Book contents
- Doing, Knowing, and Getting It Right
- Doing, Knowing, and Getting It Right
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Meaning
- Part II Rules and Rationality
- Chapter 5 From Representationalism to Rescriptivism
- Chapter 6 Practice All the Way Down
- Chapter 7 Rationality as Discursive Practice
- Part III Reasoning
- Part IV Knowing
- Part V Methodologism
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 7 - Rationality as Discursive Practice
from Part II - Rules and Rationality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: aN Invalid Date NaN
Book contents
- Doing, Knowing, and Getting It Right
- Doing, Knowing, and Getting It Right
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Meaning
- Part II Rules and Rationality
- Chapter 5 From Representationalism to Rescriptivism
- Chapter 6 Practice All the Way Down
- Chapter 7 Rationality as Discursive Practice
- Part III Reasoning
- Part IV Knowing
- Part V Methodologism
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the concept of rationality, examining the relationship between human beings and rationality through Brandom’s distinction between ‘sapients’ and ‘sentients’. Brandom treats rationality as a specifically human capacity. However, it is argued that if a non-human agent acquires sufficient discursive competence, it can also be regarded as a rational actor.Next, various senses of rationality are charted. On the one hand, rationality appears as inferential competence universally possessed by all genuinely discursive agents. On the other hand, it manifests as a variable form of social practice, shaped by material rather than formal features.The chapter concludes by proposing a conception of rationality as discursive rationality, composed of three core features: (1) a tight, dense, and explicit inferential structure; (2) a systematic coping mechanism with the non-linguistic world; and (3) openness to alternative inferential structures. This leads to a maxim for communal and discursive rationality: the more a community exhibits these three features, the more rational it is.
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- Doing, Knowing, and Getting it RightMethodologism as Pragmatism, pp. 113 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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