Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment
Brandom (Robert)
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  1. What would something unlike us – a computer, for example – have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition.
  2. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language – the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures – that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language.
  3. Making It Explicit attempts to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic "meaning" in terms of "use" – in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. At the centre of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk – and so in the fullest sense being able to think – is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one's own commitments and those of others.
  4. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind and logic is, finally, an account of who "we" are.
Book Comment

Harvard University Press, Paperback Edition, 1998


"Laurier (Daniel) - Non-Conceptually Contentful Attitudes in Interpretation"

Source: Sorites 13, October 2001: 6-22


Author’s Abstract
  1. "Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment" defends Davidson’s claim that conceptual thought can arise only on the background of a practice of mutual interpretation, without endorsing the further view that one can be a thinker only if one has the concept of a concept. This involves (inter alia) giving an account of conceptual content in terms of what Brandom calls practical deontic attitudes.
  2. In this paper, I make a plea for the conclusion that these practical attitudes are best seen as intentional, but non-conceptually contentful.
  3. In particular, I argue that the hypothesis that Brandom’s practical deontic attitudes are non-conceptually contentful wouldn’t conflict with his view that non-conceptual intentionality is merely derivative.
  4. I then explore some of the implications which this hypothesis might have with respect to various forms of intentional ascent.

Paper Comment


"Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 1


Sections
    I. Introduction
    → I.1. Saying ‘We’
    → I.2. Sapience
    → I.3. Intentionality

     for Section I.

    II. From Intentional State to Normative Status
    → II.1 Kant: Demarcation by Norms
    → II.2 From Cartesian Certainty to Kantian Necessity
    → II.3. Frege: Justification versus Causation1
    → II.4 Wittgenstein2 on the Normative Significance of Intentional Content
    → II.5 Norms and Intentional Explanation

    III. From Norms Explicit in Rules to Norms Implicit in Practices
    → III.1 Regulism: Norms as Explicit Rules or Principles
    → III.2 Wittgenstein3’s Regress Argument
    → III.3 Wittgenstein4’s Pragmatism about Norms
    → III.4 Sellars against Regulism
    → III.5 Regularism: Norms as Regularities

    IV. From Normative Status to Normative Attitude
    → IV.1 Kant: Acting According to Conceptions of Rules
    → IV.2 Practical Normative Attitudes
    → IV.3 Sanctions
    → IV.4 Regularities of Communal Assessment
    → IV.5 Normative Sanctions

    V. From Assessment to the Social Institution of Norms
    → V.1 Pufendorf on the Institution of Norms by Attitudes
    → V.2 Kantian Autonomy: The Authority of Norms arises from Their Acknowledgement
    → V.3 Objectivity and Social Institution of Conceptual Norms

    VI. From Intentional Interpretation to Original Intentionality
    → VI.1 The Stance Stance
    → VI.2 Different Stances and Kinds of Intentionality
    → VI.3 Summary

    Appendix: Wittgenstein5’s use of Regel (Rule)

Paper Comment

Photocopy of the Introduction (Sections I.1 - I.3) filed in "Various - Papers on Identity Boxes: Vol 03 (B2: Bi+)"

Write-up6 (as at 19/04/2018 00:12:58): Brandom - Toward a Normative Pragmatics (Introduction)

This is a summary (with some discussion) of Section I of "Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics" in "Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment". My own comments universally appear as “Note:”.

I. Introduction

I.1. Saying ‘We’
  1. Elastic boundaries force on us a task of demarcation between ourselves and others.
  2. It is best not to define ourselves by the deficiencies of others – in our not being subject to such deficiencies.
  3. Is what we are made or decided as much as discovered? We are what we take ourselves to be. We need a principled form of demarcation that doesn’t just seize on arbitrary distinctions of biology, geography, culture or preference.
  4. What would have to be the case for us correctly to count things such as chimpanzees, dolphins, gaseous extraterrestrials or digital computers as “among us”? We must avoid chance issues of origin and material constitution and focus on function – what they can do.
    • Note: I would have thought that what they can experience is just as important as what we can do, should we be able to come to know this of other kinds (ie. accounting for Nagel’s bats). However, while Brandom later recognises the importance of sentience, he gives pre-eminence to what he calls sapience. This raises the question of why we want to determine the “we” community. Three answers that immediately spring to mind are …
      1). To determine those with whom we can meaningfully and profitably interact. This could be at various levels – Brandom wants the “highest”, though not so as to exclude the majority of our fellow human beings.
      2). To determine those on whom we can (or might) rely.
      3). To determine those whose welfare we should or could (rationally and unselfishly) care about.
      Clearly, answers to all three of these questions might include some non-persons or exclude some persons.
  5. They must be able to participate in our self-defining activities.
    • Note: I’d have thought this could still be parochial – eg. “we are the educated aesthetes” – though Brandom admits this.
  6. There can be various non-competing answers to the question “what are we7?”, each defining a different community. What we’re really after is the superset of all these overlapping communities: The “we-sayers”.
    • Note: Should this include the “we-thinkers”, to allow for dolphin-persons and such-like? That is, on the presumption that thinking in the absence of language (other than a “language of thought”) is possible.
  7. We still need a contentful way of accounting for this fellow-feeling.

