主页 Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism
Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to InferentialismRobert B. Brandom
Книга Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism Книги Психология, философия Автор: Robert B. Brandom Год издания: 2001 Формат: pdf Издат.:Harvard University Pres Страниц: 240 Размер: 1,1 ISBN: 0674006925 Язык: Русский0 (голосов: 0) Оценка:Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's work: the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit. Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics.
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Articulating Reasons Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Articulating Reasons AN INTRODUCTION TO INFERENTIALISM ◆ ◆ ◆ Robert B. Brandom Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 2001 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brandom, Robert. Articulating reasons : an introduction to inferentialism / Robert B. Brandom. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00158-3 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-00692-5 (pbk.) 1. Language and languages—Philosophy. 2. Semantics (Philosophy) 3. Inference. 4. Reasoning. 5. Language and logic. 6. Expression (Philosophy) I. Title. P106.B6938 2000 121'.68—dc21 99-057756 Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College To my wife, Barbara, whose loving support and patient indulgence over the years mean more to me than I can say Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Acknowledgments ◆ ◆ ◆ The lectures on which this book is based evolved under the inﬂuence of the responses of many audiences to which different versions have been presented in recent years. Here and there it has been possible to acknowledge particular contributions, but the cumulative effect of all those smart people thinking these things through with me—and the debt I owe for it—is incalculable. I am profoundly grateful. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Contents ◆ ◆ ◆ Acknowledgements Introduction 1 1 Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism 45 2 Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning 79 3 Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism 97 4 What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any? 123 5 A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing 157 6 Objectivity and the Normative 6 Fine Structure of Rationality 185 Notes 205 Index 222 Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ ◆ ◆ I. Strategic Context: The Nature of the Conceptual This is a book about the use and content of concepts. Its animating thought is that the meanings of linguistic expressions and the contents of intentional states, indeed, awareness itself, should be understood, to begin with, in terms of playing a distinctive kind of role in reasoning. The idea of privileging inference over reference in the order of semantic explanation is introduced and motivated in the ﬁrst chapter. Subsequent chapters develop that approach by using it to address a variety of philosophically important issues and problems: practical reasoning and the role of normative concepts in the theory of action, perception and the role of assessments of reliability in epistemology, the expressive role distinctive of singular terms and predicates (which, as subsentential expressions, cannot play the directly inferential role of premise or conclusion), propositional attitude ascriptions and the representational dimension of concept use, and the nature of conceptual objectivity. Although the discussion is intended to be intelligible in its own right—in each individual chapter, as well as collectively—it may nonetheless be helpful to step back a bit from the project pursued here and to situate it in the larger context of theoretical issues, possibilities, and approaches within which it takes shape. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2 ◆ Introduction The overall topic is the nature of the conceptual as such. This choice already entails certain signiﬁcant emphases of attention: within the philosophy of mind, on awareness in the sense of sapience rather than of mere sentience; within semantics, on speciﬁcally conceptual content, to the detriment of concern with other sorts of contentfulness; within pragmatics, on singling out discursive (that is, concept-using) practice from the background of various other kinds of skillful doing. The aim is to focus on the conceptual in order to elaborate a relatively clear notion of the kind of awareness of something that consists in applying a concept to it—paradigmatically by saying or thinking something about it. Addressing this topic requires making a series of choices of fundamental explanatory strategy. The resulting commitments need to be brought out into the open because they shape any approach to the conceptual in such important ways. Making this background of orienting commitments explicit serves to place a view in a philosophical space of alternatives. Features of an account that otherwise express nearly invisible (because only implicit) assumptions then show up as calling for decisions, which are subject to determinate sorts of challenges and demands for justiﬁcation. The major axes articulating the region inhabited by the line of thought pursued here can be presented as a series of stark binary oppositions, which collectively make it possible to map the surrounding terrain. 1. Assimilation or Differentiation of the Conceptual? One fork in the methodological road concerns the relative priority accorded to the continuities and discontinuities between discursive and nondiscursive creatures: the similarities and differences between the judgments and actions of concept users, on the one hand, and the uptake of environmental information and Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 3 instrumental interventions of non–concept-using organisms and artifacts, on the other. We can ask how sharp this distinction is— that is, to what extent and in what ways the possibility of intermediate cases can be made intelligible. And more or less independently of the answer to this question, it is possible for theorists to differ as to whether they start by describing a common genus and go on to elaborate differentiae (whether qualitative or in terms of some quantitative ordering by a particular kind of complexity), as opposed to beginning with an account of what is distinctive of the conceptual, which is only later placed in a larger frame encompassing the doings of less capable systems. Of course, wherever the story starts, it will need to account both for the ways in which concept use is like the comportments of nondiscursive creatures and the ways in which it differs. Theories that assimilate conceptually structured activity to the nonconceptual activity out of which it arises (in evolutionary, historical, and individual-developmental terms) are in danger of failing to make enough of the difference. Theories that adopt the converse strategy, addressing themselves at the outset to what is distinctive of or exceptional about the conceptual, court the danger of not doing justice to generic similarities. The difference in emphasis and order of explanation can express substantive theoretical commitments. Along this dimension, the story told here falls into the second class: dis continuities between the conceptual and non- or preconceptual are to the fore. The discussion is motivated by a concern with what is special about or characteristic of the conceptual as such. I am more interested in what separates concept users from non–concept users than in what unites them. This distinguishes my project from that of many in contemporary semantic theory (for instance, Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan), as well as from the classical American pragmatists, and perhaps from the later Wittgenstein as well. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 4 ◆ Introduction 2. Conceptual Platonism or Pragmatism? Here is another strategic methodological issue. An account of the conceptual might explain the use of concepts in terms of a prior understanding of conceptual content. Or it might pursue a complementary explanatory strategy, beginning with a story about the practice or activity of applying concepts, and elaborating on that basis an understanding of conceptual content. The ﬁrst can be called a platonist strategy, and the second a pragmatist (in this usage, a species of functionalist) strategy. One variety of semantic or conceptual platonism in this sense would identify the content typically expressed by declarative sentences and possessed by beliefs with sets of possible worlds, or with truth conditions otherwise speciﬁed. At some point it must then explain how associating such content with sentences and beliefs contributes to our understanding of how it is proper to use sentences in making claims, and to deploy beliefs in reasoning and guiding action. The pragmatist direction of explanation, by contrast, seeks to explain how the use of linguistic expressions, or the functional role of intentional states, confers conceptual content on them. The view expounded in these pages is a kind of conceptual pragmatism (broadly, a form of functionalism) in this sense. It offers an account of knowing (or believing, or saying) that such and such is the case in terms of knowing how (being able) to do something. It approaches the contents of conceptually explicit propositions or principles from the direction of what is implicit in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs. ‘Assertion’, ‘claim’, ‘judgment’, and ‘belief ’ are all systematically ambiguous expressions—and not merely by coincidence. The sort of pragmatism adopted here seeks to explain what is asserted by appeal to features of assertings, what is claimed in terms of claimings, what is judged by judgings, and what is believed by the role of believings (indeed, what is expressed by expressings of it)—in general, the content by the act, rather than the other way around. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 5 3. Is Mind or Language the Fundamental Locus of Intentionality? Concepts are applied in the realm of language by the public use of sentences and other linguistic expressions. They are applied in the realm of mind by the private adoption of and rational reliance on beliefs and other intentional states. The philosophical tradition from Descartes to Kant took for granted a mentalistic order of explanation that privileged the mind as the native and original locus of concept use, relegating language to a secondary, latecoming, merely instrumental role in communicating to others thoughts already full-formed in a prior mental arena within the individual. The period since then has been characterized by a growing appreciation of the signiﬁcance of language for thought and mindedness generally, and a questioning of the picture of language as a more or less convenient tool for expressing thoughts intelligible as contentful apart from any consideration of the possibility of saying what one is thinking. The twentieth century has been the century of language in philosophical thought, accelerating into something like a reversal of the traditional order of explanation. Thus Dummett defends a linguistic theory of intentionality: “We have opposed throughout the view of assertion as the expression of an interior act of judgment; judgment, rather, is the interiorization of the external act of assertion.”1 Dummett’s claim is emblematic of views (put forward in different forms by thinkers such as Sellars and Geach) that see language use as antecedently and independently intelligible, and so as available to provide a model on the basis of which one could then come to understand mental acts and occurrences analogically: taking thinking as a kind of inner saying. Such a view just turns the classical early modern approach on its head. Davidson claims that to be a believer one must be an interpreter of the speech of others, but that “neither language nor thinking can be fully explained in terms of the other, and neither has Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 6 ◆ Introduction conceptual priority. The two are, indeed, linked in the sense that each requires the other in order to be understood, but the linkage is not so complete that either sufﬁces, even when reasonably reinforced, to explicate the other.”2 Although Davidson shares some important motivations with Dummett’s purely linguistic theory, in fact these two views illustrate an important difference between two ways in which one might give prominence to linguistic