An Hegelian Solution to a Tangle of Problems Facing Brandom'S Analytic Pragmatism

Abstract

The innovative and ambitious program of analytic pragmatism introduced by Robert Brandom in his 1994 Making It Explicit and developed in subsequent writings (Brandom 1994(Brandom , 2000(Brandom , 2002(Brandom , 2009(Brandom , 2010(Brandom , 2011 constitutes one of the most thoroughgoing recent reinterpretations of the nature of analytic philosophy and its place in the history of philosophy. Brandom's philosophy has its basis in a semantic theory, "inferentialism", that treats the meaning of a judgment as dependent upon those inferential relations to other possible judgments within which it stands.Moreover, on his account, not only are these inferential relations necessary for a judgment's meaningfulness, they are also sufficient. 1 This "strong" inferentialism reverses the traditional "representationalist" account of these issues that he sees as dominating philosophy since the seventeenth century. On the representationalist account, the capacity for representation is seen as intrinsic to mental states, with expressions deriving their conceptual contents from those states. In contrast, for Brandom the conceptual contents of the mental states are best regarded as determined by the contents of the linguistic acts giving expression to them-acts directed to and interpretable by others. This focus on the primacy of action constitutes a type of pragmatism, but in a move highly unusual in analytic philosophy, Brandom links this inferentialist, analytic version of pragmatism to the rationalist-idealist tradition by treating his strong inferentialism as continuous with Hegel's transformation of Kant's transcendental idealism.1 "The weak inferentialist thesis is that inferential articulation is necessary for specifically conceptual contents. The strong inferentialist thesis is that broadly inferential articulation is sufficient for specifically conceptual contentfulness-that is, that there is nothing more to conceptual content than its broadly inferential articulation" (Brandom 1994, 131).

Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles in theLogicandEncyclopaedia

“…I agree entirely with Redding (2015) that Hegel developed a “weak” rather than a “strong” (Brandomian) inferentialism about conceptual content (intension) and linguistic meaning.…”

Hegel's Pragmatic Critique and Reconstruction of Kant's System of Principles in the 1807Phenomenology of Spirit.

“…L. Will (1997: 1-18 Shook & Good (2010). 2 I am encouraged in my reconstruction by the findings of Wolff (1986), Falkenburg (1987), Ferrini (1988Ferrini ( , 1991Ferrini ( -92, 2002Ferrini ( , 2009b, Burbidge (1996), Renault (2001), Moretto (2004) and Redding ( , 2015, none of whom bears responsibility for my present venture. Hegel's counterpart to Kant's Transcendental Deduction is the 1807 Phenomenology (Westphal 1989(Westphal , 2009b.…”

Rethinking Sellars’ Myth of the Given: From the Epistemological to the Modal Relevance of Givenness in Kant and Hegel

“…It was that aspect of Hegel's philosophy that J. N. Findlay had captured with his claim that "there never has been a philosopher by whom the Jenseitige, the merely transcendent, has been more thoroughly 'done away with'" (Findlay 1958: 19-20). It is along these lines that I have elsewhere argued for Hegel's philosophical stance as a variety of "actualism" (Redding 2017b(Redding , 2018, linking this to features of his logic that I have used to contrast with the approach to logic of Robert Brandom (Brandom 1994, Redding 2015).…”