I.2. Sapience
  1. What is it that we do that is so special? The traditional answer is that it is our cognitive abilities that mark us out. Reason, meaning, conceptual content and understanding.
  2. Rationality is normative – we are bound by the norms of reason. We need reasons for our attitudes and performances, and without them they will not be respectively beliefs and actions.
  3. We operate in a web of inference that might conceivably be occupied by beings of other backgrounds.
  4. Sapience rather than sentience. Understanding and intelligence8 rather than irritability and arousal. Sentience is shared with non-verbal animals; awareness as awakeness; an exclusively biological phenomenon.
    • Note: Brandom mentions cats, as displaying the “exclusively biological phenomenon”; but what about chimps? Do they display more?
  5. The sentient are segregated from those (eg. thermostats) that merely show differential responsiveness to the environment.
  6. One treats others as sapient insofar as one attributes to them intentional states as reasons for their behaviour.
    • Note: I think this is too broad – aren’t all the higher mammals intelligent, and don’t they have beliefs and desires? The intentional stance we adopt towards them is not as towards a thermostat, which we interpret “as if” it had intentional states, while we accept that it doesn’t really possess them. On the other hand, we think the higher mammals really do enjoy these intentional states. However, Brandom accepts this too.
  7. Concern about truth, as well as inference, is another indicator of sapience. You can’t believe something unless you think it true (Note: presumably a reference to Moore’s paradox, though Brandom doesn’t say). Belief is taking-true; action is making-true. We are capable of grasping truth-conditions.
  8. Propositional form underlies both truth and inference. Propositional contents have truth conditions and stand in inferential relations to one another.
  9. Brandom’s project is to explain who we are as sapients by explaining what it is to grasp propositional contents, and also to explain the relationship between inference and truth.

I.3. Intentionality
  1. Brandom describes this propositional focus on intelligible contents as discursive rather than representational.
    • Note: I don’t know what he means by discursive.
  2. Descartes distinguished us, the representers, from that which is represented.
  3. Representations can be correct or incorrect, answerable to what is represented.
  4. A third task for Brandom is to investigate the relationship between representation and the discursive concepts of reason and truth.
  5. Despite much progress, we still don’t know what the representations consist in and what makes them intelligible to the representer. What is it that makes an x-idea an idea about x-es? Brandom doesn’t think the representational power of the mind can be left basic and unexplained.
  6. So, Brandom’s topic is intentionality, but in the sense of contentfulness rather than directedness.
  7. His focus is on sapience, though not to the utter neglect of sentience.
  8. “We” is a multi-faceted term.
  9. His target is a high-grade intentionality that requires linguistic practice to make sense of it. This may be “beastly to beasts” in two ways: by treating sapience as more important (in this context) than sentience, and by ignoring the lower-grade intentionality of non- or pre-linguistic animals.
  10. There can be different senses of “we” corresponding to the different grades of intentionality.
  11. Brandom’s project is partly to explain what a sentient creature has to do in order to become sapient. He wants to know what practices are sufficient to confer propositionally contentful intentional states on those that lack them. This would help us diagnose aliens as in possession of such states, and to program computers or train (merely) sentient animals to attain sapience.
    • Note: it would seem that sentience and sapience are logically independent. Might it not be possible for a suitably-programmed digital computer to become sapient, but never sentient, if sentience cannot be realised on a digital computer? Should we include insentient machines in the “we” community? This, presumably, depends on why we are trying to determine the extent of “we” community. If it’s to determine those towards whom our responsibilities lie, we should favour our non-sapient infants (or even animals, if we can get out of the habit of treating them as property) over our sapient machines, when it comes to the last place on the life-boat.

