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Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism
Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit.
Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics.
Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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About the author
Robert B. Brandom
29 books80 followersRobert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 26, 2025
yardır bob
September 27, 2024
A “SIMPLIFIED” PRESENTATION OF BRANDOM’S “MAKING IT EXPLICIT”
Robert Brandom is professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote in the Introduction to this 2000 book, “This is a book about the use and content of CONCEPTS. Its animating thought is that the meanings of linguistic expressions and the contents of intentional states, indeed, awareness itself, should be understood, to begin with, in terms of playing a distinctive kind of role in REASONING. The idea of privileging INFERENCE over REFERENCE in the order of semantic explanation is introduced and motivated… The overall topic is the nature of the conceptual as such… The aim is to focus on the conceptual in order to elaborate a relatively clear notion of the kind of AWARENESS of something that consists in applying a concept to it---paradigmatically by saying or thinking something about it.” (Pg. 1-2)
He continues, “The view expounded in these pages is a kind of conceptual pragmatism (broadly, a form of functionalism) in this sense. It offers an account of knowing (or believing, or saying) THAT such and such is the case in terms of knowing HOW (being able) to DO something. It approaches the contents of conceptually EXPLICIT propositions or principles from the direction of what is IMPLICIT in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs. ‘Assertion,’ ‘claim,’ ‘judgment,’ and ‘belief’ are all systematically ambiguous expressions---and not merely by coincidence. The sort of pragmatism adopted here seeks to explain what is asserted by appeal to what is judged by judgINGS, and what is believed by the role of believINGS… in general, the content by the act, rather than the other way around.” (Pg. 4)
He goes on, “The line of thought pursued here is … a RELATIONAL LINGUISTIC approach to the conceptual. Concept use is treated as an essentially linguistic affair. Claiming and believing are two sides of one coin… in the sense that neither the activity of believing nor that of asserting can be made sense of independently of the other, and that their conceptual contents are essentially, and not just accidentally, capable of being the contents indifferently of both claims and beliefs… this approach takes the form of a linguistic pragmatism that might take as its slogan Sellar’s principle that ‘grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word.’” (Pg. 6)
Later, he adds, “My aim is to offer a quick sketch of the terrain against the background of which the approach pursued in the body of this work (and at greater length and in greater detail in ‘Making It Explicit’) takes its characteristic shape---to introduce and place those commitments, rather than so much as to begin to entitle myself to any of them… what distinguishes specifically DISCURSIVE practices from the doings of non-concept using creatures is their INFERENTIAL articulation. To talk about concepts is to talk about their role in reasoning… It is a RATIONALIST pragmatism, in giving pride of place to practices of giving and asking for reasons, understanding them as conferring conceptual content on performances, expressions, and states suitably caught up in those practices.” (Pg. 10-11)
He points out, “I am putting forward a view that is opposed to many (if not most) of the large theoretical, explanatory, and strategic commitments that have shaped and motivated Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century: empiricism, naturalism, representationalism, semantic atomism, formalism about logic, and instrumentalism about the norms of practical rationality… I take my expository and argumentative structure and the criteria of adequacy for having made a claim with a clear content, argued for it, and responsibly followed out its consequences resolutely from the Anglo-American tradition… What I am trying to do is in a clear and specific inferential sense make EXPLICIT what is IMPLICIT in various philosophically important concepts.” (Pg. 31-32) He adds, “My hope is that by slighting the similarities to animals… and highlighting the possibilities opened up by engaging in social practices of giving and asking for reasons, we will get closer to an account of being human that does justice to the kinds of consciousness and self-consciousness distinctive of us as CULTURAL, and nor merely NATURAL, creatures.” (Pg. 35)