practice in thinking about the use of concepts. Davidson’s claim, by contrast to Dummett’s, serves to epitomize a relational view of the signiﬁcance of language for sapience: taking it that concept use is not intelligible in a context that does not include language use, but not insisting that linguistic practices can be made sense of without appeal at the same time to intentional states such as belief. The line of thought pursued here is in this sense a relational linguistic approach to the conceptual. Concept use is treated as an essentially linguistic affair. Claiming and believing are two sides of one coin—not in the sense that every belief must be asserted nor that every assertion must express a belief, but in the sense that neither the activity of believing nor that of asserting can be made sense of independently of the other, and that their conceptual contents are essentially, and not just accidentally, capable of being the contents indifferently of both claims and beliefs. In the context of the commitment to the kind of explanatory relation between those activities and those contents mentioned above, this approach takes the form of a linguistic pragmatism that might take as its slogan Sellars’s principle that grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word. James and Dewey were pragmatists in the sense I have picked out, since they try to understand conceptual content in terms of practices of using concepts. But, in line with their generally assimilationist approach to concept use, they were not speciﬁcally linguistic pragmatists. The later Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars (as well as Dummett and Davidson) are linguistic pragmatists, whose strategy of coming at the meaning of expressions by considering Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 7 their use provides a counterbalance to the Frege-Russell-CarnapTarski platonistic model-theoretic approach to meaning. 4. The Genus of Conceptual Activity: Representation or Expression? Besides this issue about the original locus of the conceptual, there is an issue about how to understand the genus of which it is a species. (As I have indicated, this is no less urgent for theories that concern themselves in the ﬁrst instance with what is distinctive of the conceptual species of that genus than it is for those adopting the assimilationist order of proceeding.) The master concept of Enlightenment epistemology and semantics, at least since Descartes, was representation. Awareness was understood in representational terms—whether taking the form of direct awareness of representings or of indirect awareness of representeds via representations of them. Typically, speciﬁcally conceptual representations were taken to be just one kind of representation of which and by means of which we can be aware. This orienting thought remains active to this day, surviving the quite substantial transformations required, for instance, for naturalistic and broadly functional accounts of awareness by and of representations. The result is a familiar, arguably dominant, contemporary research program: to put in place a general conception of representation, the simpler forms of which are exhibited already in the activity of non–concept-using creatures, and on that basis elaborate ever more complex forms until one reaches something recognizable as speciﬁcally conceptual representation. This representational paradigm3 of what mindedness consists in is sufﬁciently ubiquitous that it is perhaps not easy to think of alternatives of similar generality and promise. One prominent countertradition, however, looks to the notion of expression, rather than representation, for the genus within which distinctively conceptual activity can become intelligible as a species. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 8 ◆ Introduction To the Enlightenment picture of mind as mirror, Romanticism opposed an image of the mind as lamp.4 Broadly cognitive activity was to be seen not as a kind of passive reﬂection but as a kind of active revelation. Emphasizing the importance of experimental intervention and the creative character of theory production motivated an assimilation of scientiﬁc to artistic activity, of ﬁnding as constrained making—a picture of knowing nature as producing a second nature (to use Leonardo da Vinci’s phrase). The sort of expressivism Herder initiated takes as its initial point of departure the process by which inner becomes outer when a feeling is expressed by a gesture.5 We are then invited to consider more complex cases in which attitudes are expressed in actions, for instance, when a desire or intention issues in a corresponding doing, or a belief in saying. So long as we focus on the simplest cases, an expressivist model will not seem to offer a particularly promising avenue for construing the genus of which conceptual activity is a species (though one might say the same of the representational model if attention is focused on, say, the imprint of a seal on a wax tablet). But a suitable commentary on the model may be able to repair this impression somewhat. First, we might think of the process of expression in the more complex and interesting cases as a matter not of transforming what is inner into what is outer but of making explicit what is implicit. This can be understood in a pragmatist sense of turning something we can initially only do into something we can say: codifying some sort of knowing how in the form of a knowing that. Second, as is suggested by this characterization of a pragmatist form of expressivism, in the cases of most interest in the present context, the notion of explicitness will be a conceptual one. The process of explicitation is to be the process of applying concepts: conceptualizing some subject matter. Third, we need not yield to the temptation, offered by the primitive expressive relation of gesture to feeling, to think of what is expressed and the expression of it as individually intelligible independently of consideration of the Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 9 relation between them. At least in the more interesting cases, speciﬁcation of what is implicit may depend on the possibility of making it explicit. And the explicit may not be speciﬁable apart from consideration of what is made explicit. On such a view, what is expressed must be understood in terms of the possibility of expressing it. Such a relational expressivism will understand linguistic performances and the intentional states they express each as essential elements in a whole that is intelligible only in terms of their relation. According to such an approach, for instance, one ought not to think that one can understand either believing or asserting except by abstracting from their role in the process of asserting what one believes (that is, this sort of expressivism has as a consequence a relational linguistic view of the layout of the conceptual realm). Understanding the genus of which the conceptual is a species in representational terms invites a platonist order of explanation. That it does not demand one is clear from the possibility of psychologically or linguistically functionalist accounts of representational content. Nonetheless, expressivism is particularly congenial to a pragmatist order of semantic explanation, as is indicated by the formulation of the relation between what is implicit and what is explicit in terms of the distinction between knowing how and knowing that. The account presented in the body of this work is one kind of constitutive, pragmatist, relationally linguistic, conceptual expressivism. The commitment to trying to make expressivism work as a framework within which to understand concept use and (so) conceptual content sets this project off from most others on the contemporary scene. For a representational paradigm reigns not only in the whole spectrum of analytically pursued semantics, from model-theoretic, through possible worlds, directly counterfactual, and informational approaches to teleosemantic ones, but also in structuralism inheriting the broad outlines of Saussure’s semantics, and even in those later continental thinkers whose poststructuralism is still so far mired in the Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 10 ◆ Introduction representational paradigm that it can see no other alternative to understanding meaning in terms of signiﬁers standing for signiﬁeds than to understand it in terms of signiﬁers standing for other signiﬁers. Even contemporary forms of pragmatism, which are explicitly motivated by the rejection of platonist forms of the representational paradigm, have not embraced or sought to develop an expressivist alternative. 5. Distinguishing the Conceptual: Intensionalism or Inferentialism? I am not in this introduction pretending to argue for any of the methodological commitments I am rehearsing. My aim is to offer a quick sketch of the terrain against the background of which the approach pursued in the body of this work (and at greater length and in greater detail in Making It Explicit) takes its characteristic shape—to introduce and place those commitments, rather than so much as to begin to entitle myself to any of them. I said at the outset that I am particularly interested in what distinguishes the conceptual from the nonconceptual. This is not a topic that has attracted as much philosophical attention in contemporary circles as I think it deserves. Insofar as there is a consensus answer abroad, I think it must be that the conceptual (or the intentional) is distinguished by a special sort of intensionality: intersubstitution of coreferential or coextensional expressions or concepts does not preserve the content of ascriptions of intentional states, paradigmatically propositional attitudes such as thought and belief. (This is a datum that is relatively independent of how that content is construed, whether in representational terms of truth conditions or of propositions as sets of possible worlds, or as functional roles of some sort, in information-theoretic terms, assertibility conditions, and so on.) Quite a different approach is pursued here. The master idea that animates and orients this enterprise is that what distinguishes speciﬁcally discursive practices from the doings Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 11 of non–concept-using creatures is their inferential articulation. To talk about concepts is to talk about roles in reasoning. The original Romantic expressivists were (like the pragmatists, both classical and contemporary) assimilationists about the conceptual. My way of working out an expressivist approach is exceptionalist, focusing on the differentiae distinctive of the conceptual as such. It is a rationalist pragmatism, in giving pride of place to practices of giving and asking for reasons, understanding them as conferring conceptual content on performances, expressions, and states suitably caught up in those practices. In this way it differs from the view of other prominent theorists who are pragmatists in the sense of subscribing to use theorists of meaning such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dummett, and Quine. And it is a rationalist expressivism in that it understands expressing something, making it explicit, as putting it in a form in which it can both serve as and stand in need of reasons: a form in which it can serve as both premise and conclusion in inferences. Saying or thinking that things are thus-and-so is undertaking a distinctive kind of inferentially articulated commitment: putting it forward as a ﬁt premise for further inferences, that is, authorizing its use as such a premise, and undertaking responsibility to entitle oneself to that commitment, to vindicate one’s authority, under suitable circumstances, paradigmatically by exhibiting it as the conclusion of an inference from other such commitments to which one is or can become entitled. Grasping the concept that is applied in such a making explicit is mastering its inferential use: knowing (in the practical sense of being able to distinguish, a kind of knowing how) what else one would be committing oneself to by applying the concept, what would entitle one to do so, and what would preclude such entitlement. What might be thought of as Frege’s fundamental pragmatic principle is that in asserting a claim, one is committing oneself to its truth. The standard way of exploiting this principle is a platonist one: some grip on the concept of truth derived from one’s Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 12 ◆ Introduction semantic theory is assumed, and an account of the pragmatic force or speech act of assertion is elaborated based on this connection. But the principle can be exploited in more than one way, and linguistic pragmatism reverses the platonist order of explanation. Starting with an account of what one is doing in making a claim, it seeks to elaborate from it an account of what is said, the content or proposition—something that can be thought of in terms of truth conditions—to which one commits oneself by such a speech act. What might be thought of as Frege’s fundamental semantic principle is that a good inference never leads from a true claim(able) to one that is not true. It, too, can be exploited in either of two reductive orders of explanation.6 The standard way is to assume that one has a prior grip on the notion of truth, and use it to explain what good inference consists in. Rationalist or inferentialist pragmatism reverses this order of explanation also. It starts with a practical distinction between good and bad inferences, understood as a distinction between appropriate and inappropriate doings, and goes on to understand talk about truth as talk about what is preserved by the good moves. 