Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment

by Robert B. Brandom

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Logic

768 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Robert 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.

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The late Wittgenstein's groundbreaking insight was that the meaning of a linguistic expression is constituted the (practical) use of that expression. Ordinary language philosophy sprung from this insight. But philosophers of this tradition tend to take for granted that meaning is constituted by use, and investigate other aspects of the pragmatics of language that follow from this assumption.

Brandom's work is groundbreaking; he faces, head-on, the question of exactly how the use of an expression can constitute its meaning. His account is systematic, precise, and detailed. Brandom describes his account as a combination of inferentialism and pragmatism regarding meaning. Inferentialism is opposed to representationalism. According to inferentialism, the meaning of a claim is derived from the inferential roles that the claim serves (more of this below). In contrast, representationalism holds that meaning of a claim is based in the referents of the subsentential elements of that claim (e.g. singular terms and predicates). According to pragmatism, we need to start off with examining our actual practices regarding language use, and then show how formal aspects of language are based in these lived practices (more of this below). This is opposed to varieties of formalism, which start with taking theoretical concepts for granted, and using these to explain the pragmatics of language.

We need to think of language as used by members of a linguistic community. As we go about our lives in a pre-reflective manner, all our actions, experiences, and uses of speech presuppose our commitments to various facts (e.g., when I avoid looking at the sun, this act presupposes that looking at the sun damages vision). According to Brandom, while we use language for many different purposes, these boil down to the basic use of assertion (so by analyzing the mechanics of assertion, we can discover how all other cases of language get their meanings). Assertions are the building blocks of this fundamental purpose of language: to ask for people's reasons (e.g., for the behaviors, claims, and attitudes they have), and to provide reasons in response to such demands. Thus, when we use language, we make implicitly presupposed facts explicit.

The reasons we would give in response to such a demand constitute the propositional contents of an assertion. Such reasons may be premises that we presume and that lead to our assertion, as the conclusion; or they may be consequences of our assertion, new claims to which we must commit in order to maintain rational consistency. For example, I assert "Staring at the sun is bad", and you demand my reasons for this assertion. If my presupposed premise was "The ultraviolet radiation is very powerful and can damage physical aspects of the eye" (along with other premises needed to amount to my particular assertion), these reasons were implicitly constitutive of the meaning of my assertion. Alternatively, if my presupposed premise was "It hurts my head when I look directly at the sun", my assertion would've had a different meaning according to this line of reasoning.

The criteria of justification (and thus the reasons we would provide, and the meaning that is fixed of our assertions) are socially-normatively regulated. Each member of a linguistic community has deontic statuses of commitment, entitlement, and responsibility. We are committed to various claims, to which all our beliefs and behaviors should be consistent. We are entitled to a commitment if we can justify it in the face of others' demanding for our reasons. We are responsible for our commitments by acknowledging that others hold us accountable (for living up to our commitments), and that we will be subject to punishments if we fail (e.g., others will revoke our entitlements). Every member of a community is governed by such normative concerns. This allows for our assertions to have determinate, regular contents, and for us to communicate and understand each other.

While the contents of this book definitely deserve a perfect rating, the writing style barely deserves a single star. Brandom writes with unnecessary repetition and jargon. His paragraphs often involve presenting the same idea in two, three, or more ways, when the idea could be more clearly and forcefully presented with choosing just one way. He too often "reminds" the reader what he had presented earlier in the book, by just repeating content. Rather than choose a simple term to represent a concept, he will string together multiple technical adjectives to serve as the official term, which is repeated everywhere; he could've just explained the concept in all its complexity once, and then give it a simple name, and readers would be able to understand. In order to get through this book, I had to learn to skillfully skim it. This was not initially straightforward to do. But eventually it became intuitive to predict which parts would be important, and which would not be.

Brandom's core theory is presented over chapters 3 and 4. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the philosophical problems to which his theory responds, and the background and competing theories that help situated his ideas. Chapters 5-8 show how Brandom's theory can account for core semantic concepts such as truth, reference, and singular terms. These 3 different parts of the book, I think, could be read quite independently (especially the last part). The introduction is useful for understanding his theory, but the implications of this theory spanning the second half of the book would be of interest only to readers steeped in debates about formal semantic concepts. I am not such a reader, so I skipped the last two chapters; I do not think this compromised the my understanding of his core theory.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in pragmatic approaches to language, theories of meaning, or social normativity.