He acknowledges, “the rationalist pragmatism and expressivism presented here is opposed to NATURALISM, at least as that term is usually understood. For it emphasizes what distinguishes discursive creatures, as subject to distinctively conceptual norms, from their non-concept-using ancestors and cousins. Conceptual norms are brought into play by social linguistic practices of giving and asking for reasons of assessing the propriety of claims and inferences.” (Pg. 26)
He outlines, “I work within the context of what I call there a ‘normative pragmatics.’ Specifically, I think of discursive practice as deontic scorekeeping: the significance of a speech act is how it changes what commitments and entitlements one attributes and acknowledges. I work also within the context of an ‘inferential semantics.’ That is, discursive commitments… are distinguished by their specifically inferential articulation… I further endorse an EXPRESSIVE view of logic. That is, I see the characteristic role that distinguishes specifically logical vocabulary as being making explicit… features of the game of giving and asking for reasons in virtue of which bits of NONlogical vocabulary play the roles that they do… Giving and asking for reasons for ACTIONS is possible only in the context of practices of giving and asking for reasons generally---that is, the practice of making and defending ‘claims’ or ‘judgments.’ … This is a point about explanatory AUTONOMY: I claim that one can explain the role of beliefs in theoretical reasoning (leading from claims to claims) without needed to appeal to practical reasoning, while I do not believe that one can do things in the opposite order.” (Pg. 81-82)
He argues, “In fact, there is nothing unintelligible about having beliefs for which we cannot give reasons. Faith---understood broadly as undertaking commitments without claiming corresponding entitlements-is surely not an incoherent concept. (Nor is it by any means the exclusive province of religion.) And should the convictions of the faithful turn out not only to be true but also … to result from reliable belief-forming processes, I do not see why they should not be taken to constitute knowledge.” (Pg. 105-106)
He explains, “How, then, OUGHT we to understand and significance of considerations of reliability in epistemology? How can we properly acknowledge both the Founding Insight and Goldman’s Insight while avoiding both the Conceptual and the Naturalistic Blindspot? I think the key to answering these important questions is to see that, far from being opposed to considerations of what is a good reason for what, concern with reliability should itself be understood as concern with the goodness of a distinctive kind of INFERENCE. I will call this idea the ‘Implicit Insight’ of epistemological reliabilism.” (Pg. 117)
He states, “I take it that liability to demands for justification---that is, demonstration of entitlement---is another major dimension of the responsibility one undertakes, the commitment one makes, in asserting something. In making an assertion one implicitly acknowledges the propriety, at least under some circumstances, of demands for reasons, for justification of the claim one has endorsed, the commitment one has undertaken. Besides the COMMITTIVE dimension of assertional practice, there is the CRITICAL dimension: the aspect of the practice in which the propriety of those commitments is assessed. Apart from this critical dimension, the notion of REASONS gets no grip. So the overall claim is that the sense of endorsement that determines the force of assertional speech acts involves, as a minimum, a kind of COMMITMENT to which is always potentially at issue.” (Pg. 193)
He concludes, “The recognition of propositional contents that are objective in this sense is open to any community whose inferentially articulated practices acknowledge the different normative statuses of commitment and entitlement. I argued… that this includes all RATIONAL communities---all of those whose practices include the game of giving and asking for reasons. According to the thesis of linguistic rationalism, this is all linguistic communities whatsoever. I have tried here to explain how we can begin to understand the objectivity of our thought—the way in which the contents of our thought go beyond the attitudes of endorsement or entitlement we have toward those contents---as a particular aspect of the normative find structure of rationality.” (Pg. 203-204)
This book will be of great interest to those who found Brandom’s “Making It Explicit” rather intimidating.
