my view of the fact that inferences do come from culture. You would need to know the culture to understand the concepts and to understand how to speak and how to understand these things. That’s my own extrapolation from what he said but what he does is to show that, within the linguistic context alone, you have to know how to use something. There’s no representation that shows that this means x and I just put it in a spot in a sentence. He says sentences are constructed and inferences are the crucial part of the construction. In my view, sentences are the result of dialogue and negotiation. If I ask you did your parents arrive yet? and you answer there were fish in the river , it’s not clear how those two are related but I will damn-well make an effort to figure out how that could possibly answer my question. I understand then that that obviously enters into other philosophical traditions as well. Brandom’s book lays out the importance of inferences and use and – for me – culture for understanding concepts. There’s been this long distinction in philosophy between knowing-how and knowing-that; I know how to ride a bike and I know that it is Tuesday. But if Brandom’s right, that distinction is done away with because I can’t know that unless I know how to use that word. Yes. Very heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars – there’s a long tradition of this. Wittgenstein’s work is so useful to my view of language as use and language in culture, and Brandom is a further articulation. The other thing that I love about Brandom’s book is that it fits in the pragmatist tradition – the American pragmatist tradition going back, according to some, to the American Indians but certainly starting with William James and Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. Brandom’s thesis advisor was Richard Rorty who was another leading pragmatist. To me, today, in philosophy Brandom was probably the leading American pragmatist. It’s not the same as James’s pragmatism but is language as use and language as function. It fits very well with the tradition and I think that it probably, of all the books I’ve listed, it’s one of the most important books of the last twenty or thirty years on language. In my personal thought, it’s been one of the most influential and important books. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, here we have a picture going from the first book to the last book, beginning with somebody who looked at the importance of the connection between language and culture but at the same time took both of them seriously as separate entities that overlapped and interacted. To me it wasn’t one supervening on the other but a symbiotic relation; they help form each other. Then you move to Pike who tried to develop this model further, he was influenced by Sapir; you move to Chomsky who presented a totally different perspective and got people thinking in a different way. Givon’s book was a reaction to that. He said sure we do need form, but we need to get it back to meaning. Brandom’s was, for me, the ultimate statement of how meaning arrives in grammar – ultimate is probably too strong, but it’s one of the most important statements that has been made on that since Wittgenstein."