Articulating Reasons

Author: Robert BRANDOM
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
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. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism 2. Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning 3. Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism 4. What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any? 5. A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing 6. Objectivity and the Normative Fine Structure of Rationality Notes Index Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation ' Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed. --J'rgen Habermas

Articulating the World

Author: Joseph Rouse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629370X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Book Description
Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself. In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it.

Reason in Philosophy

Author: Robert Brandom
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674034495
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
An emphasis on our capacity to reason, rather than merely to represent, has been growing in philosophy over the years. This book gives an overview of the author's understanding of the role of reason as the structure at once of our minds and our meanings - what constitutes us as free, responsible agents.

Articulating a Thought

Author: Eli Alshanetsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191088927
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
Articulating a thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have never considered before, though not always. Articulating a thought can also be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade many aspects of philosophical inquiry, as well as many ordinary situations. While we may overcome some of the challenges through education and practice, we cannot do away with them altogether. And the hardest thoughts to articulate often come to us unbidden: as we neither assemble them from other thoughts nor get them from any source of external information. They can come from us freely and spontaneously, and frequently we articulate them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge—yet, when we find the right words, we can often instantly tell that they express our thought. How do we manage to recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation contributes in any way to the deeply private undertaking of coming to know our own thoughts? In Articulating a Thought, Eli Alshanetsky considers how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words and examines the paradox of those difficult cases where we do not already know what we are struggling to articulate.

Inferentialism

Author: J. Peregrin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113745296X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
In this study two strands of inferentialism are brought together: the philosophical doctrine of Brandom, according to which meanings are generally inferential roles, and the logical doctrine prioritizing proof-theory over model theory and approaching meaning in logical, especially proof-theoretical terms.

Articulating Design Decisions

Author: Tom Greever
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1491921536
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
Annotation Every designer has had to justify designs to non-designers, yet most lack the ability to explain themselves in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement. The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins. This practical book provides principles, tactics and actionable methods for talking about designs with executives, managers, developers, marketers and other stakeholders who have influence over the project with the goal of winning them over and creating the best user experience.

From Empiricism to Expressivism

Author: Robert Brandom
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674187288
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading critics of empiricism—a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Robert Brandom clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.

A Spirit of Trust

Author: Robert B. Brandom
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674976819
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 857

Book Description
Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers. In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel. A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it. According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

Perspectives on Pragmatism

Author: Robert Brandom
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058089
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Pragmatism has been reinvented in every generation since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. This book, by one of todayÕs most distinguished contemporary heirs of pragmatist philosophy, rereads cardinal figures in that tradition, distilling from their insights a way forward from where we are now. Perspectives on Pragmatism opens with a new accounting of what is living and what is dead in the first three generations of classical American pragmatists, represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Post-Deweyan pragmatism at midcentury is discussed in the work of Wilfrid Sellars, one of its most brilliant and original practitioners. SellarsÕ legacy in turn is traced through the thought of his admirer, Richard Rorty, who further developed JamesÕs and DeweyÕs ideas within the professional discipline of philosophy and once more succeeded, as they had, in showing the more general importance of those ideas not only for intellectuals outside philosophy but for the wider public sphere. The book closes with a clear description of the authorÕs own analytic pragmatism, which combines all these ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and synthesizes that broad pragmatism with its dominant philosophical rival, analytic philosophy, which focuses on language and logic. The result is a treatise that allows us to see American philosophy in its full scope, both its origins and its promise for tomorrow.

Reading Brandom

Author: Bernhard Weiss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113697184X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 812

Book Description
Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment is one of the most significant, talked about and daunting books published in philosophy in recent years. Featuring specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers with replies by Brandom himself, Reading Brandom clarifies, critically appraises and furthers understanding of Brandom’s important book. Divided into four parts - ‘Normative Pragmatics’; ‘The Challenge of Inferentialism’; ‘Inferentialist Semantics’; and ‘Brandom’s Replies’, Reading Brandom covers the following key aspects of Brandom’s work: inferentialism vs. representationalism normativity in philosophy of language and mind pragmatics and the centrality of asserting language entries and exits meaning and truth semantic deflationism and logical locutions. Essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy of language and mind, Reading Brandom is also an excellent companion volume to Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, also published by Routledge.