Introduction

Despite the many differences between you, the reader of this book, and me, its author, there is one thing that, necessarily, we both share. We, you and me, both belong to a community whose members all have cognitive capacities, in the broad sense of being able to reason and understand. There may also be other features and capacities that we share. We may, for example, both be mammals, and we may both be capable of some form of self-propulsion of parts of ourselves through space. While this may well be the case, the kind of interaction that is going on between us, communication via writing and reading with comprehension, requires that we share cognitive capacities. If, to the publisher's delight, this book finds unexpected readership on some alien planet, and you are one such alien reader, then there is an important sense in which you are not alien; you too are part of the “we” who share such capacities.

Brandom's work aims, in part, to give an account of this shared capacity, the sense in which we are both creatures that think, understand and are “subject to the peculiar force of the better reason” (MIE: 5). One may want to gloss this in terms of having a mind, a gloss however that needs to be treated with care. First, it is important not to think of the mind as some kind of thing, be it mental or physical, the possession of which is supposed to explain these capacities.