Abstract
This paper discusses the semantic theory presented in Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit. I argue that it is best understood as a special version of dynamic semantics, so that these semantics by themselves offer an interesting theoretical alternative to more standard truth-conditional theories. This reorientation also has implications for more foundational issues. I argue that it gives us the resources for a renewed argument for the normativity of meaning. The paper ends by critically assessing the view in both its development and motivations.
Highlights
Truth is the basic concept in many semantic theories for natural language
An appeal to the content-force distinction in a static theory can be used to defend assertion as a source of norms, not meaning. It is precisely because in dynamic theories, force and content are both aspects of semantic content that this is a defense of the normativism
Though, that even the first incoherence doesn’t come for free for Brandom, since we need a semantics for the logical operators that delivers, for example, that one cannot be committed to both p and ¬p
Summary
Truth is the basic concept in many semantic theories for natural language. They assign truth-conditions or truth-values to sentences and semantic values to subsentential expressions that account for their contribution to the determination of the truth-conditions of the sentences containing them. This is not a mere choice of convenience. I’ll argue that Brandom’s definition of entailment is unworkable, that the close tie between semantics and epistemology implicit in his reliance on norms has extremely counter-intuitive consequences, and that one of the main arguments in favor of the theory, the argument from anaphora, fails
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