Constructing Commitment: Brandom's Pragmatist Take on Rule‐Following

Abstract

According to a standard criticism, Robert Brandom's “normative pragmatics”, i.e. his attempt to explain normative statuses in terms of practical attitudes, faces a dilemma. If practical attitudes and their interactions are specified in purely non‐normative terms, then they underdetermine normative statuses; but if normative terms are allowed into the account, then the account becomes viciously circular. This paper argues that there is no dilemma, because the feared circularity is not vicious. While normative claims do exhibit their respective authors' practical attitudes and thereby contribute towards establishing the normative statuses they are about, this circularity is not a mark of Brandom's explanatory strategy but a feature of social practice of which we theorists partake.

Two Pillars of Institutions: Constitutive Rules and Participation

“…19 Calibration can also take place at a more complex level that entails discussions about the linguistic norms that guide our practice. In a series of papers, Matthias Kiesselbach (2012;2020) has drawn attention to the fact that language contains a practice of calibration or a "calibration game", as he calls it, that allows participants to render their own commitments (or that of others) explicit. A calibration game of this kind is part of a more comprehensive shared practice, typically that of an articulate language that allows for discussions over the use of certain terms.…”

On Being Bound to Linguistic Norms. Reply to Reinikainen and Kaluziński

“…Notice, however, that according to the view presented here, conventions and/or coordination equilibria are not central to the elucidation of normativity. 6 For more on this, seeKiesselbach (2012Kiesselbach ( , 2014. The ideas sketched here are, of course, far from a complete account of meaning, at most a rough picture of its scaffolding.…”

“…I lift this formulation fromKiesselbach (2012).10 Past communicative success typically suffices for practical purposes (in fact, at the limit, there is nothing else to go by, because all signals -even those used in calibration -are open for interpretation, and for that, we are forced to judge on the basis of finite stretches of past linguistic conduct). Only before this background did my original paper approvingly cite Brandom's default-challenge structure(Brandom 1994, 177; Kiesselbach 2014, 436) when relaxing the assumption that agents always start by explicitly signaling which norms they (are about to) follow.…”

“…InKiesselbach (2012), I have focused on yet another dimension of circularity: to make a normative pronouncement, for example a pronouncement about the appropriateness of someone's assessment of someone else, is to display an attitude which contributes to validating the normative pronouncement. I show this with respect to value-and meaning-statements.…”