Robert Brandom is professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote in the Introduction to this 2000 book, “This is a book about the use and content of CONCEPTS. Its animating thought is that the meanings of linguistic expressions and the contents of intentional states, indeed, awareness itself, should be understood, to begin with, in terms of playing a distinctive kind of role in REASONING. The idea of privileging INFERENCE over REFERENCE in the order of semantic explanation is introduced and motivated… The overall topic is the nature of the conceptual as such… The aim is to focus on the conceptual in order to elaborate a relatively clear notion of the kind of AWARENESS of something that consists in applying a concept to it---paradigmatically by saying or thinking something about it.” (Pg. 1-2)
He continues, “The view expounded in these pages is a kind of conceptual pragmatism (broadly, a form of functionalism) in this sense. It offers an account of knowing (or believing, or saying) THAT such and such is the case in terms of knowing HOW (being able) to DO something. It approaches the contents of conceptually EXPLICIT propositions or principles from the direction of what is IMPLICIT in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs. ‘Assertion,’ ‘claim,’ ‘judgment,’ and ‘belief’ are all systematically ambiguous expressions---and not merely by coincidence. The sort of pragmatism adopted here seeks to explain what is asserted by appeal to what is judged by judgINGS, and what is believed by the role of believINGS… in general, the content by the act, rather than the other way around.” (Pg. 4)
He goes on, “The line of thought pursued here is … a RELATIONAL LINGUISTIC approach to the conceptual. Concept use is treated as an essentially linguistic affair. Claiming and believing are two sides of one coin… in the sense that neither the activity of believing nor that of asserting can be made sense of independently of the other, and that their conceptual contents are essentially, and not just accidentally, capable of being the contents indifferently of both claims and beliefs… this approach takes the form of a linguistic pragmatism that might take as its slogan Sellar’s principle that ‘grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word.’” (Pg. 6)
Later, he adds, “My aim is to offer a quick sketch of the terrain against the background of which the approach pursued in the body of this work (and at greater length and in greater detail in ‘Making It Explicit’) takes its characteristic shape---to introduce and place those commitments, rather than so much as to begin to entitle myself to any of them… what distinguishes specifically DISCURSIVE practices from the doings of non-concept using creatures is their INFERENTIAL articulation. To talk about concepts is to talk about their role in reasoning… It is a RATIONALIST pragmatism, in giving pride of place to practices of giving and asking for reasons, understanding them as conferring conceptual content on performances, expressions, and states suitably caught up in those practices.” (Pg. 10-11)
He points out, “I am putting forward a view that is opposed to many (if not most) of the large theoretical, explanatory, and strategic commitments that have shaped and motivated Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century: empiricism, naturalism, representationalism, semantic atomism, formalism about logic, and instrumentalism about the norms of practical rationality… I take my expository and argumentative structure and the criteria of adequacy for having made a claim with a clear content, argued for it, and responsibly followed out its consequences resolutely from the Anglo-American tradition… What I am trying to do is in a clear and specific inferential sense make EXPLICIT what is IMPLICIT in various philosophically important concepts.” (Pg. 31-32) He adds, “My hope is that by slighting the similarities to animals… and highlighting the possibilities opened up by engaging in social practices of giving and asking for reasons, we will get closer to an account of being human that does justice to the kinds of consciousness and self-consciousness distinctive of us as CULTURAL, and nor merely NATURAL, creatures.” (Pg. 35)
He acknowledges, “the rationalist pragmatism and expressivism presented here is opposed to NATURALISM, at least as that term is usually understood. For it emphasizes what distinguishes discursive creatures, as subject to distinctively conceptual norms, from their non-concept-using ancestors and cousins. Conceptual norms are brought into play by social linguistic practices of giving and asking for reasons of assessing the propriety of claims and inferences.” (Pg. 26)
