The Pragmatics of Making It Explicit

728417, "The Pragmatics of Making It Explicit"
John Benjamins Publishing Company | 2008-10-29 | ISBN: 9027222452 | 237 pages | PDF | 2,7 MB

Introduction
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer
Some books set standards by developing new perspectives on a whole field of
knowledge, thinking, and research. Robert Brandom’s
Making it Explicit (1994)
does precisely this. It marks a change in philosophical semantics insofar as it turns
away from the widespread idea to analyze concepts as truth-value functions (or
sortal classifications) on a given domain. As a result, philosophical analysis has to
do more than to reconstruct the corresponding functions on different levels in a
merely formal, in the end set theoretical, semantic model. Brandom shows, that in
semantics we better start with (material) inferences, or rather, with the normative
statuses and roles of entitlements and discursive commitments to such (material)
inferences. As a result, the content of an assertive speech act consists in the role
the assertion plays in a language game of giving reasons for certain (assertions
and) inferences to the hearer, and of answering questions, when we are asked to
support previous assertions by reasons. This means that assertions are especially
important speech acts; and the discursive practice of drawing material inferences
and asking for reasons plays a fundamental role for the semantics of sentences,
not the other way round. That is, the content of sentences and their (logical) ‘parts’,
the names, predicates and other words, consists in their contribution to the normative
proprieties when using the sentence in real dialogues. Other speech acts
presuppose the corresponding forms and norms of assertions. Therefore, they do
not stand on equal footing with assertions – such that we cannot equally well start
with imperatives, as a certain reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
wants to have it. In other words, the discursive practice of asserting, asking
for, and giving reasons plays a fundamental role in semantic analysis as a whole...

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