6. Bottom-up or Top-down Semantic Explanation? According to such an inferentialist line of thought, the fundamental form of the conceptual is the propositional, and the core of concept use is applying concepts in propositionally contentful assertions, beliefs, and thoughts. It claims that to be propositionally contentful is to be able to play the basic inferential roles of both premise and conclusion in inferences. Demarcating the conceptual realm by appeal to inference accordingly involves coming down ﬁrmly on one side of another abstract methodological divide. For it entails treating the sort of conceptual content that is expressed by whole declarative sentences as prior in the order of explanation to the sort of content that is expressed by subsenten- Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 13 tial expressions such as singular terms and predicates. Traditional term logics built up from below, offering ﬁrst accounts of the meanings of the concepts associated with singular and general terms (in a nominalistic representational way: in terms of what they name or stand for), then of judgments constructed by relating those terms, and ﬁnally of proprieties of inferences relating those judgments. This order of explanation is still typical of contemporary representational approaches to semantics (paradigmatically Tarskian model-theoretic ones). There are, however, platonistic representational semantic theories that begin by assigning semantic interpretants (for instance, sets of possible worlds) to declarative sentences. Pragmatist semantic theories typically adopt a top-down approach because they start from the use of concepts, and what one does with concepts is apply them in judgment and action. Thus Kant takes the judgment to be the minimal unit of experience (and so of awareness in his discursive sense) because it is the ﬁrst element in the traditional logical hierarchy that one can take responsibility for. (Naming is not a doing that makes one answerable to anything.) Frege starts with judgeable conceptual contents because that is what pragmatic force can attach to. And Wittgenstein’s focus on use leads him to privilege sentences as bits of language the utterance of which can make a move in a language game. I take these to be three ways of making essentially the same pragmatist point about the priority of the propositional. Again, the connection between propositionalism and pragmatism in the broad sense of approaching meaning from the side of use is not a coercive one, since a functionalist version of this approach might privilege contents associated with subsentential expressions. Inferentialism, however, is an essentially propositional doctrine. In this respect, inferentialism and expressivism dovetail neatly. For the paradigm of expression is saying something. And what can play the role of premise and conclusion of inference is a saying in the sense of a claiming. Expressivism, like inferentialism, directs our attention in the ﬁrst place to propositional conceptual contents. A Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 14 ◆ Introduction further story must then be told about the decomposition of such contents into the sort of conceptual contents that are expressed (in a derivative sense) by subsentential expressions such as singular terms and predicates. (And about their subsequent recomposition to produce novel contents. Such a story is presented in Chapter 4.) Representationalism, by contrast, is motivated by a designational paradigm: the relation of a name to its bearer. In one standard way of pursuing this direction of explanation, one must then introduce a special ontological category of states of affairs, thought of as being represented by declarative sentences in something like the same way that objects are represented by singular terms. Rationalist expressivism understands the explicit (the sayable in the sense of claimable, the form something must be in to count as having been expressed) in terms of its inferential role. Coupled with a linguistic pragmatism, such a view entails that practices of giving and asking for reasons have a privileged, indeed deﬁning, role with respect to linguistic practice generally. What makes something a speciﬁcally linguistic (and therefore, according to this view, discursive) practice is that it accords some performances the force or signiﬁcance of claimings, of propositionally contentful commitments, which can both serve as and stand in need of reasons. Practices that do not involve reasoning are not linguistic or (therefore) discursive practices. Thus the ‘Slab’ Sprachspiel that Wittgenstein introduces in the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations should not, by these standards of demarcation, count as a genuine Sprach spiel. It is a vocal but not yet a verbal practice. By contrast to Wittgenstein, the inferential identiﬁcation of the conceptual claims that language (discursive practice) has a center; it is not a motley. Inferential practices of producing and consuming reasons are downtown in the region of linguistic practice. Suburban linguistic practices utilize and depend on the conceptual contents forged in the game of giving and asking for reasons, are parasitic on it. Claiming, being able to justify one’s Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 15 claims, and using one’s claims to justify other claims and actions are not just one among other sets of things one can do with language. They are not on a par with other ‘games’ one can play. They are what in the ﬁrst place make possible talking, and therefore thinking: sapience in general. Of course we do many other things as concept users besides applying concepts in judgment and action and justifying those applications. But (by contrast to the indiscriminately egalitarian picture presented by contemporary neo-Romantic theorists such as Derrida) according to this sort of semantic rationalism, those sophisticated, latecoming linguistic and more generally discursive activities are intelligible in principle only against the background of the core practices of inferenceand-assertion. 7. Atomism or Holism? Closely related to the issue of top-down or bottom-up semantic explanation is the issue of semantic holism versus semantic atomism. The tradition of formal semantics has been resolutely atomistic, in the sense that the assignment of a semantic interpretant to one element (say, a proper name) is taken to be intelligible independently of the assignment of semantic interpretants to any other elements (for instance, predicates or other proper names). One does not need to know anything about what other dots represent, or what blue wavy lines represent, in order to understand that a particular dot stands for Cleveland on a map. The task of formal semantics is the bottom-up one of explaining how semantically relevant whatsits can systematically be assigned to complex expressions, given that they have been assigned already to simple ones. Atomism adds that the assignments to the simple ones can be done one by one. By contrast, inferentialist semantics is resolutely holist. On an inferentialist account of conceptual content, one cannot have any concepts unless one has many concepts. For the content of each concept is articulated by its inferential Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 16 ◆ Introduction relations to other concepts. Concepts, then, must come in packages (though it does not yet follow that they must come in just one great big one). Conceptual holism is not a commitment that one might be motivated to undertake independently of the considerations that lead one to an inferential conception of the conceptual. It is rather a straightforward consequence of that approach. 8. Traditional or Rationalist Expressivism? The heart of any expressivist theory is of course its account of expressing. What is expressed appears in two forms, as implicit (only potentially expressible) and explicit (actually expressed). To talk of expression is to talk about a process of transformation of what in virtue of its role in that process becomes visible as a content that appears in two forms, as implicit and then as explicit. As I indicated above, traditional Romantic expressivism took as its paradigm something like the relationship between an inner feeling expressed by an outer gesture. The rationalist expressivism informing the present account is quite different. Where, as here, explicitness is identiﬁed with speciﬁcally conceptual articulation, expressing something is conceptualizing it: putting it into conceptual form. I said at the outset that the goal of the enterprise is a clear account of sapient awareness, of the sense in which being aware of something is bringing it under a concept. On the approach pursued here, doing that is making a claim or judgment about what one is (thereby) aware of, forming a belief about it— in general, addressing it in a form that can serve as and stand in need of reasons, making it inferentially signiﬁcant. The image of conceptualizing the unconceptualized is a familiar focus of philosophical attention, and it has given rise to a familiar panoply of philosophical pathologies. The rationalist expressivist course pursued here is distinguished by the particular strategy it employs for understanding the relation between the merely implicit and the conceptually explicit. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 17 That strategy depends on a constellation of related inferentialist ideas. The ﬁrst and most fundamental idea, already mentioned above, is a way of thinking about conceptual explicitness. To be explicit in the conceptual sense is to play a speciﬁcally inferential role. In the most basic case, it is to be propositionally contentful in the sense of being ﬁt to serve both as a premise and as a conclusion in inferences. According to the relational linguistic view, to be thinkable or believable in this sense is to be assertible. The basic way of working out the pragmatist explanatory strategy is to understand saying (thinking, believing . . . ) that such and such (that is, adopting a propositionally contentful attitude) in terms of a distinctive kind of knowing how or being able to do something. Inferentialism picks out the relevant sort of doing by its inferential articulation. Propositional (and more generally conceptual) contents become available to those engaging in linguistic practices, whose core is drawing conclusions and offering justiﬁcations. Merely reliably responding differentially to red things is not yet being aware of them as red. Discrimination by producing repeatable responses (as a machine or a pigeon might do) sorts the eliciting stimuli, and in that sense classiﬁes them. But it is not yet conceptual classiﬁcation, and so involves no awareness of the sort under investigation here. (If instead of teaching a pigeon to peck one button rather than another under appropriate sensory stimulation, we teach a parrot to utter one noise rather than another, we get only to the vocal, not yet to the verbal.) As a next stage, we might imagine a normative practice, according to which red things are appropriately responded to by making a certain noise. That would still not be a conceptual matter. What is implicit in that sort of practical doing becomes explicit in the application of the concept red when that responsive capacity or skill is put into a larger context that includes treating the responses as inferentially signiﬁcant: as providing reasons for making other moves in the