He outlines, “I work within the context of what I call there a ‘normative pragmatics.’ Specifically, I think of discursive practice as deontic scorekeeping: the significance of a speech act is how it changes what commitments and entitlements one attributes and acknowledges. I work also within the context of an ‘inferential semantics.’ That is, discursive commitments… are distinguished by their specifically inferential articulation… I further endorse an EXPRESSIVE view of logic. That is, I see the characteristic role that distinguishes specifically logical vocabulary as being making explicit… features of the game of giving and asking for reasons in virtue of which bits of NONlogical vocabulary play the roles that they do… Giving and asking for reasons for ACTIONS is possible only in the context of practices of giving and asking for reasons generally---that is, the practice of making and defending ‘claims’ or ‘judgments.’ … This is a point about explanatory AUTONOMY: I claim that one can explain the role of beliefs in theoretical reasoning (leading from claims to claims) without needed to appeal to practical reasoning, while I do not believe that one can do things in the opposite order.” (Pg. 81-82)
He argues, “In fact, there is nothing unintelligible about having beliefs for which we cannot give reasons. Faith---understood broadly as undertaking commitments without claiming corresponding entitlements-is surely not an incoherent concept. (Nor is it by any means the exclusive province of religion.) And should the convictions of the faithful turn out not only to be true but also … to result from reliable belief-forming processes, I do not see why they should not be taken to constitute knowledge.” (Pg. 105-106)
He explains, “How, then, OUGHT we to understand and significance of considerations of reliability in epistemology? How can we properly acknowledge both the Founding Insight and Goldman’s Insight while avoiding both the Conceptual and the Naturalistic Blindspot? I think the key to answering these important questions is to see that, far from being opposed to considerations of what is a good reason for what, concern with reliability should itself be understood as concern with the goodness of a distinctive kind of INFERENCE. I will call this idea the ‘Implicit Insight’ of epistemological reliabilism.” (Pg. 117)
He states, “I take it that liability to demands for justification---that is, demonstration of entitlement---is another major dimension of the responsibility one undertakes, the commitment one makes, in asserting something. In making an assertion one implicitly acknowledges the propriety, at least under some circumstances, of demands for reasons, for justification of the claim one has endorsed, the commitment one has undertaken. Besides the COMMITTIVE dimension of assertional practice, there is the CRITICAL dimension: the aspect of the practice in which the propriety of those commitments is assessed. Apart from this critical dimension, the notion of REASONS gets no grip. So the overall claim is that the sense of endorsement that determines the force of assertional speech acts involves, as a minimum, a kind of COMMITMENT to which is always potentially at issue.” (Pg. 193)
He concludes, “The recognition of propositional contents that are objective in this sense is open to any community whose inferentially articulated practices acknowledge the different normative statuses of commitment and entitlement. I argued… that this includes all RATIONAL communities---all of those whose practices include the game of giving and asking for reasons. According to the thesis of linguistic rationalism, this is all linguistic communities whatsoever. I have tried here to explain how we can begin to understand the objectivity of our thought—the way in which the contents of our thought go beyond the attitudes of endorsement or entitlement we have toward those contents---as a particular aspect of the normative find structure of rationality.” (Pg. 203-204)
This book will be of great interest to those who found Brandom’s “Making It Explicit” rather intimidating.
June 22, 2019
This provides a succinct overview of Brandom's inferentialism. Chapter 6 is an attempt to show how inferentialism makes room for objectivity, for the acknowledgement of standards that are relevantly independent of practitioners' attitudes, but it is ultimately less than convincing. In this light, it is no surprise that much of Brandom's latest book on Hegel is an attempt to provide a substantially more robust account of objectivity that takes account of both the social dimension, as Brandom does in Chapter 6 and in Making it Explicit, as well as the historical dimension of linguistic practices.
June 10, 2022
Brandom es lo mejor que ha parido el mundo en mucho tiempo. Crítica: por favor, no le pongas tantos nombres a las cosas (y no los cambies de una obra a otra!) (O de un cap a otro!!)
November 11, 2022
Brandom es un maldito genio y punto
March 4, 2023
Challenging. Illuminating but challenging.
April 30, 2024
i dont agree
January 7, 2025
banger (ni siquiera lo acabé)
March 31, 2008
Once you can hack through the fairly esoteric technical vocabulary being used, this is really a great book. Though I don't know much about the history of analytic philosophy, I'd guess that Brandom's philosophy is probably largely informed by later Wittgenstein.
I'm all over the idea of reading Making It Explicit once I have time.
I'm all over the idea of reading Making It Explicit once I have time.
August 27, 2008
Cool overview of Brandom's thought. Pragmatic Rationalism--unh.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews