Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment [Paperback]

Robert B. Brandom (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674543300 | ISBN-13: 978-0674543300 | Publication Date: November 1, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Making It Explicit has already developed a justified reputation as a major contribution to the philosophy of language. It takes the traditional ill-fitting story of the relationship between language and the world and turns it upside down. Instead of starting with the existence of the world and explaining what it is for language to represent the world, it starts with language and explains what it is for the world to be represented by language...With tremendous panache, he launches into accounts of normativity, inference, meaning, truth, reference and objectivity, trying to show that the later concepts in that list are made intelligible by the earlier.
--Rowland Stout (Times Literary Supplement )

Making It Explicit is a landmark in theoretical philosophy comparable to that constituted in the early seventies by A Theory of Justice in practical philosophy...Drawing upon the resources furnished by his intricate theory of language, Brandom succeeds in offering a thoroughly convincing description of the practices within which beings capable of language and action express their rationality and autonomy.
--Jürgen Habermas (Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung )

Robert Brandom's magnificent book is an attempt to rework the whole of the philosophy of language in terms of normative, socially articulated pragmatics. His approach, inferentialism, which he traces through Kant and Frege to Wittgenstein and Sellars, is opposed to a more standard approach, representationalism...Making It Explicit is written with an exhilarating argumentative relish and tremendous assurance and thoroughness.
--Rowland Stout (Mind )

Wilfrid Sellars described his project as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage...Brandom's work can usefully be seen as an attempt to usher philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage...This sort of free and easy transition between philosophy of language and mind on the one hand, and world-historical vision on the other, is reminiscent not only of Mead and Dewey but also of Gadamer and Habermas.
--Richard Rorty, Introduction to Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

An extraordinary philosophical book. Brandom has produced a work of great power, scope, and originality. He gives a plausible and powerful reading to the claim that "meaning is normative," or that the concept of meaning is a normative concept, and elucidates it at length. It turns out, in his hands, to be a claim of great philosophical fertility and power.
--Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan

Robert Brandom's Making it Explicit is an unusual book on the Anglo-American scene...What Brandom achieves is a convincing elaboration of the view of intentionality as a linguistic, normative and social-pragmatic affair...Brandom's book is the first detailed elaboration of the position that it is normative attitudes which distinguishes us, insofar as we are thinking and acting beings, from the physical. It will hopefully contribute to giving that position the attention it deserves in contemporary philosophy of mind.
--Michael Epsfield (Erkenntnis )

Review

Wilfrid Sellars described his project as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage...Brandom's work can usefully be seen as an attempt to usher philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage...This sort of free and easy transition between philosophy of language and mind on the one hand, and world-historical vision on the other, is reminiscent not only of Mead and Dewey but also of Gadamer and Habermas.
--Richard Rorty, Introduction to Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (November 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674543300
• ISBN-13: 978-0674543300
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #275,633 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Culminates a venerable analytic philosophical tradition., October 25, 1999

By 

James Bogen (pittsburgh, pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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.

43 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Much ado about nothing!, December 1, 1998

By 

Zeno of Citium (Regensburg/Deutschland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Paperback)

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)!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Groundbreaking Work, September 14, 2011

By 

Sigurd Jorem - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Paperback)

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.