Asserting

  • Robert B. Brandom University of Pittsburgh, USA
  • Kurt Wischin Universidad de Granada, Spain
Keywords: Assertions, Content, Judgement, Inference, Practice

Abstract

In this paper, written more than ten years before Making it Explicit, I take a close look at the pivotal role which assertions play in human interactions. Tending a bridge from the Kantian theory of judgements to Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy, with the Fregean notion of conceptual content providing the pillars, and relying on the teachings drawn from the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy as keystones, I begin by questioning the dominant view of representationalism in analytical philosophy after Russell, Carnap and Tarski. It is here that I begin weaving the conceptual network that will eventually blossom into the program of pragmatic rationalism with logical inferentialism and semantic expressivism as pivotal notions, manifest in our game of asking for and giving reasons. It is for these reasons that I agree that a bilingual version of this early piece seems a good starting point for the reflections on what unites and what divides la philosophical visions of Wittgenstein and my own.

Author Biographies

Robert B. Brandom, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Robert Boyce Brandom works on the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of logic, on German idealism and neo–pragmatism, and on Wilfrid Sellars. His most important books are Making It Explicit (Harvard, 1994) and Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford, 2008). His most recent books are Reason in Philosophy (Harvard 2009), Perspectives on Pragmatism (Harvard, 2011), From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars (Harvard, 2014) and Wiedererinnerter Idealismus (Suhrkamp, 2015). Professor Brandom has given the John Locke lectures at Oxford, the Hempel lectures at Princeton, the Howison and Townsend lectures at Berkeley, a William James lecture at Harvard, and the Woodbridge lectures at Columbia. He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at All Souls College Oxford. In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2004 he received the Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Kurt Wischin, Universidad de Granada, Spain

Kurt Wischin is currently CPhil at the University of Granada, Spain. He got in touch with philosophy first at the University of Vienna in the 1970s, obtained a BA in Philosophy from the University of Queretaro, Mexico and an MPhil at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico. His main interest centres in Philosophy of Language and early Analytical Philosophy, in particular, Frege and Wittgenstein. He has published articles and translations in some anthologies and academic reviews.

References

Baier, Kurt (1966). “Responsibility and Freedom,” In Ethics and Society, edited by Richard T. De George. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Brandom, Robert (1966). “Truth and Assertibility.” Journal of Philosophy 73, no. 6: pp. 137-149.

Brandom, Robert (1979). “Freedom and Constraint by Norms.” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 3: pp. 187-196.

De George, Richard T. (ed.) (1966), Ethics and Society. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Dummett, Michael (1973). Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckwork.

Frege, Gottlob (1979). Posthumous Writings, edited by Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel, and Friedrich Kaulbach. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grogono, Peter (1980). Programming in Pascal. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Rorty, Richard (1970). “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental.” Journal of Philosophy 67: pp. 399-424.

Searle, John (1969). Speech Acts, London: Cambridge University Press.

Sellars, Wilfrid (1963). “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, In Science, Perception, and Reality. New York, NY: Humanities Press.

Published
2019-06-30
How to Cite
[1]
Brandom, R.B. and Wischin, K. 2019. Asserting. Disputatio. 8, 9 (Jun. 2019), 13-44. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2631649.

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