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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Culminates a venerable analytic philosophical tradition., October 25, 1999
This review is from: Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Hardcover)
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.
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43 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Much ado about nothing!, December 1, 1998
Brandom promises the reader an investigation into the very nature of human language and reasoning and thus an "account of who we are". Unfortunately, chapter after chapter, the author repeats this intention, assures the reader of the importance of his particular approach, refers to Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein and Sellars, tells us that other theories are no good (refutations of these come in only sketchy and are taken over from Wittgenstein)and again repeats the nature of his project, and all of that in an tantalizingly complicated and redundant style. But when you are looking for precise arguments, or even a rigorous abstract account of his theory (which would be analytic philosophy in the best sense) you may find a few scattered lines towards the end of each section. If you consider Brandom's "theory" as a whole, the most important parts are missing: How does Brandom get from practice to normative contents? What does Brandomian normativity consist in? On both issues, the reader only gets diffuse hints, which to me even seem in contradiction with the whole proclaimed scope of the theory (i.e. to explicate intentional states and observation sentences.) With these decisive premises of his theory unsettled (you simply have to accept Brandoms view in order to be able to continue to follow the book; or you might try to guess yourself on how to justify the premises), what remains is a reconstruction of some semantics (logical and ordinary language) in terms of the Brandomian primitive operators of entitlement and commitment (which smell like a pair of mutually definable modal operators) and of incompatibility, which Brandom himself cannot explicate without using LOGICAL vocabulary. That logic can be formulated in different ways and by different primitive operators is no big deal anyway. And that operators can be given some interpretation from everyday life is not as well. The project of the book is very challenging and I was looking forward to see Brandoms theory expounded, but nothing came in this work. The author proclaims his work a great synthesis of Kant, Wittgenstein and Sellars, and also partially the early Frege. My feeling is that reading Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein and Sellars in their own rights is much more benefitting. And if Frege had written this work, he would only have needed 150 pages, instead of 650 (plus footnotes)!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Groundbreaking Work, September 14, 2011
I spent three months of my life reading this book, trying to grasp every little detail. That was half a year ago. Now I find myself reading it again, equally satisfied with every step of argument Brandom makes, even if I am more able to view those steps critically. This is a difficult and demanding book to read. If you have the time, discipline and devotion to work your way through it, I cannot imagine that you will not be rewarded. Because of the radical character of Brandom's project (replace representation with inference; natural regularities with normative pragmatics etc.), he has to be almost excessively thorough in his argument to meet the dialectical demands. Thus, the theory--which is really about semantic content, but touches upon many features of intentionality--is built from the ground up, and aims ultimately to answer how our intentional states and expressions can come to contain objective representational content. Making it Explicit answers that in a manner originally due to Kant (by analyzing the conditions for the possibility of such content), but the conditions he accords that status are nothing like Kantian forms of cognition. Instead we get a normatively pragmatic and social-perspectival account of how states and expressions are treated with content, how, in extension, norms and status are instituted that outrun the "scorekeepers'" attitudes. The conceptual content states and expressions come to contain, are analyzed as being identified inferentially (inferential role semantics). The account of the inferential structure of content is satisfyingly detailed, and takes up the most space in Making it Explicit. It contains three levels, corresponding to 1) the propositional, 2) the sub-sentential conceptual, and 3) the conceptual content of non-repeatable tokenings of linguistic expressions. The inferential dimensions answering to these three levels are 1) ordinary inference, 2) substitutional inference, 3) anaphoric chains.
It is easy for me to say that this is a "must-read" book, but that would not be fair in consideration of its length and difficulty. What I can say is that anyone who has the opportunity to embark on the project of reading it will come out enlightened and enriched.
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