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Notes
Mark Okrent claims not to see anything like the Frege Geach problem in Kant’s passing comments about hypothetical judgments. See Mark Okrent, “Review of Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18567, (2010).
See Peter Geach, “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review 2 (1960).
Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 45. A weird and almost certainly unintended Heideggerian consequence of this definition is that Nothingness ends up being an object for Brandom. Since Nothingness has no properties, it has no incompatible properties. Whether one takes this to mean that the definition question-beggingly assumes a distinction between objects and non-objects, or in fact says something very deep about Being with a big B, of course depends upon a number of other commitments.
Brandom argues for this point, which he calls the Kant-Sellars Thesis, at greater length elsewhere. See Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). For a nice overview see Jon Cogburn, “Critical Notice of Robert Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism,” Philosophical Books, Vol. 51, No. 3, (2010), pp. 160–174.
Brandom, op. cit., p. 79. For the canonical statement of this concern, see Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Brandom, op. cit. p. 82.
That is, before Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia and Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind fatally undermined certain philosophical appeals to sense data, and the holism stemming from Quine’s own writings fatally undermined many philosophical uses of the distinction between observation and theory. See J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1962), Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964).
Brandom, op. cit., p. 95.
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). In the closing passages of the book McDowell actually hints at some form of panpsychism with his denial of what he calls “bald naturalism” but his quietism constitutively not only prevents him from ever doing more than hint, but also renders the very contentfulness of such hints deeply problematic.
See also “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism.” The essays, both excellent companions to Chapter 3 of Reason in Philosophy, are in Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Brandom, op. cit., p. 98.
Brandom’s discussion of epistemic progress (ibid.) might also be fruitfully applied to this problematic, though this would be a mistake, as one can always raise a Euthyphro problem such as is raised in Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). People think that they have changed their views because they are getting closer to the truth, not that closer to the truth is merely constituted by whatever humanity contingently happens to end up believing. But then why is this the case? Such an explanation will also be the answer to Russell’s problem.
Mark Wilson, Mark. 1982. “Predicate Meets Property,” The Philosophical Review Vol. 91, No. 4 (1982), pp. 549–589.
Brandom, op. cit., p. 83.
Stephen Stich, Deconstructing the Mind (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2008). Brandom cites Wilson on this very issue. “A patient and detailed investigation of the mechanisms of this phenomenon in basic descriptive and scientific concepts, and an extended argument for its ubiquity, can be found in Mark Wilson’s exciting and original Wandering Significance (Brandom, op. cit., p. 7).”
Brandom, op. cit., p. 123.
Brandom, op. cit., p. 126.
Brandom, op. cit., p. 136.
Brandom, op. cit., p. 148.
Brandom, op. cit., p. 196.
Mark Okrent, Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007), and Alisdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (New York: Open Court 2001).
Perhaps the first sophisticated discussion of the philosophical consequences of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems is found in Rudolph Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (New York: Littlefield, Adams, and Co, 1959). On the distinction between internal and external in this context, the absolutely classic essay to which much of Rorty and Brandom should be represented as responding, is Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” printed in Rudolph Carnap, Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
Rorty’s inability to see clearly past crude versions of the fact-value dichotomy relentlessly drove him to his later relativism, a view of astonishing crudeness for a philosopher of his depth and power. See the essays in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper’s, 2007).
Okrent, op. cit.
Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance, Yo! and Lo! The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
See especially Barbara Hannan, The Riddle of the World: A Reconsideration of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009).
See Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Idealism from Kant to Fichte (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008).
I would like to first thank Graham Bounds, Levi Bryant, Emily Beck Cogburn, Graham Harman, Andrew Johnson, Mark Lance, Joel Musser, Mark Okrent, John Protevi, Francois Raffoul, Jeffrey Roland, Greg Schufreider, Mark Silcox, James Stacey Taylor, Gary Williams, and Pete Wolfendale for helpful conversations, and then especially thank Robert Kraut, a decade later, for his wonderful graduate classes on Quine and Rorty, courses which form the horizon for much of the above.
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Cogburn, J. Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas . J Value Inquiry 45, 465–476 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-011-9289-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-011-9289-6