Brandom Tutorials09

Towards an Analytic Pragmatism 2009 April 19 Introduction to tutorials

tutorials
Today:
Carlo Penco: Assertion and inference
Italo Testa: Some Pragmatist Themes in Brandom's Reconstructive Rationality (on: Tales of the Mighty Dead)
Raffaela Giovagnoli: Brandom and "The Logicist's Dilemma”
(on: Ch. II of Between Saying and Doing)
Tomorrow:
Daniele Santoro: Modality, Normativity, and Incompatibility: A conceptual map of Analytic Pragmatism
(on Ch. IV and V of Between Saying and Doing)
Giorgio Bertolotti: Pragmatism and Intentionalilty
(on: Ch. VI of Between Saying and Doing)

Background
Humans & Parrots on inference
Assertion
Holism
Anaphora

1
background

Kant
James-Peirce Frege
Carnap Wittgenstein
Sellars Dummett
Brandom

Wittgenstein: Dummett: (& Gentzen)
Language games Meaning as Justification
Sellars:
Game of giving and asking for reasons
David Lewis:
Rorty: Scorekeeping & L.G.
Avoid “representations”
Phil. Mirr.Nat.
Chastain:
Davidson: rigidity (Kripke, Kaplan) as
Holism anaphora

2
Humans and parrots on inference

Inferential semantics
Knowing the meaning = ability to give and ask for reasons (Sellars)
Dummett: give justifications: premises from which the sentence comes
Brandom: inferential role semantics
The meaning of a sentence is its inferential role:
the set of its premises and consequences

Humans & parrots
Rrrred!
Hume: parrots do not have ideas
Brandom: parrots do not have an inferential network
Humans do: “it is red, therefore..
it has a color, it is not blue,…
and I can say it because my perception system is OK

Normative pragmatics
Inferential semantics is embedded in a normative dimension
the key concept is the concept of assertion
making an assertion is to get a normative status
felicity conditions of the speech act of assertion

3
Assertion

To make an assertion is to master the game
(of giving and asking for reasons)
NORMATIVE DIMENSION:
(1) I have rights (reasons) to assert p
I assert p = entitlements [permissions]
(2) I am committed to accept its conseguences
committments [obligations]

Asserting and reporting
Entitlements & commitments are normative statuses
but
We attribute normative statuses to others:
we have normative attitudes
To attribute entitlements & commitments to others = practicall attitude
Just reporting - (practical attitude implicit in scorekiiping)
Acknowledging (making it explicit )
Ascribing beliefs or commitments
Undertaking as my own commitment

example
Prosecutor:
The defence attorney believes a pathological liar is a trustworthy witness
Defence attorney:
Not so; what I believe is that the man who just testified is trustworthy witness
Proscutor:
Exactly, an I have presented evidence that the man who just testified is a pathological liar
The disagreement is no whether liars are trustworthy witnesses:)

How to make explicit the division of the responibility involved in the report?
Using de dicto-de re distinction to express
different attitudes for attributing beliefs to others
The defense attorney claims of [what I believe to be] a pathological liar that he is trustworthy witness

4
Holism

Every assertion is given in a networks of
entitlements (premises or justifications) and
commitments (accepting consequences)
However there is no apriori definition of which entitlements or comitments are the right ones
How communication can be successful if there is no agreement on the meanings ou our assertions?

holism and communication
If we don’t share the same meaning
How can we agree or disagree on what we say?
Communication is not apriori sharing of meanings but
cooperating in a joint activity of
converging towards the same meanings
assessing the meanings
searching for objectivity

5
Anaphora

Kaplan tought us the central role of tokens over types sentences with indexicals (I, here..) and demonstraties (that..) are not evaluable unless we refer to the context of utterance
The mistake of Kaplan (and Keipke) is to think in “naturalistic terms” as if “that”, “this” were explessions whose unique role is the prolungation of the phisical direction of the fingers
The role of indexicals and demonstrative is fundamentally linked to anaphora: “this bottle is full of water; do you want it ?”
Indexicals and demonstratives can be considered “anaphoric initiators” (at the beginning of an anaphoric chain)
The idea of causal chain in Kripke’s theory of direct reference is an obscure way to speak of “anaphoric chains”. Anaphora is what permits to reconstruct the different attitudes in discourse

Anaphora
“ this” does not work alone
because
To recognize an object you need to have a criterio of identity
( no entity without identity ), (Frege-Quine)
you need to recognize the object as the same object you need to be able to refer to it anaphorically
There cannot be deixis without anaphora
deixis presupposes anaphora

Conclusion: Two steps in MIT
Inferential Semantics inside Normative Pragmatics
meaning is explainde in a normative dimension of entitlements and commitments and attitudes over these entitlements or commitments
(2) The social route from Reasoning to Representing
objectivity and representation are the result of a social practive of the network of our attitudes towards our entitlements and inferential commitments.

The End
R. B. Brandom, Making it Explicit. Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment , Harvard U.P. Cambridge (Mass), 1994
R. B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons, An Introduction to Inferentialism , Harvard U.P Cambridge (Mass), 2002
R. B. Brandom, Between Sayng & Doing, towards an Analytic Pragmatism , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008

Brandom Tutorials09

by carlo penco on Apr 19, 2009

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