Propositional Contents and the Logical Space

Abstract

Robert Brandom's formulation of the inferentialist doctrine advances a number of bold claims. One of them is that logical vocabulary has a distinctive expressive role to play in linguistic practice. It serves to make explicit, in the content of claims, material-inferential proprieties implicitly governing use of nonlogical expressions within discursive practices of making, challenging, and justifying claims. This chapter elaborates a challenge to this account of logic and its relation to prelogical discourse. It starts by situating it in a wider context of Brandom's inferentialism. The chapter turns to Jaroslav Peregrin's development of the inferentialist approach, which contains a line of reasoning that flirts with an alternative conception of logic. Expressive role of logical vocabulary presupposes the intelligibility of a discursive practice having the pragmatic structure of practices of giving and asking for reasons whose participants are capable of expressing and endorsing inferentially articulated contents in claims made by means of nonlogical sentences.