Semantic Nihilism and Pragmatic Expressivism
About some tensions between Wittgenstein's linguistic pragmatism and Brandom's rational pragmatism
Abstract
Brandom expresses sympathy for, what he calls, Wittgenstein's semantic nihilism when directed at efforts to construct a reductive theory of semantics. But he thinks Wittgenstein is wrong to rule out any form of theory construction in philosophy. He says that what we need is not a philosophy without theory but one with many theories about our discursive practices. This article looks at some of the problems that arise from Wittgenstein and Brandom's different approaches to language philosophy.
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