language game, and as themselves potentially standing in need of reasons that could be provided by making still other moves. The ﬁrst advantage that this rationalist pragmatism claims over earlier Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 18 ◆ Introduction forms of expressivism is provided by this relatively clear inferential notion of conceptual explicitness. Pragmatism about the conceptual seeks to understand what it is explicitly to say or think that something is the case in terms of what one must implicitly know how (be able) to do. That the relevant sort of doing is a constellation of asserting and inferring, making claims and giving and asking for reasons for them, is the essence of rationalist or inferentialist pragmatism about the conceptual. But once such an inferential notion of explicitness (propositional or, more generally, conceptual contentfulness) has been put in place, we can appeal to this notion of expressing (what is explicit) to understand various senses in which something can be expressed (what is implicit). The inferentialist picture actually puts in play several notions of implicitness. The ﬁrst is what is made explicit by a claim or becomes explicit in it: a proposition, possible fact, what is said (sayable) or thought or believed. But in another sense we can talk about what still remains implicit in an explicit claim, namely, its inferential consequences. For in the context of a constellation of inferential practices, endorsing or committing oneself to one proposition (claimable) is implicitly endorsing or committing oneself to others which follow from it. Mastery of these inferential connections is the implicit background against which alone explicit claiming is intelligible. Actually drawing inferences from an explicit claimable (something that can be said, thought, and so on) is exploring the inferential relations that articulate its content. Since in saying that things are thus-and-so, for instance, that the cloth is red, one is not in the same sense saying (making explicit) that it is colored and spatially extended, those consequences count as only implicit. Since they articulate the content of the original saying, they are at least implicit in it. ‘Implicit’ is once again given a relatively clear inferential sense, but one that is distinct from the sense in which the fact that the cloth is red (to which one can reliably respond differentially) is made explicit in the claim. In different but related senses, an explicit claim has implicit in it: Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 19 1. proprieties governing inferential moves to and from the commitments to the claimable content in question; 2. the other claims that are inferential consequences of the ﬁrst one, according to the practical proprieties mentioned in (1); and 3. the conceptual content of the claim, which is articulated by the inferences in (1). These notions of implicitness are direct products of the basic inferential model of explicitness. 9. Is the Semantic Task of Logic Epistemological or Expressive? One standard way to think of logic is as giving us special epistemic access to a kind of truth. Logic is for establishing the truth of certain kinds of claims, by proving them. But logic can also be thought of in expressive terms, as a distinctive set of tools for saying something that cannot otherwise be made explicit. Seeing how this can be so depends on making a further move: applying the original model of explicitness to the inferential consequences that are implicit (in the sense just considered) in any explicit claim. According to the inferentialist account of concept use, in making a claim one is implicitly endorsing a set of inferences, which articulate its conceptual content. Implicitly endorsing those inferences is a sort of doing. Understanding the conceptual content to which one has committed oneself is a kind of practical mastery: a bit of know-how that consists in being able to discriminate what does and does not follow from the claim, what would be evidence for and against it, and so on. Making explicit that know-how, the inferences one has implicitly endorsed, is putting it in the form of a claim that things are thus-and-so. In this case a central expressive resource for doing that is provided by basic logical vocabulary. In applying the concept lion to Leo, I implicitly commit myself to the applicability of the concept mammal to him. If my language is Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 20 ◆ Introduction expressively rich enough to contain conditionals, I can say that if Leo is a lion, then Leo is a mammal. (And if the language is expressively rich enough to include quantiﬁcational operators, I can say that if anything is a lion, then it is a mammal.) That Cleo is a cephalopod is good (indeed, decisive) evidence that she is not a lion. If my language is expressively rich enough to contain negation, I can make that implicit inferential component articulating the content of the concept lion explicit by saying that if Cleo is a cephalopod, then Cleo is not a mammal. By saying things like this, by using logical vocabulary, I can make explicit the implicit inferential commitments that articulate the content of the concepts I apply in making ordinary explicit claims. Here the original inferential-propositional model of awareness (in the sense of sapience) is applied at a higher level. In the ﬁrst application, we get an account of consciousness—for example, that Leo is a lion. In the second application we get an account of a kind of semantic self-consciousness. For in this way we begin to say what we are doing in saying that Leo is a lion. For instance, we make explicit (in the form of a claimable, and so propositional content) that we are committing ourselves thereby to his being a mammal by saying that if something is a lion, then it is a mammal. An account along these lines of the expressive role distinctive of logical vocabulary as such is introduced in Chapter 1 of this book. It is applied and extended in subsequent chapters to include such sophisticated locutions as normative vocabulary (in Chapter 2) and intentional tropes such as some uses of ‘of ’ and ‘about’ (in Chapter 5), which are not usually put in a box with conditionals and negation. Inferentialism about conceptual content in this way makes possible a new kind of expressivism about logic. Applying the inferential model of explicitness, and so of expression, to the functioning of logical vocabulary provides a proving ground for the model that permits its elaboration at a level of clarity and exactness that has (to say the least) been unusual within the expressivist tradition. Two dimensions along Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 21 which philosophical payoffs can be expected from this fact are explored in Chapters 4 and 5, which present an expressive account of the nature and deduction of the necessity of the use of singular terms (and predicates), and an account of the expressive role characteristic of explicitly intentional and representational vocabulary, respectively. Conditional claims—and claims formed by the use of logical vocabulary in general, of which the conditional is paradigmatic for the inferentialist—express a kind of semantic self-consciousness because they make explicit the inferential relations, consequences, and contents of ordinary nonlogical claims and concepts. It is possible to use the model of (partial) logical explicitation of nonlogical conceptual contents to illuminate certain features of ordinary making explicit in nonlogical claims. For instance, the conceptual content of a concept such as red has as a crucial element its noninferential circumstances of appropriate application (which, recall, are appealed to in the broadly inferential notion of content, since in applying the concept, one implicitly endorses the propriety of the inference from the concept’s circumstances of appropriate application to its consequences of application, regardless of whether those circumstances are themselves speciﬁed in narrowly inferential terms). Part of the practical skill that forms the implicit background of knowing how against which alone a broadly inferentialist semantic theory can explain the practice of explicitly claiming that something is red, then, is the capacity noninferentially to respond appropriately and differentially to red things. Chapter 3 discusses how this part of the implicit background of explicit application of concepts of observables can itself be made explicit, in the logical sense, by ﬁrst tracking it with a corresponding reliability inference and then codifying that inference with a conditional. In inferentialist terms, the reliability inference conceptualizes the initially nonconceptual capacity to respond differentially to red things. Once it appears in this inferential guise, the aspect of the content of the concept red that is still implicit (in Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 22 ◆ Introduction another sense) even when presented in the form of a reliability inference can be made explicit by using a conditional, just as for any other inferentially articulated aspect. This development of the relation of expression between what is explicit and what is implicit is guided throughout by the fundamental idea of demarcating the conceptual by its speciﬁcally inferential articulation. At the ﬁrst stage, that idea yields an understanding of the end result of making something explicit in a claimable (judgeable, thinkable, believable), that is, propositional content, of the sort expressed by the use of basic declarative sentences. At the second stage, the same inferentialist idea leads to an expressive model of the conceptual role distinctive of logical vocabulary, which serves to make explicit in the form of claimables (paradigmatically, conditional ones) the inferential relations that implicitly articulate the contents of the ordinary nonlogical concepts we use in making things explicit in the sense speciﬁed at the ﬁrst stage. At the third stage, the notion of the expressive relation between what is explicit and what is implicit that was developed at the second stage in connection with the use of distinctively logical concepts is applied to illuminate further the relation between what is explicit in the sense of the ﬁrst stage and what is made explicit thereby. The result is an account with a structure recognizable as Hegelian: a rationalist, expressivist account of (a kind of ) consciousness (namely, sapient awareness) provides the basis for a corresponding account of (a kind of ) self-consciousness (namely, semantic or conceptual self-consciousness), which is then called upon to deepen the original story by providing a model for understanding the sort of consciousness with which the account began. II. Historical Context: Rationalism, Pragmatism, and Expressivism At the very center of this account is its rationalism: the pride of place it gives to speciﬁcally inferential articulation, to playing a role in practices of giving and asking for reasons. It provides the Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 23 answer I offer to the question how to demarcate the distinctive realm of the conceptual. Speciﬁcally linguistic practice is picked out (and recognized as discursive) by its incorporation of inferential-and-assertional practices: attributing and undertaking commitments to the propriety of making certain moves and occupying certain positions whose contents are determined by their places in those practices. The resulting rationalistic pragmatism is importantly different in just this respect from that of other semantic pragmatists such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Rorty. Again, rationalistic expressivism has important conceptual resources and advantages denied to traditional Romantic expressivism. This version of expressivism offers a framework within which it is possible to do detailed semantic work (the argument presented in Chapter 4 is emblematic). And that same framework makes possible an expressivist approach to logic, which provides potentially important new insights—for instance, into the expressive role distinctive of normative vocabulary (discussed in Chapter 2), and the expressive role distinctive of intentional or explicitly representational vocabulary (discussed in Chapter 5). Empiricism has been the ﬁghting faith and organizing principle of philosophy in the English-speaking world since at least the time of Locke. Its distinctive twentieth-century form, developed by thinkers such as Russell, Carnap, and Quine, joins to the classical insistence on the origin