Publications

Publication details [#48058]

Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

One common criticism of deflationism is that it does not have the resources to explain defective discourse (e.g., vagueness, referential indeterminacy, confusion, etc.). This problem is especially pressing for someone like Robert Brandom, who not only endorses deflationist accounts of truth, reference, and predication, but also refuses to use representational relations to explain content and propositional attitudes. To address this problem, it is suggested that Brandom should explain defective discourse in terms of what it is to treat some portion of discourse as defective. To illustrate this strategy, the paper presents an extension of his theory of content and uses it to provide an explanation of confusion. The result is a theory of confusion based on Joseph Camp’s recent treatment. The extension of Brandom’s theory of content involves additions to his account of scorekeeping that allow members of a discursive practice to accept different standards of inferential correctness.