On Brandom’s Normative Pragmatics

Establishing Entitlements to Observational

Abstract

Brandom’s inferentialism is the thesis that meanings of linguistic expressions are determined by their roles in appropriate material inferences that are established in our discursive practices. Since Brandom tries to develop a general semantics to treat not only vocabulary in mathematics or logic but also empirical vocabulary used in our daily lives and scientific practices, one of the most important and difficult tasks of inferentialism is to establish appropriate empirical material inferences in his framework of normative pragmatics, which is supposed to describe our discursive practices. Observational reports play a key role in this task. It is necessary to show that we can explain sufficiently how subjects become entitled to make observational reports in normative pragmatics.

Our critical survey of Brandom’s main work Making It Explicit shows that his explanation of entitlements to make observational reports falls into infinite regress. This paper tries to show, however, that the problem of infinite regress can be dissolved by modifying the Hegelian mutual recognition model that Brandom develops in his later works Reason in Philosophy and Tales of the Mighty Dead. That is, although Brandom’s mutual recognition model also brings another kind of infinite regress that is distinct from the one in Making It Explicit, if we modify his model by introducing the concept desire for recognition, we can explain sufficiently how entitlements to make observational reports are instituted in normative pragmatics, avoiding the problem of infinite regress. The paper may therefore be regarded as a partial defense of Brandom’s inferentialism.