Note: Some Random Thoughts
  1. Throughout history, “we” has been tribal, rising to national. Or, there have been special interest groups – the aristocrats, the intelligentsia, the Manchester United Supporters, the Anglo Saxons.
  2. We now agree that “we” are at least co-extensive with the human race (though maybe the “mentally defective” are excluded). The “we” that agree on this are a privileged subset of those we count as being “we”. No doubt some of those we count as within “our” community would exclude us from that community.
  3. There is pressure to widen the net, but what are the principled reasons for the width of the net? Brandom gives reasons, but why are these not just his preferences? There seems to be something of a dilemma:-
    a). If we take “we” to be those falling under a natural kind concept (ie. all human beings), we have a basic reason for drawing boundaries as we do; yet we open ourselves up to charges of “speciesism”, because the qualities we find valuable in our group might be shared by others of different species who might (as Brandom notes) be excluded for irrelevant reasons.
    b). But if we widen the net, we open ourselves up to arbitrariness of the function-set we happen to find important.
  4. Brandom considers that “we” are those we can interact with propositionally. I’m not sure how much of this goes on in families, especially between generations. Yet these are paradigmatic “we” communities. A “fellow feeling” can arise in completely non-verbal environments (I’ve experienced a lot of this rowing in eights). We’re concerned about those in the same boat as us, and if chimps or dolphins were to have self-concern, we are their fellow-travellers, whether or not they have language or conceptual thought in the way we do. An argument I heard recently against the commercial predation on whales, is that they form close-knit communities and mourn the loss of group members. I’m not sure how this is known, but I can imagine it being true. If so, whales form a “we-group”. Why exclude them because they can only squeak?
  5. I’m not clear on the relevance of all this to my thesis. I want to know what we are9, metaphysically speaking, and what adventures we can survive. So, I need to know roughly how to determine whether or not a particular individual belongs to the class “we”. As Olson points out, if we take this class functionally, members of all sorts of kinds with different persistence conditions might belong to it, so our general questions about the persistence of individuals would have no answer. However, even this might beg the question against those who (seem to) claim that a kind can be determined functionally (as distinct from what? Just what does determine kind-membership? For artefact-kinds function is all we have to go on, but for natural kinds we think there’s something more). For instance, those holding the “psychological view”10 of personal identity might claim that “we” belong to a natural kind - PERSON.



In-Page Footnotes ("Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics")

Footnote 6:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (19/04/2018 00:12:58).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.


"Brandom (Robert) - Towards an Interential Semantics"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 2


"Brandom (Robert) - Linguistic Practice and Discursive Commitment"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 3


"Brandom (Robert) - Perception and Action: The Conferral of Empirical and Practical Conceptual Content"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 4


"Brandom (Robert) - The Expressive Role of Traditional Semantic Vocabulary: 'True' and 'Refers'"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 5


"Brandom (Robert) - Substitution: What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any?"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 6


"Brandom (Robert) - Anaphora: The Structure of Token Repeatables"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 7


"Brandom (Robert) - Acribing Propositional Attitudes: The Social Route from Reasoning to Representing"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 8


"Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Conclusion"

Source: Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment, 1994, Chapter 9


Sections
    I. Two Concepts of Concepts
    … I.1 Three Kantian Dualisms
    … I.2 The Inferential Conception of Concepts Is Not Dualistic in Any of These Three Ways

    II. Norms and Practices
    … II.1 The Normative and the Factual
    … II.2 Where Do Norms Come From?
    … II.3 Interpretation
    … II.4 Semantic Externalism and the Attribution of Original Intentionality
    … II.5 Sharing Inferentially Individuated Concepts
    … II.6 Three Levels of Norms

    III. We Have Met the Norms, and They Are Ours
    … III.1 Original Intentionality and the Explicit Discursive Scorekeeping Stance
    … III.2 Expressive Completeness and Interpretive Equilibrium
    … III.3 Saying ‘We’
    … III.4 Semantic Externalism Begins at Home
    … III.5 Making It Explicit
 Click here for Note

Write-up1 (as at 12/02/2009 21:30:14): Brandom - Making It Explicit: Conclusion

This write-up is a review of "Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Conclusion", Sections III.2-3.

2. Expressive Completeness and interpretive Equilibrium
3. Saying ‘We’

… Further details to be supplied2 …



In-Page Footnotes ("Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Conclusion")

Footnote 1:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (12/02/2009 21:30:14).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.

Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


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