Publications

Publication details [#48055]

Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin, ed. 2008. The Pragmatics of Making it Explicit. (Benjamins Current Topics 15). John Benjamins. viii+237 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English

Annotation

Robert Brandom’s Making it Explicit (1994) marks a Copernican turn in the philosophy of mind and language, as this collection of critical essays together with Brandom’s enlightening answers convincingly shows. Though faithful to Wittgenstein’s pragmatic turn in spirit, Brandom gives a systematic account of human sapience as a whole – by grounding our relation to the world by words on our discursive practice, assessing its normative basis, which is instituted by scorekeeping activities and sanctioning attitudes, and thus trying to avoid mystifying mentalism as well as dogmatic naturalism in our account of the human spirit. The topics emphasized in this volume concern the place of Brandom’s inferentialist and normative semantics in 20th century philosophy of language (Frege, Carnap, Quine), also in comparison to cognitive linguistics (Chomsky), instrumentalist pragmatism and functionalist understanding of the use of signs (Sellars), deflation of intentionality (Brentano), the logical analysis of predicative structures (Kant), the role of constructions for understanding, the constitution of objectivity by de-re-ascriptions and the problem of anti-representationalism, or how to treat malapropisms (Davidson).

Articles in this volume