of knowledge in experience an emphasis on the crucial cognitive role played by language and logic. A central goal of this book is to introduce a way of thinking about these latter topics—and so about meaning, mind, and knowledge—that swings free of the context of empiricist commitments that has shaped discussion within this tradition. In turning away from empiricism I do not mean to deny that consideration of perceptual practices must play a crucial role in our epistemology and semantics. What might be called platitudinous empiricism restricts itself to the observations that without perceptual experience we can have no knowledge of contingent matters of fact, and more deeply, that conceptual content is unintelligible Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 24 ◆ Introduction apart from its relation to perceptual experience.7 These are not controversial claims. (Indeed, I think it is very difﬁcult to ﬁnd any philosophers who have ever disputed them, including the most notorious candidates. But I will not try to support that claim here.) The theoretical and explanatory commitments of philosophically substantial empiricisms go well beyond these platitudes. My main target is the semantic theory that I see as underlying empiricist approaches to meaning, mind, knowledge, and action. Empiricism is a current of thought too broad and multifarious, with too many shifting eddies, backwaters, and side channels, to be conﬁned within the well-deﬁned banks of necessary and sufﬁcient conditions. Its general course, though, is marked out by commitment to grounding theoretical and practical reasoning and concept use in the occurrence of episodes we immediately ﬁnd ourselves with: sense experiences on the cognitive side, and felt motivations or preferences on the active side. In the forms I ﬁnd most objectionable, having these experiences is thought of as not requiring the exercise of speciﬁcally conceptual abilities. It is understood rather as a preconceptual capacity shareable with non–concept-using mammals. Its deliverances are accordingly conceived of as available to explain what concept use consists in, and as providing the raw materials conceptual activities work on or with. (Traditional abstractionist and associationist strategies are just particular ways of working out this line of thought; many others are possible.) Classical empiricist philosophy of mind takes immediate perceptual experiences as the paradigm of awareness or consciousness. Classical empiricist epistemology takes as its paradigm of empirical knowledge those same experiences, to which it traces the warrant for and authority of all the rest. As the tradition has developed, it has become clearer that both rest on a more or less explicit semantic picture, according to which the content of experience, awareness, and knowledge is to be understood in the ﬁrst instance in representational terms: as a matter of what is (or pur- Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 25 ports to be) represented by some representing states or episodes. In contemporary incarnations, this notion of representational content is most often unpacked in terms of what objects, events, or states of affairs actually causally elicited the representation, or which ones would reliably elicit representations of that kind under various conditions. This way of thinking about the content of empirical knowledge, to begin with perceptual experience, is then naturally seen to be complemented by a philosophy of language that focuses on reference, denotation, and extension, following the pattern of extensional model-theoretic semantics for the language of ﬁrst-order predicate logic. Empiricism attempts to understand the content of concepts in terms of the origin of empirical beliefs in experience that we just ﬁnd ourselves with, and the origin of practical intentions in desires or preferences that in the most basic case we just ﬁnd ourselves with. The rationalist order of explanation understands concepts as norms determining what counts as a reason for particular beliefs, claims, and intentions, whose content is articulated by the application of those concepts and which such statuses can be reasons for. Its impetus is a classically rationalist thought, which Sellars (in an autobiographical sketch) says motivated his philosophical development starting already in the 1930s: the thought that “what was needed was a functional theory of concepts which would make their role in reasoning, rather than supposed origin in experience, their primary feature.”8 The difference is most telling when we ask about the relation between awareness and concept use. The empiricist understands concept use as an achievement to be understood against the background of a prior sort of awareness, which justiﬁes or makes appropriate the application of one concept rather than another. To play this latter role, the awareness in question must amount to something more than just the reliable differential responsiveness of merely irritable devices such as land mines and pressure plates that open doors in supermarkets. For the rationalist, on the contrary, awareness of the sort that has a potentially Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 26 ◆ Introduction normative signiﬁcance (the genus of which cognitive signiﬁcance is a species) consists in the application of concepts. One must already have concepts to be aware in this sense. Of course, this immediately raises the question how one could come to be a concept user unless one could already be aware of things. But to this a pragmatist such as Sellars can reply with a story about how initially merely differentially responsive creatures can be initiated into the implicitly normative social practice of giving and asking for reasons, so that some of their responses can come to count as or have the social signiﬁcance of endorsements, of the making or staking of inferentially articulated claims.9 Besides rejecting empiricism, the rationalist pragmatism and expressivism presented here is opposed to naturalism, at least as that term is usually understood. For it emphasizes what distinguishes discursive creatures, as subject to distinctively conceptual norms, from their non–concept-using ancestors and cousins. Conceptual norms are brought into play by social linguistic practices of giving and asking for reasons, of assessing the propriety of claims and inferences. Products of social interactions (in a strict sense that distinguishes them merely from features of populations) are not studied by the natural sciences—though they are not for that reason to be treated as spooky and supernatural. In conferring conceptual content on performances, states, and expressions suitably caught up in them, those practices institute a realm of culture that rests on, but goes beyond, the background of reliable differential responsive dispositions and their exercise characteristic of merely natural creatures. Once concept use is on the scene, a distinction opens up between things that have natures and things that have histories. Physical things such as electrons and aromatic compounds would be paradigmatic of the ﬁrst class, while cultural formations such as English Romantic poetry and uses of the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ would be paradigmatic of the second. The relations between these categories is a complex affair. Phys- Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 27 ical, chemical, and biological things have natures rather than histories, but what about the disciplines that deﬁne and study them? Should physics itself be thought of as something that has a nature, or as something that has a history? Concluding the latter is giving a certain kind of pride of place to the historical, cultural, and conceptual. For it is in effect treating the distinction between things that have natures and things that have histories, between things studied by the Naturwissenschaften and things studied by the Geisteswissenschaften, as itself a cultural formation: the sort of thing that itself has a history rather than a nature. Grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word—and uses of words are a paradigm of the sort of thing that must be understood historically. In this sense even concepts such as electron and aromatic compound are the sort of thing that has a history. But they are not purely historical. For the proprieties governing the application of those concepts depend on what inferences involving them are correct, that is, on what really follows from what. And that depends on how things are with electrons and aromatic compounds, not just on what judgments and inferences we endorse. (To say that is to say that our use of the corresponding words should not be thought of as restricted to our dispositions to such endorsements.) Understanding the relevant sort of dependence—the way what inferences are correct, and so what we are really committing ourselves to by applying them, and so what their contents really are (the contents we have conferred on them by using them as we do), as opposed to what we take them to be—is a delicate and important task. Some essential raw materials for it are assembled in the ﬁnal three chapters of this book. Chapter 4 offers an account of what it is to talk about objects. Chapter 5 tells what it is to take our talk to be about objects. And Chapter 6 shows how the structure of reasoning makes it possible to understand subjecting our claims to assessments according to a kind of correctness in which authority is invested in the things we are talking about rather than in our attitudes toward them. None of these is a naturalistic account. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 28 ◆ Introduction In addition to rejecting empiricism and embracing nonnaturalism, the rationalistic semantic theory introduced here is unusual in not taking representation as its fundamental concept. A methodological commitment to beginning an account of concept use (and so, eventually, of conceptual content) with reasoning rather than representing does not require denying that there is an important representational dimension to concept use. Indeed, the unusual explanatory starting point has the advantage of bringing into relief certain features of conceptual representation that are hard to notice otherwise. The ﬁnal three chapters highlight some of these, while beginning the process of cashing the promissory note issued by an inferentialist order of explanation—that is, offering an account of referential relations to objects in terms ultimately of inferential relations among claims. Of course, noninferential language entry moves in perception and language exit moves in action play a crucial role in the story too. But the speciﬁcally inferential articulation of the acknowledgments of propositional commitments that result from observation and result in intentional performances are to the fore in understanding the cognitive and practical normative signiﬁcance of the reliable differential responsive capacities exercised in those processes. I call the view that inferential articulation is a necessary element in the demarcation of the conceptual ‘weak inferentialism’. The view that inferential articulation broadly construed is sufﬁcient to account for conceptual content I call ‘strong inferentialism’. The view that inferential articulation narrowly construed is sufﬁcient to account for conceptual content, I call ‘hyperinferentialism’. The difference between the broad and the narrow construal of inferential articulation is just whether or not noninferential circumstances of application (in the case of concepts such as red that have noninferential reporting uses) and consequences of application (in the case of concepts such as ought that have noninferential practical uses) are taken into account. The broad sense focuses attention on the inferential commitment that is implicitly undertaken in using Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 29 any concept whatever, even those with noninferential circumstances or consequences of application: the commitment, namely, to the propriety of the inference from the circumstances to the consequences of application. The view endorsed here is strong inferentialism.10 Inferentialism of any sort is committed to a certain kind of semantic holism, as opposed to the atomism that often goes hand in hand with commitment to a representationalist order of semantic explanation. For if the conceptual content expressed by each sentence or word is understood as essentially consisting in its inferential relations (broadly construed) or articulated by its inferential relations (narrowly construed), then one must grasp many such contents in order to grasp any. Such holistic conceptual role approaches to semantics potentially face problems concerning both the stability of conceptual contents under change of belief and commitment to the propriety of various inferences, and the possibility of communication between individuals who endorse different claims and inferences. Such concerns are rendered much less urgent, however, if one thinks of concepts as norms determining the correctness of various moves. The norms I am binding myself to by using the term ‘molybdenum’—what actually follows from or is incompatible with the applicability of the concept— need not change as my views about molybdenum and its inferential surround change. And you and I may be bound by just the same public linguistic and conceptual norms in the vicinity in spite of the fact that we are disposed to make different claims and inferential moves. It is up to me whether I play a token of the ‘molybdenum’ type in the game of giving and asking for reasons. But it is not then up to me what the signiﬁcance of that move is. (And I do not take the case to be signiﬁcantly different if I play such a token internally, in thought.) As I have already remarked, inferentialism also carries with it a commitment to the conceptual primacy of the propositional. Thus inferentialism semantic explanations reverse the traditional order: Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 30 ◆ Introduction beginning with proprieties of inference, they explain propositional content, and in terms of both go on to explain the conceptual content expressed by subsentential expressions such as singular terms and predicates. Chapter 4 describes how this last step (which has not been much attended to by recent inferentialists such as Sellars and—on my reading—Dummett) might be accomplished. The rationalist form of expressivism pursued here also involves rejecting conventional wisdom about the nature and philosophical signiﬁcance of logic. Logic is not properly understood as the study of a distinctive kind of formal inference. It is rather the study of the inferential roles of vocabulary playing a distinctive expressive role: codifying in explicit form the inferences that are implicit in the use of ordinary, nonlogical vocabulary. Making explicit the inferential roles of the logical vocabulary then can take the form of presenting patterns of inference involving them that are formally valid in the sense that they are invariant under substitution of nonlogical for nonlogical vocabulary. But that task is subsidiary and instrumental only. The task of logic is in the ﬁrst instance to help us say something about the conceptual contents expressed by the use of nonlogical vocabulary, not to prove something about the conceptual contents expressed by the use of logical vocabulary. On this picture, formal proprieties of inference essentially involving logical vocabulary derive from and must be explained in terms of material proprieties of inference essentially involving nonlogical vocabulary rather than the other way around. Logic is accordingly not a canon or standard of right reasoning. It can help us make explicit (and hence available for criticism and transformation) the inferential commitments that govern the use of all our vocabulary, and hence articulate the contents of all our concepts. Finally, the views presented here turn on their head prevailing humean ideas about practical reasoning. According to this common approach—which is very much in evidence in Davidson’s writings on action, and of rational-choice theorists and others Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 31 who approach the norms of rationality through decision theory or game theory—the norms governing practical reasoning and deﬁning rational action are essentially instrumental norms, which derive their authority from intrinsically motivating preferences or desires. Those states are the empiricist analogs, on the side of agency, to the preconceptual episodes of awareness to which epistemic authority is traced on the side of cognition. Chapter 2 offers an account in which statements about what an agent prefers or desires are interpreted instead as codifying commitment to certain speciﬁc patterns of practical reasoning, selected from among a wide variety of patterns that are codiﬁed by the use of other normative vocabulary. The concepts of desire and preference are accordingly demoted from their position of privilege, and take their place as having a derivative and provincial sort of normative authority. Endorsement and commitment are at the center of rational agency—as of rationality in general—and inclination enters only insofar as rational agents must bring inclination in the train of rational propriety, not the other way around. So I am putting forward a view that is opposed to many (if not most) of the large theoretical, explanatory, and strategic commitments that have shaped and motivated Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century: empiricism, naturalism, representationalism, semantic atomism, formalism about logic, and instrumentalism about the norms of practical rationality. In spite of my disagreements with central elements of the worldview that has animated analytic philosophy, I take my expository and argumentative structure and the criteria of adequacy for having made a claim with a clear content, argued for it, and responsibly followed out its consequences resolutely from the Anglo-American tradition. I do not think those standards need be taken to entail or be warranted only by this one constellation of ideas. Indeed, although the enterprise I am engaged in here is not happily identiﬁed with analysis of meanings in a traditional sense, it is properly thought of as pursuing a recognizable successor project. For what Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 32 ◆ Introduction I am trying to do is in a clear and speciﬁc inferential sense make explicit what is implicit in various philosophically important concepts. Among the examples treated in the following pages are concepts such as conceptual content, logic, ought, reliable, singular term, what is expressed by the ‘of ’ or ‘about’ of intentional directedness, and objectivity. Sellars once said that the aim of his work as a whole was to begin moving analytic philosophy from its humean phase into a kantian one. The full implications of this remark include reverberations contributed by many of the chambers and corridors of the Kantian ediﬁce. But at its heart, I think, is the conviction that the distinctive nature, contribution, and signiﬁcance of the conceptual articulation of thought and action have been systematically slighted by empiricism in all its forms. Although the addition of logic to the mix in the twentieth century was a promising development, there was from Sellars’s point of view a failure to rethink from the beginning the constraints and criteria of adequacy of the enterprise in the light of the expressive power the new formal idioms put at our disposal. The result was the pursuit of traditional empiricist visions by other means—ones that could not in principle do justice in the end to the normativity of concept use that ﬁnds its expression variously in the distinction between laws of nature codifying inferential relations among facts, on the one hand, and mere regularities regarding them, on the other, and in the difference between acting for a reason and merely moving when prompted. The more promising alternative is to focus to begin with on the conceptual articulation of perceptually acquired and practically pursued commitments and entitlements rather than on the experiences and inclinations with which we simply ﬁnd ourselves. That kantian strategy is a better one for the same sort of reasons that lead us to expect that one will learn more about a building by studying blueprints than by studying bricks. My teacher Richard Rorty has described the enterprise to which this volume is a contribution as an extension of Sellars’s: to make possible a further transition from a kantian to a hegelian approach Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 33 to thought and action.11 The justice of this characterization can be understood in terms of the strategic options already rehearsed here. First, I am interested in the divide between nature and culture. In this context we can identify the realm of the cultural with activities that either consist in the application of concepts in judgment and action or that presuppose such capacities. The Geisteswissenschaften have as their proper aim the study of concept use and things made possible by it—activities of which only concept users are capable. One of my principal goals is to present and explore the consequences of a particular sort of principle of demarcation for the realm of culture, so understood. Although of course cultural activities arise within the framework of a natural world, I am most concerned with what is made possible by the emergence of the peculiar constellation of conceptually articulated comportments that Hegel called “Geist.” Cultural products and activities become explicit as such only by the use of normative vocabulary that is in principle not reducible to the vocabulary of the natural sciences (though of course the same phenomena under other descriptions are available in that vocabulary). Indeed, the deployment of the vocabulary of the natural sciences (like that of any other vocabulary) is itself a cultural phenomenon, something that becomes intelligible only within the conceptual horizon provided by the Geisteswissenschaften. The study of natures itself has a history, and its own nature, if any, must be approached through the study of that history. This is a picture and an aspiration that we owe to Hegel. A second dimension of Hegelian inﬂuence is his pragmatism about conceptual norms. One of Kant’s great insights is that judgments and actions are to be distinguished from the responses of merely natural creatures by their distinctive normative status, as things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He understood concepts as the norms that determine just what we have made ourselves responsible for, what we have committed ourselves to and what would entitle us to it, by particular acts of judging and acting. Kant, however, punted many hard questions about the nature Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 34 ◆ Introduction and origins of this normativity, of the bindingness of concepts, out of the familiar phenomenal realm of experience into the noumenal realm. Hegel brought these issues back to earth by understanding normative statuses as social statuses—by developing a view according to which (as my colleague John Haugeland put the point in another context)12 all transcendental constitution is social institution. The background against which the conceptual activity of making things explicit is intelligible is taken to be implicitly normative essentially social practice. Pragmatism about the norms implicit in cognitive activity came down to us in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century from three independent directions: from the classical American pragmatists, culminating in Dewey; from the Heidegger of Being and Time; and from the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. In trying to work out how the insights of these traditions (partly common, partly complementary) could be applied to make progress within contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, however, I found myself driven back to Hegel’s original version. For unlike all three of these more recent sorts of social practice theory, Hegel’s is a rationalist pragmatism. By contrast to their conceptual assimilationism, he gives pride of place to reasoning in understanding what it is to say or do something. Again, Dewey and James,13 the early Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein each resisted, in his own way, the representational semantic paradigm. But none of them evidently provides an alternative paradigm that is structurally rich enough and deﬁnite enough either to do real semantic work with—of the sort done by model-theoretic developments of representationalism, including possible worlds semantics14—or to provide an account of the distinctive function of logical vocabulary. Hegel’s rationalistic, inferentialist version of the Romantic expressivist tradition he inherited, it seemed to me, holds out the promise of just such an alternative paradigm. Hegel’s version of expressivism is further attractive in that it is not only pragmatic