[Joey Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I wanted to, I never had a class with him. However, I did see him only once from behind in the cathedral of learning , and I finally understood what it was like to be Hegel hiding in the ditch, looking at Napoleon.

He even had a flip phone in a holster on his belt

[Dan Yingst · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brandom never writes a sentence when he could write 200 pages. Interesting ideas, but Christ he's a bad writer.

[Ageel Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Making It Explicit, Robert Brandom argues that semantic content can be explicated through the social discursive practices of asking and giving reasons. In this project, he systematically constructs a model for discursive practices that eschews the representational idioms which he replaces with expressive vocabulary. Instead of employing the synthetic-analytic distinction and the other distinction of inner-outer to clarify conceptual content, Brandom uses the material inferences (taken from Sellars's paper ''Inference and Meaning'') to interpret semantic content. In this line of thought, semantic content is determined through material incompatibilities/compatibilities of doxastic commitments implicit in social discursive practices. However, these commitments and entitlements are made explicit by logical vocabulary. For instance, the use of singular terms as subsentential component is defined substitutionally to be symmetrically substituted-for expressions in what Brandom calls substitution-inferential-commitment. In a similar fashion, referential terms such as demonstratives and indexicals are treated as anaphorically dependent on recurrence commitments. On the problem of experience, Brandom takes an eliminativist position since he considers empirical content to be already explicated by the endorsement of doxastic commitment implicit in the differential reliable responses of noninferential reportings to the presence of perceptual objects.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN “INVESTIGATION INTO THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE”

Robert Brandom is professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote in the Preface of this 1994 book, “This book is an investigation into the nature of LANGUAGE: of the social practices that distinguish us as rational, indeed logical, concept-mongering creatures---knowers and agents… the body of the work aims to set criteria of adequacy for a theory of discursive practice, motivate the approach adopted, work the model out in detail, and apply it. The idea is to show what kind of understanding and explanatory power one gets from talking this way, rather than to argue that one is somehow rationally obliged to talk this way… One of the central tenets of the account of linguistic practice put forward here is that the characteristic AUTHORITY on which the role of assertions in communication depends is intelligible only against the background of a correlative RESPONSIBILITY to vindicate one’s entitlement to the commitments such speech acts express…

“One of the overarching methodological commitments that orients this project is to explain the MEANINGS of linguistic expressions in terms of their USE… The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically LINGUISTIC practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. The result is a new kind of conceptual-role semantics. It is at once rooted firmly in actual practices of producing and consuming speech acts, and sufficiently finely articulated to make clear how those practices are capable of conferring the rich variety of kinds of content that philosophers of language have revealed and reveled in.” (Pg. xi-xiii)

He continues, “the pragmatics presented here elaborates a conception of ‘normative statuses’; … it puts ‘deontic scorekeeping’---that is, the social practice of attributing and acknowledging commitments and entitlements, which implicitly institute these statuses. The theoretical work … is done by assessments of properties of INFERENCE. Semantic articulation is attributed and acknowledged by keeping score … of indirectly inferential ‘substitutional’ and ‘anaphoric’ commitments, which relate the subsentential contents of expressions of other grammatical categories.” (Pg. xviii)

He explains, “So an EXPRESSIVE theory of logic is presented here. On this view, the philosophical significance of logic is not that it enables those who master the use of logical locutions to PROVE a special class of claims---that is, to entitle themselves to a class of commitments in a formally privileged fashion. The significance of logical vocabulary lies rather in what it lets those who master it SAY—the special class of claims it enables them to express… Logic is the organ of semantic self-consciousness. It brings out into the light of day the practical attitudes that determine the conceptual contents members of a linguistic community are able to express---putting them in the form of explicit claims, which can be debated, for which reasons can be given and alternatives proposed and assessed.” (Pg. xix)

