Same–saying with different rules: Robert Brandom and Wittgensteinian linguistic pragmatism

Abstract

In the Preface of Making It Explicit, Robert Brandom states that his philosophy of language follows Wittgenstein’s when addressing the question of how expressions come to mean something: the meaning of an expression is explained in terms of the rules of use within a linguistic community. In his exploration of human language, Wittgenstein makes us imagine, again and again, extreme situations so we may see how our language works in a normal situation. For instance, in sections 206 and 207 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests that a regular connection between speakers’ practice and their verbal behaviour must be there for us to consider verbal behaviour as a language. Section 206 concludes: “Shared human behaviour is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.” However, Wittgenstein is not interested here in exploring in detail how we might succeed in a particular case to understand an unknown language — that is not his point here. It is, however, a topic well within Brandom’s vast enterprise of working out the details of rational pragmatism and inferential semantics. His work might be conceived of, in this sense, as a continuation of an investigation left unfinished, perhaps by Wittgensteinian quietism. In chapter 8 of Making it Explicit, he proposes an answer, among others, to the question of how we ascribe propositional attitudes, resorting to this end in particular to the distinction between de dicto and de re ascriptions. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether Brandom’s proposal may be seen as answering a question Wittgenstein left tacit at the end of § 206 and whether his proposal collides with Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy. I suggest that it does not.