and inferentialist about the conceptual but also relational, in the sense that the implicit and the Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 35 explicit are each at least in part constituted by their expressive relation to each other.15 The inferentialist understanding of explicitness is just what is needed to make an expressive alternative to representationalism viable. As I put the point above, rationalist expressivism understands the explicit—the thinkable, the sayable, the form something must be in to count as having been expressed—in terms of its role in inference. I take Hegel to have introduced this idea, although he takes the minimal unit of conceptual content to be the whole holistic system of inferentially interrelated judgeables, and so is not a propositionalist. Finally, this rationalist expressivist pragmatism forges a link between logic and self-consciousness, in the sense of making explicit the implicit background against which alone anything can be made explicit, that is recognizably Hegelian. For it offers an account of a kind of consciousness, awareness in the sense of sapience, which underwrites a corresponding account of a kind of selfconsciousness: semantic or conceptual self-consciousness. This notion of what is made explicit by the characteristic use of speciﬁcally logical vocabulary then makes possible a new appreciation of the sort of consciousness with which the story begins.16 I think this is a constellation of ideas that has the prospect of enlarging the frontiers of contemporary analytic philosophy. My hope is that by slighting the similarities to animals which preoccupied Locke and Hume and highlighting the possibilities opened up by engaging in social practices of giving and asking for reasons, we will get closer to an account of being human that does justice to the kinds of consciousness and self-consciousness distinctive of us as cultural, and not merely natural, creatures. III. Structure of the Book The six chapters that make up the body of this work present ideas and arguments drawn from or developing out of my 1994 book Making It Explicit. There is nothing in them that will come as a surprise to anyone who has mastered that work. They were Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 36 ◆ Introduction originally written as lectures, each intended to be intelligible in its own right, apart from its relation to the others. I had in mind audiences that had perhaps not so much as dipped into the big book but were curious about its themes and philosophical consequences. The lectures have been presented individually on many occasions, to many audiences, whose penetrating questions and lively discussion have helped me avoid at least some errors and to groom and streamline the presentations. The lectures were also written with an eye to mutual reinforcement and cumulative effect for those occasions when I was afforded the opportunity for a more extended presentation. I delivered versions of all but one (Chapter 3, on reliabilism) as the Townsend Lectures at Berkeley in the fall of 1997, and a different set of ﬁve (all but the last) more recently at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt in the winter of 1999. The ancestors of Chapters 1, 4, and 5 saw the light of day as my Hempel Lectures at Princeton in the spring of 1994.17 I think experience has proven that the stories told in each of these chapters can stand on their own, and that together they give a good picture of some of the argumentative high points of the approach to language and thought developed at length in Making It Explicit. Where questions arise about the presuppositions and context of these arguments, however, it should be kept in mind that that work is what should be consulted, and should be considered as offering the fullest account I can manage—including about the topics put on the table in this introduction. A number of important motivations, commitments, and developments have had to be omitted in this shorter, simpler book. Chapter 1, “Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism,” introduces and motivates two basic ideas. The ﬁrst is that to have speciﬁcally conceptual content is to play a certain kind of role in reasoning. The most basic sort of conceptual content is propositional content: the sort of content expressed by declarative sentences (and the ‘that’ clauses or content-specifying sentential complements of propositional attitude ascriptions). Because con- Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 37 tents of this sort are the right shape to be sayable, thinkable, and believable, they can be understood as making something explicit. The claim is that to have or express a content of this kind just is to be able to play the role both of premise and of conclusion in inferences. The second idea is that the expressive role characteristic of logical vocabulary as such is to make inferential relations explicit. Thus conditionals are treated as paradigms of logical locutions. This line of thought makes sense only if one thinks of proprieties of inference as extending beyond those underwritten by logical form. That is, one must acknowledge that besides inferences that are formally good in the sense of being logically valid, there are inferences that are materially good in the sense of articulating the contents of the nonlogical concepts applied in their premises and conclusions. In the rest of the book these ideas are applied to shed light on a variety of philosophical issues: normativity and practical reasoning in Chapter 2, the ultimately inferential nature of appeals to the reliability of cognitive processes such as perception in Chapter 3, how the notion of substitution allows the inferential semantic approach to be extended to subsentential expressions (which cannot play the direct inferential role of premises and conclusions) such as singular terms and predicates in Chapter 4, the inferential expressive role characteristic of the locutions that make explicit the intentional directedness or representational aboutness of thought and talk in Chapter 5, and the sort of social-perspectival, dialogical inferential articulation that makes possible the objectivity of conceptual content in Chapter 6. Chapter 2, “Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning,” extends the inferentialist paradigm in logic and semantics to encompass practical reasoning, culminating in noninferential discursive exit transitions in the form of intentional actions. Thus it combines an inferentialist approach to the contents of intentions with the inferentialist approach to the content of beliefs. It aims to do three things, corresponding to the three pieces of the title of the chapter: Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 38 ◆ Introduction To explain in inferentialist terms the expressive role that distinguishes speciﬁcally normative vocabulary. That is, to say what it is the job of such vocabulary to make explicit. Doing this is saying what ‘ought’ means. To introduce a non-humean way of thinking about practical reasoning. To offer a broadly kantian account of the will as a rational faculty of practical reasoning. The empiricist tradition seeks to trace back talk of reasons for action and norms governing action to underlying preferences and desires, which are understood both as intrinsically motivating and as the only sorts of things that can be intrinsically motivating. Thus any complete expression of a reason for action must include a speciﬁcation of what it is that the agent wants, in virtue of which the reason functions (motivationally) as a reason for that agent. In the story told here, by contrast to this instrumentalist one, preferences and desires are explained in terms of commitments to certain patterns of practical inference, that is, in terms of what is a reason for what, instead of the other way around. Different sorts of normative vocabulary are presented as making it possible to codify, in the explicit form of claims (claimables), commitment to the propriety of different patterns of practical reasoning. Against this background, preferences and desires take their place as one sort of commitment among others, distinguished by its structure rather than by any privilege with respect either to reasons or to motivations for action. Chapter 3, “Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism,” follows out the application of inferentialist semantic ideas to observation, that is, to perceptual noninferential discursive entrance transitions. The topic is the taking up into the conceptual order of the reliable differential responsive dispositions—for instance, to respond to red things by applying the concept red—that are essential to the contents of empirical concepts corresponding to observable states Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 39 of affairs. The issue is approached through a discussion of contemporary epistemological reliabilism, which seeks to put appeals to reliable processes in place of more traditional appeals to inferential justiﬁcations—at least in epistemology, and perhaps also in understanding the contents of knowledge claims. Three insights and two blindspots of reliabilism are identiﬁed. What I call the Founding Insight points out that reliably formed true beliefs can qualify as knowledge even where the candidate knower cannot justify them. Goldman’s Insight is that attributions of reliability must be relativized to reference classes. The Implicit Insight I discern in the examples used to motivate the ﬁrst two claims is that attributions of reliability should be understood in terms of endorsements of a distinctive kind of inference. The Conceptual Blindspot results from overgeneralizing the founding insight from epistemology to semantics, taking it that because there can be knowledge even in cases where the knower cannot offer an inferential justiﬁcation, it is therefore possible to understand the content of (knowledge) claims without appeal to inference at all. The Naturalistic Blindspot seeks in reliabilism the basis of a fully naturalized epistemology, one that need not appeal to norms or reasons at all. To avoid the Conceptual Blindspot, one must appreciate the signiﬁcance of speciﬁcally inferential articulation in distinguishing representations that qualify as beliefs, and hence as candidates for knowledge. To avoid the Naturalistic Blindspot, one must appreciate that concern with reliability is concern with a distinctive kind of interpersonal inference. Appreciating the role of inference in these explanatory contexts is grasping the implicit insight of reliabilism. It is what is required to conserve and extend both the Founding Insight and Goldman’s Insight. Thus, reliability should be understood in terms of the goodness of inference rather than the other way around. The last three chapters take up the challenge of explaining the referential or representational dimension of concept use and conceptual content in terms of the inferential articulation that is here Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 40 ◆ Introduction treated as primary in the order of explanation. To make a claim is to purport to state a fact. Chapter 4 offers an inferentialist account of what it is for the facts stated by true claimings to be about objects, and an inferentialist argument to the conclusion that facts must be about objects. An inferentialist pragmatism is committed to a top-down order of semantic explanation. It must give pride of place to propositional contents, for it is expressions with that sort of content that can play the basic inferential roles of premise and conclusion. The utterance of expressions that are suitable to appear in both these kinds of roles can have the pragmatic force or signiﬁcance of assertions, and so the expressions in question can be identiﬁed as declarative sentences. Some further work is needed to distinguish and attribute conceptual content to subsentential expressions such as singular terms and predicates, since they cannot serve as premises or conclusions in inferences. Frege’s notion of substitution provides a way to extend the inferentialist account of the conceptual content of sentences to these sorts of subsentential expressions. It gives us a way of making sense of the notion of the contribution the occurrence of a subsentential expression makes to the correctness of inferences it appears in (as an element of a premise or conclusion). For we can notice which substitutions of subsentential expressions do, and which do not, preserve the correctness of inferences in which the sentences they occur in play the role of premise or