Brandom and the Logicist's Dilemma

Workshop on Bob Brandom's Recent Philosophy of Language: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism

Raffaela Giovagnoli

PID  :  80129

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

In this introduction to the tutorials I will give a brief sketch of the place of Brandom's ideas in the network of classical authors, focusing on some of the central tenets intro duced by Making it Explicit (MIE), which antecedes the ideas developed in Between Saying andDoing (BSD). I give here a schematic presentation with some references to pages in MIE andBSD..The core point of Brandom’s original book Between Saying and Doing is to de scribe discursive practices and to introduce norms for deploying an autonomous vo cabulary. Brandom reinforces his criticism to the Fodor’s theory of concepts andrefuses the explanation of discursive practices in terms of syntactical operations as ispresented by the so called “functionalism” in “strong” artificial intelligence. He doesnot even accept weak functionalism (Searle), rather he aims to present a “logical func tionalism” along the line of Gilbert Ryle’s account of conditionals. According toBrandom, we are not only creatures who possess abilities such as to respond to envi ronmental stimuli we share with thermostats and parrots but also “conceptual crea tures” i.e. we are logical creatures in a peculiar way. It is a fascinating enterprise to investigate how machines simulate human behaviorand the project of Artificial Intelligence, a project that began meads of the XX cen tury, could tell us interesting things about the relationship between syntactical abili ties and language. Brandom seriously considers the functioning of automata becausehe moves from some basic abilities and he gradually introduces more sophisticatedpractices, which show how an autonomous vocabulary raises. This analysis is a“pragmatist challenge’ for different perspectives in analytic philosophy such as for mal semantics (Frege, Russell, Carnap and Tarski), pragmatics both in the sense ofthe semantics of tokenreflexive expressions (Kaplan and Stalnaker) and of Grice,who grounds conversation on classical semantics. Brandom uses the term “pragmat ics” to characterize his enterprise in the sense of the study of the use in virtue ofwhich they are meaningful at all:In its most ambitious form, as in the present project, such an enterprise would as pire to articulate something like a logic of the relations between meaning and use(Brandom 2008 p 8).The title of the book suggests that we must look at what it is to use locutions as ex pressing meaning namely at what we must do in order to count as saying what thevocabulary lets practitioners express. We introduce “practicevocabulary sufficiency”or “PVsufficiency” which obtain when exercising a specific set of abilities is suffi