1997/03/01 by Robert Brandom, Robert B. Brandom
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/2953784
The book is an attempt to explain the meanings of linguistic expressions in terms of their use. The explanatory strategy is to begin with an account of social practices, to identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then to consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. The result is a kind of conceptual role semantics that is at once firmly rooted in actual practices of producing and consuming speech acts, and sufficiently finely articulated to make clear how those practices are capable of conferring a rich variety of kinds of content. Claims about the relations between meaning and use only have a clear sense in the context of a specification of the vocabulary in which that use is described or ascribed. At one extreme, use clearly determines meaning in the strongest possible sense if admissible specifications of the use can include such phrases as using the word 'not' to express negation, or using the term 'Julius Caesar' to refer to Julius Caesar. At an opposite extreme, if admissible specifications of use are restricted to descriptions of the movements of particles expressed in the vocabulary of physics, not only will the use, so described, fail to settle what is meant or expressed by various noises or inscriptions, it will in general fail to settle even that anything is meant or expressed by them. The specification of use employed here is neither so generous as to permit semantic or intentional vocabulary, nor so parsimonious as to insist on purely naturalistic vocabulary. Instead, it makes essential use of normative vocabulary. The practices that confer propositional and other sorts of conceptual content implicitly contain norms concerning how it is correct to use expressions, under what circumstances it is appropriate to perform various speech acts, and what the appropriate consequences of such performances are. Chapter One introduces and motivates this normative pragmatics, which is rooted in considerations ad-