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Reasoning, Reason Relations, and Semantics 2022 Lecture by Robert Brandom
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I sketch a pragmatics-first order of semantic explanation. It begins with an account of the practical attitudes of doxastic acceptance and rejection, and seeks to understand in terms of them the propositional contents expressed by the declarative sentences used in the speech acts of assertion and denial that manifest those attitudes publicly. In the first step of the argument, reason relations of implication and incompatibility are found to be implicit in reasoning practices. In the second step, semantic contents are understood as roles sentence play in those reason relations. Interpretations are offered of two sorts of semantics in these ultimately pragmatic terms: Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics (relying on work by Ulf Hlobil), and Dan Kaplan’s implicational phase-space semantics. Viewing both from a bilateral normative pragmatic perspective (inspired by Greg Restall and Dave Ripley) reveals a surprising isomorphism between these very different approaches to semantics. Text of paper and much more available at sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom
Directors & creators
Robert Brandom
Subjects
Robert Brandom, reasons, semantics, philosophy, inferentialism, pragmatics
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