Introduction

The headline “Card-Carrying Pragmatist Rejects Representationalist Totalitarianism” is unlikely to generate much surprise in a philosophically aware audience. Ever since Dewey, the rejection of a representationalist conception of the function of language, and its influence into other areas (including the conception of philosophy itself), has been taken to be the hallmark of the pragmatist tradition.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Brandom portrays his inferentialist approach to semantics in contrast “to the representationalist idiom for thinking and talking about thinking that has been so well worked out over the last three centuries” (MIE: xxii). His first published paper opens by contrasting two opposing schools within the philosophy of language. The first school assumes that “the central feature of language is its capacity to represent the way things are”; the second assumes that “language is best thought of as a set of social practices”, so that “to understand how language works, we must attend to the uses to which sentences are put and the circumstances in which they are used” (Brandom 1976: 137). Brandom locates himself “squarely within the language-as-social-practice tradition” (ibid.: 146), in contrast to the representationalist orthodoxy.

What is surprising about Brandom's approach in this regard is not this rejection of representationalism, but rather how much of what are normally taken to be core features of the representationalist orthodoxy he is prepared to embrace. For example, he explicitly places accounting for the representational dimension of linguistic discourse as a key criterion that must be satisfied by his inferentialism.