Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment

By Robert B. Brandom

Book Overview

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--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. 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. Making It Explicit is the first attempt 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 center 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. 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674543300
• ISBN13: 9780674543300
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 768 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A complex and rewarding work.

An at times frustratingly complex work of philosophy, which is well worth the effort. Brandom successfully tranposes ideas and concepts from transcendental philosophy (Heiddeggger, Kant, Hegel) into an analytic idiom. As others have sited Brandom is not an easy philosopher to understand, it takes time and effort to get through this text, but the reward is certainly worth the effort, in that Brandom is one of the very few (constructive) philosophers to defend the concept of rationality (Habermas being the other) using a convincing and novel approach which actually succeeds in answering the postmodern challenge to reason (by addressing their arguments directly). Oh, would urge anyone having difficulty understanding some of Brandom's arguments to check out Jeremy Wanderer's book on Brandom.

Culminates a venerable analytic philosophical tradition.

Brandom deals with a number of outstanding problems in philosphy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind as these came to be construed by several generations of analytic philosophy beginning with Frege and continuing through Quine, Davidson, and Dummett. His solutions fall out of a Sellarsian theory grounded in the idea that meaning, inference, and epistemic justification are grounded in norms governing social interactions and practices. Brandom's treatment of standard questions of reference which have plagued us since Russell are particularly original and ingenious. Like the rest of his themes, this account is developed in detail with admirable rigor and honesty. Difficult but indespensible reading.

Difficult reading but well worth it.

Finally, a book has come along which discusses Wilfrid Sellars philosophy which is even more difficult to read than Sellars himself. Brandom writes like a medieval scholastic footnoting and expanding the ideas envisioned by Wilfrid Sellars and conflated by Richard Rorty. Still, if one has the patience to make through this sometimes tedious 750 page book, one will be greatly rewarded.