He acknowledges, “This is a long book. Its length is a consequence of the demands made ty its governing methodological aspirations: to eschew representational primitives, to show how content is related to use, and to achieve self-referential expressive completeness… The aim is not to replace that familiar idiom but to enrich it. The promised enrichment is of two sorts. First, there is the greater depth of field afforded by the stereoscopic vision made available by an alternative to familiar ways of talking about intentional phenomena. Second, there is the grounding and illumination of representational tropes secured by displaying the implicit features of discursive practice that are expressed explicitly by their use.” (Pg. xxii)

In the first chapter, he asks, “That is it we do that is so special? The answer… is that we are distinguished by capacities that are broadly cognitive. Our transactions with other things, and with each other, in a special and characteristic sense MEAN something to us, they have a conceptual content for us, we UNDERSTAND them in one way rather than another… Picking us out by our capacity for reason and understanding expresses a commitment to take SAPIENCE, rather than SENTIENCE as the constellation of characteristics that distinguishes us. Sentience is what we share with non-verbal animals such as cats---the capacity to be AWARE in the sense of being AWAKE...
Sapience concerns understanding or intelligence, rather than irritability or arousal… one explains its behavior by attributing it to intentional states such as belief and desire as constituting reasons for that behavior.” (Pg. 4-5)

He suggests, “propositional contents have a pragmatic priority, not only in the setting of assessments of the significance of speech acts, but also in the setting of attributions of intentional states that do not evidently depend on linguistic practices. Semantics must answer to pragmatics. The theoretical point of attributing semantic content to intentional states, attitudes, and performances is to determine the pragmatic significance of their occurrence in various contexts… It is specifically PROPISITIONAL contents that determine these pragmatic significances, so it is specifically propositional contents that it is the task of semantic explanatory theories to attribute.” (Pg. 83)

He outlines, “The leading idea of the account to be presented here is that belief can be modeled on the kind of inferentially articulated COMMITMENT that is undertaken or acknowledged by making an assertion. These may be called ‘doxastic’ or ‘assertional’ commitments. This is the basic kind of DISCURSIVE commitment. The strategy is to describe a simplified system of social practices in which something can be taken or treated AS (having the significance of) an assertion---the acknowledging of commitment to an assertible content.” (Pg. 157)

He states, “The rational will as described here is not a particularly puzzling phenomenon. Its normative dimension is explained by extending the account of discursive commitments to encompass not only doxastic but practical deontic statuses. Its causal dimension is explained by appealing to the causal efficacy of the deontic attitude of ACKNOWLEDGING commitments: acknowledgements of doxastic commitments can be reliably differentially elicited as responses to environmental situations in perception, and acknowledgements of practical commitments can reliably differentially elicit performances as responses in action… We are rational creatures exactly insofar as our acknowledgement of discursive commitments makes a difference to what we go on to do---on the side of action, insofar as we incorporate a connection between what is expressed by ‘should’ and what is expressed by ‘shall.’” (Pg. 271)

He recapitulates, “We are the creatures who say ‘we’---who can explicitly take or treat someone as one of us. Adopting this practical attitude is adopting a discursive normative stance… Sapience of the sort distinctive of us is a status achieved within a structure of mutual recognition: of holding and being help responsible, of acknowledging and exercising authority. The specifically DISCURSIVE character of that normative social structure… consists in the INFERENTIAL articulation of those recognitive practices. We are the ones who give and ask for REASONS for what we say and do… Offering a reason is making a claim… [such as] the undertaking (by overt, explicit acknowledgement) of a doxastic commitment… We are sentient creatures as well as sapient ones, but our sentience is different from that of those who cannot give and ask for reasons… We are practical creatures, as well as linguistic ones, but our purposive activity is different from that of those who cannot give and ask for reasons…. Our mammalian cousins, primate ancestors, and neonatal offspring… are interpretable as perceiving and acting only in a derivative sense… Our discursive practices make us semantically autonomous in a sense in which their nondiscursive practices do not.” (Pg. 277)