conclusion. In that way, subsentential expressions can be accorded a substitutionally indirect inferential role. Chapter 4, “What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any?” falls into two parts, corresponding to the two parts of its title. The ﬁrst argues that singular terms and predicates can be distinguished by the structure of the contributions they make to the correctness of substitution inferences involving sentences in which they occur. The second part argues that this is not a contingent or accidental structure. Very general conditions on inferential practice mandate that if inferentially signiﬁcant subsentential Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 41 structure is to be discerned in sentences at all, it must take the form of singular terms and predicates—that is, that if we are in the fact-stating line of work at all, the facts we state must be facts about objects and their properties and relations. Although in principle it is coherent to conceive of discursive practices that involve only sentential expressions devoid of internal structure, the expressive power of such languages is severely limited. For the productivity and creativity of language depend on the fact that an indeﬁnite number of novel sentences can be produced and understood because they are constructed out of familiar subsentential elements. The central argument of the chapter is a derivation of the necessity of a singular term and predicate structure (in the precise substitution inferential sense speciﬁed in the ﬁrst part of the chapter) from just two conditions: that there not be arbitrary restrictions on the carving up of sentences with a substitutional scalpel, and that the language contain the minimal expressive resources of sentential logic, namely, conditionals (or negation). Since, according to the inferentialist expressive view of logic, these are the locutions needed to make explicit within the language the material inferential relations in virtue of which ordinary nonlogical sentences have the conceptual contents they do, this means that singular terms and predicates will be substitutionally discernible within the basic sentences of any productive, projectible language capable of the minimal semantic self-consciousness made possible by the use of conditionals. The conclusion is that any language with sufﬁcient expressive power concerning its own conceptual contents—never mind the character of the world it is being used to talk about—must take the form of sentences containing singular terms and predicates. That is, it must at least purport to state facts about objects and their properties and relations. I call this, rather grandly, an expressive transcendental deduction of the necessity of objects. It is certainly the most difﬁcult part of the book, but the argument, though technical, requires no competence beyond familiarity with ﬁrst-order logic. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 42 ◆ Introduction At this point, then, we have seen in some sense what it is for our talk to be about objects. Chapter 5, “A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing,” complements this discussion by offering a general account of aboutness. It pursues a double-barreled expressivist and pragmatist strategy. On the expressivist side, it aims to understand what is implicit in what one is doing in terms of the kind of saying that makes it explicit. Here the aim is to understand the activity of representing things as being thus-and-so in terms of the use of the explicitly representational locutions we use to express the representational dimension of concept use. If we put to one side technical, inevitably theory-laden philosophical terms such as ‘denotes’ and some uses of ‘refers’ and ‘represents’,18 the claim is that the ordinary distinction between what we say or think and what we are talking of thinking about is expressed by using terms like ‘of ’ and ‘about’—not in phrases such as “the pen of my aunt” and “weighing about ﬁve pounds,” but when used to express intentional directedness, as in “thinking of Benjamin Franklin” and “talking about wolves.” These uses are in turn distinguished as those used to express de re attributions of propositional attitudes in the explicit, claimable form of ascriptions, such as “Adams claimed of Benjamin Franklin that he did not invent the lightning rod” (which might be paraphrased as “Adams represented Benjamin Franklin as not inventing the lightning rod”). In the pragmatist phase of the argument, then, we ask how one must use expressions in order for them to play the expressive role of explicit de re ascriptions of propositional attitude. The argument is completed by answering this question by an account of the inferential role distinctive of such ascriptions. The claim is that they codify certain interpersonal inferential commitments. The result is an account of the role of the explicitly representational vocabulary we use to express intentional directedness as codifying inferential commitments—that is, according to the expressive approach to logic, an account of its speciﬁcally logical expressive role. Chapter 6, “Objectivity and the Normative Fine Structure of Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Introduction ◆ 43 Rationality,” offers an argument in two parts, again corresponding to the two parts of the title. First is an argument for a thesis about the norms governing any practices recognizable as including the giving of and asking for reasons—any practice in which some performances have the implicit force or signiﬁcance of asserting and inferring—that is, according to the rationalist linguistic pragmatist line of thought pursued here, any genuinely discursive or concept-using practices. The claim is that those implicit practical norms must, in order to count as discursive, come in at least two ﬂavors. It must be possible for some performances to have the practical signiﬁcance of undertaking commitments. For asserting something is committing oneself to it, and the beliefs those assertions express involve a kind of commitment. It is such commitments that, in the ﬁrst instance, stand in practical inferential relations—such as that by committing oneself overtly (assertionally) to Leo’s being a lion, one thereby implicitly commits oneself (whether one realizes it or not) to Leo’s being a mammal. And it is the contents of those commitments that stand in the semantic inferential relations that can be made explicit by the use of conditionals. But for such a structure of consequential commitment to count as involving assessments of reasons, there must be in play also a notion of entitlement to one’s commitments: the sort of entitlement that is in question when we ask whether someone has good reasons for her commitments. The question whether or not one is committed to a certain claim(able) must be distinct from the question whether or not one is entitled (by reasons) to that commitment. What I call here the ‘normative ﬁne structure of rationality’ is the constellation of kinds of broadly inferential relations that is generated once we recognize these two sorts of normative status. For now we can discern and distinguish at least three fundamental ones: commitment-preserving inferences, entitlement-preserving inferences, and incompatibilities. The ﬁrst is a class of materially good inferences (that is, ones whose correctness or incorrectness Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 44 ◆ Introduction essentially depends on or articulates the content of the nonlogical concepts that occur in their premises or conclusions) that generalizes what appears in the formalist tradition of logic as deductive inferences. The second is a class of materially good inferences that generalizes what appears in the formalist tradition as inductive inferences. The third has no classical analog. We can say that two claims are materially incompatible in case commitment to one precludes entitlement to the other. (This is a normative relation. One can undertake incompatible assertible commitments as easily and intelligibly as one can undertake incompatible practical ones, for instance, by making two promises both of which cannot be kept. What one cannot do is be entitled to both—indeed, in standard cases, to either—of the incompatible commitments.) This richer practical inferential structure provides important new resources for logic. For instance, one can deﬁne the negation of p as its minimum incompatible: it is the claim that is commitment entailed by every claim materially incompatible with p. It also provides important new resources for semantics. The ﬁnal portion of the chapter shows how this structure of reasoning makes it possible to understand subjecting our claims to assessments according to a kind of correctness in which authority is invested in the things we are (in that central normative sense) talking about rather than in our attitudes toward them. Thus, by the end of the discussion we see how inferentially articulated conceptual norms can underwrite assessments of objective correctness of representation. Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College ONE ◆ ◆ ◆ Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism I. Introduction I want to introduce here a way of thinking about semantics that is different from more familiar ones, and on that basis also a new way of thinking about logic. In case that seems insufﬁciently ambitious, I will introduce these ideas by sketching a different way of thinking about some important episodes in the history of philosophy in the era that stretches from Descartes to Kant. I then explain and motivate the two ideas indicated in the title by putting together considerations drawn from three different thinkers, Frege, Dummett, and Sellars, or, as I think of them, the sage of Jena, the sage of Oxford, and the sage of Pittsburgh. In each case I pick up strands other than those usually emphasized when we read these ﬁgures. II. Representationalism and Inferentialism Pre-Kantian empiricists and rationalists alike were notoriously disposed to run together causal and conceptual issues, largely through insufﬁcient appreciation of the normative character of the “order and connection of ideas” (Spinoza) that matters for concepts. But there is another, perhaps less appreciated, contrast Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College 46 ◆ Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism in play during this period, besides that of the causal and the conceptual, the origin and the justiﬁcation of our ideas. Enlightenment epistemology was always the home for two somewhat uneasily coexisting conceptions of the conceptual. The fundamental concept of the dominant and characteristic understanding of cognitive contentfulness in the period initiated by Descartes is of course representation. There is, however, a minority semantic tradition that takes inference rather than representation as its master concept. Rationalists such as Spinoza and Leibniz accepted the central role of the concept of representation in explaining human cognitive activity. But they were not prepared to accept Descartes’s strategy of treating the possession of representational content as an unexplained explainer—just dividing the world into what is by nature a representing and what by nature can only be represented. Each of them developed instead an account of what it is for one thing to represent another, in terms of the inferential signiﬁcance of the representing. They were explicitly concerned, as Descartes was not, to be able to explain what it is for something to be understood, taken, treated, or employed as a representing by the subject: what it is for it to be a representing to or for that subject (to be “tanquam rem,” as if of things, as Descartes puts it). Their idea was that the way in which representings point beyond themselves to something represented is to be understood in terms of inferential relations among representings. States and acts acquire content by being caught up in inferences, as premises and conclusions. Thus a big divide within Enlightenment epistemology concerns the relative explanatory priority accorded to the concepts of representation and inference. The British empiricists were more puzzled than Descartes about representational purport: the property of so much as seeming to be about something. But they were clear in seeking to derive inferential relations from the contents of representings rather than the other way around. In this regard they belong to the still dominant tradition that reads inferential cor- Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College Semantic Inf