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Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment

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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.

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)!

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.

This book shines a new light on everything that matters in 20th century philosophy and, hence, on almost everything that matters in modern philosophy before it. Juergen Habermas rightfully recommends it (in "Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung"). It fruitfully brings together the linguistic turn and pragmatic philosophy, continuing in this sense the work of Richard Rorty, but in much more detail, und hence offering a deeper understanding of the topics at issue. It is not an easy read. But, as Wittgenstein used to say: Philosophy is not (that) easy.

I think this book should be would as a must read for students of contemporary philosophy.Wahrheit Und Rechtfertigung

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.

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.

This books trys to fulfill very worthy philosophical ambitions - drawing attention to the philosophical importance of explicating the obvious. However the two systemic failings of the text are that (a) it is too wordy, and (b) attempts to address too many topics in detail. Both of these qualities should have been trapped during the editorial process. I confess that I am partial to the author's mission. Unfortunately, the grammatical style of much of the writing is egregiously wordy - even by philosophical standards. The result is that large tracts in the book are uninspiring and require such careful stalking of clauses as to deprive the reader of rewarding intelligibility. The second failing arises from the range of topics covered - simply immense - with no thematic core pulling them into a coherent theory. The book wanders with its topics. I spent too long going through this book not to find something of value in it, but what is there (on commitment, etc.) could be stated succinctly in a much smaller text. The time I gave to the text would have been more profitably spent on looking back over Hacker and Baker's works on Wittgenstein.

Having plowed through several hundred pages of this book, I simply concluded that there was nothing here that had not already been pointed out by Wittgenstein, Frege, Sellars, Quine, etc.--the very philosophers who are referenced constantly but never coherently brought together or successfully reframed into Brandom's project. In short, a lot of rhetorical hot air, badly in need of editing. In hope, I tried Brandom's slimmer explication of inferentialism, and again was profoundly disappointed. There's no there there.

It's now over 1 1/2 years since I first read "Making It Explicit" and Brandom's theory has not ever proven to be useful for me. Except for Brandom's short (which means, by the standards of this book, several pages) remarks about "canonical designators" (which are somewhat nifty, but quite independent from his overall theory; which may be the reason...), not once did Brandom's work ever help me solve any philosophical problems. Needless to say that Brandom's semantics for logic never ever helped solve any problems in formal logic. Considering the tedious reading, the ridiculously low given-information/rhetoric ratio in 750 pages, and the lack of fruitfulness, I can now say, that "Making It Explicit" was one of the worst philosophical books I have read.