He notes, “The claim developed and defended here is that representational locutions should be understood as making explicit certain features of communicating by claiming----the INTERPERSONAL giving and asking for reasons… The thesis is that the REPRESENTATIONAL dimension of propositional content is conferred on thought and talk by the SOCIAL dimension of the practice of giving and asking for reasons… However, discursive practice, the giving and asking for reasons... involves both interCONTENT and interpersonal dimensions. The claim is that the representational aspect of the propositional contents that play the inferential roles of premise and conclusion is to be understood in terms of the social dimension of communicating reasons and assessing the significance of reasons offered by others… Representationally contentful claims arise in the social context of communication and only then are available to be employed in solitary cogitation.” (Pg. 496-497)

He summarizes, “We discursive creatures---rational, logical, concept-using ones---are construed here in EXPRESSIVE terms; we are the ones who can make it explicit… the methodological principle that what is implicit is to be made theoretically, as opposed to practically, intelligible precisely by exercising our defining attribute---by making it explicit. When the inferences implicit in the use of a word are made explicit in the form of conditionals, the fact that the proprieties governing them are relative to a background of collateral commitments is manifest… A word---‘dog,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘Republican’---has a different significance in my mouth than it does in yours, because an insofar as what follows from its being applicable, its consequences of application, differ for me, in virtue of my collateral beliefs…” (Pg. 587) Later, he adds, “[we should be] understanding ourselves as not merely RATIONAL, but LOGICAL normative creatures, as not merely EXPRESSIVE, but SELF-EXPLICATING ones.” (Pg. 639)

He continues, “So the theoretical attempt to track down the ‘source’ of the normative dimension in discourse leads us right back to our own implicitly normative practices. The structure of those practices can be elucidated, but always from within our normative practices of giving and asking for reasons. That is the project that has been pursued in this work. Its aim is not reductive but expressive: making explicit the implicit structure characteristic of discursive practice as such… In the end, though, this expressive account of language, mind, and logic is an account of who WE are. For it is the account of the sort of thing that constitutes itself as an expressive being---as a creature who makes explicit, and who makes itself explicit. We are sapients: rational, expressive—that is, discursive—beings. But we are more than rational expressive beings. We are also LOGICAL, SELF-expressive beings. We not only make IT explicit, we make OURSELVES explicit AS making it explicit. ” (Pg. 649-650)

This is a rather difficult book, but one that will be of great interest to students of contemporary analytic and linguistic philosophy.

[Zo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing work in its ambition, thoroughness, and, possibly, success? There is so much here that Brandom attempts to do that it is impossible to keep it all in my head for assessment, especially because most of the topics would require much more study for me to feel confident. But I felt like I was able to follow most of what was going on, and generally found myself nodding my head in agreement with much of Brandom's thought. His pragmatic explanation of the notion of reasoning and linguistic meaning (inferentialism), his logical expressivism, the deflationary accounts of truth/reference, and the account of how social practices lead to representational concepts all seem deeply right (and in many ways a "making explicit" of many of LW's fundamental insights). Where I am most unsure is Brandom's inability to construe the development of intentionality and normativity from the non-normative aside from appealing to language, which as Dennett points out seems insufficient, especially if we think about the reverse engineering question. Along with that his account of the objectivity of conceptual norms seems uneasy to me, and more of a scientific antirealism than he would want to own up to? I'm also not sure how to tie his account in with contemporary phil of mind (such as a PP story). All of these are big issues which threaten crucial parts of his project, and I am not sure to what degree they could be resolved in his work, or if they can't be resolved how much that calls into questions other aspects of the work? I don't know. I need to think way more about pretty much everything herein. Regardless, this is a truly exciting and amazing work in what it tries to do as an account of the nature of rationality/sapience/language.

[jeremiah]

Read about a third of this for a course. Brandom is an intellectual tomb raider and isn't nearly as provocative a writer as Rorty. Might be something more for me here next time around.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read first half, skimmed second. Long, hard, technical, dry.

[Bene Pétursson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fucking fantastic book. Highly recommend to those interested in pragmatism or postmodernism, provides the first (that I've read) systematic attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for relativism.

[saml · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fight the bourgeois concept of representation!

[Harry Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

∞/10

[Aislan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um livro grandioso com um projeto de mesma qualidade. Finalmente terminei esta primeira leitura com milhares de anotações. Várias possibilidades de desenvolvimento filosófico, nos mais diversos âmbitos. Feliz e aliviado em terminar esta leitura.