=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-444/paper-22
|storemode=property
|title=Assertion and Inference (on: Making It Explicit)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-444/paper22.pdf
|volume=Vol-444
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==Assertion and Inference (on: Making It Explicit)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-444/paper22.pdf
Assertion and Inference
Carlo Penco1
1 Università degli studi di Genova via Balbi 4 16126 Genova (Italy)
www.dif.unige.it/epi/hp/penco
penco@unige.it
Abstract. In this introduction to the tutorials I will give a brief sketch of the place of Bran-
dom's ideas in the network of "classical" authors, focusing on some of the central tenets intro-
duced by Making it Explicit (MIE), which antecedes the ideas developed in Between Saying and
Doing (BSD). I give here a schematic presentation with some references to pages in MIE and
BSD.
.
1 Classic Authors: Background
Differently from many contemporary analytic authors, Brandom makes often refer-
ences to classical philosophical traditions, from rationalism to pragmatism, and
rerences to classical authors are easy to find in his books. Among these authors I
think it useful to quote what I think are some of the main contributions in Brandom's
work:
Kant contributes as the typical representative of rationalism and for his conception
of normativity: to be rational is to be bound by rules (both in theoretical judgements
and in practical actions); the authority of rules derives by our endorsing them, by our
acting according to our conceptions of the rules (MIE 50-52; see 30-36)
Frege is taken first of all as the author who claims the priority of judgment over
concepts - recovering a Kantian idea which has dismissed by Kant's successors - and
his consequent idea of the sense of a sentence as its inferential potential. The other
main aspect of Frege is the distinction between conceptual content and force, a dis-
tinction basic for any pragmatic account (MIE 79-81; 107-116).
Dewey and Peirce are taken to reinterpret what is meant with "pragmatism", insist-
ing on what one is doing when one takes something as true. To understand the use of
"true" we need to clarify what we are doing when we make a claim, when we make an
assertion (MIE 286-288).
Wittgenstein is taken first of all as the author of rule following considerations.
Brandom claims that the Wittgensteinian point is to make sense of the idea of norms
implicit in practice, which can avoid the reduction of understanding to interpretation
on the one hand or to natural reactions on the other. The point is that norms belong to
a custom, a practice or institution (MIE 29; see also McDowell 1984).
Sellars, who is said to have introduced Kant into Analytic Philosophy, is taken as
an example of the reaction against the myth of the given (see introd. to Sellars 1997)
and as the proponent of the basic idea of what he calls "socratic method", that is "a
way of bringing our practices under rational control, by expressing them explicitly in
a form in which they can be confronted with objections and alternatives." (MIE 106)
2 Basic Ideas: Background
Beside these general ideas there are more specific points which Brandom takes
from different authors although expressing doubts and reservations. Brandom's work
is entangled with a complex networks of concepts and topics (from material infer-
ences, to conservativeness, from preception to substitution…) which cannot be easily
summarized I will speake therefore of some of the concepts Brandom partially takes
from other authors. to give at least a hint on some influences on his thought. This will
be useful to find at least a thread to follow: his treatment of assertion.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's influence is linked to his treatment of rule following and
language games; however Brandom puts some doubt on Wittgenstein's conception of
language games, as they included just "vocal" practice which do not deserve to be
called language games (Brandom is referring to the language game of the builders in
Wittgenstein 1953, § 2; see MIE 172 and BSD 42). Here Brandom's stance is that to
have a proper language game you need to have the practice of assertion.
Wilfrid Sellars: Brandom refers strictly to Sellar's notion of "game of giving and
asking for reasons". It is a notion of language game where assertions are the basic
case: we ask for the grounds of an assertion and are ready to give reasons for what we
assert. An assertion is something which stands in need of a reason and it is also some-
thing that can be offered as a reason. (MIE 167)
Michael Dummett's theory of meaning as use has received much attention in Bran-
dom's work, taking Dummett's idea that we need to generalize Gentzen's model of
introduction and elimination rules for logic to a general theory o meaning (MIE 116-
118): learning to use a statement involve the mastery of the conditions under which
we can justify the statement and the the consequences of accepting it. Against Dum-
met's idea to restrict a systematic theory of meaning only to the justification (or as-
sertibility) conditions, Brandom insists on treating also the consequences, giving a
prominent role to the commitment of accepting the consequences of our assertions
(the reason is that assertions with the same assertibility conditions may have different
consequences MIE 121-122).
David Lewis 1974 suggests the fundamental idea of scorekeeping; he suggests to
treat our normal rule governed conversation as a game which evolves according to
scorekeeping like it happens in baseball; the element of the conversational score are
things like presuppositions, boudaries between permissible and impermissible actions,
and so on. Scorekeeping in conversation is perspectival: playing a conversational
game means, among other things, that different people keep track of the commitments
and entitlements of the other participants, attributing them commitments and entitle-
ments.
Richard Rorty was a teacher of Brandom and his main influence is to be found in
the attempt to build a philosophy where "representation" is not the first step. Fighting
against the idea that philosophy must be the "mirror of nature" (Rorty 1980), Bran-
dom tries to recover objectivity through inference and social practice.
Charles Chastain 1975 suggested a unusual way of thinking of Kripke's treatment
proper names. While Kripke said that the reference of a proper name is fixed through
a causal chain, Chastain begun to think to the actual ways we keep a chain of refer-
ence going: anaphora, that is the use of picking what antecedes in a discourse with
pronouns and other indexicals… (John had a daughter; she was very nice…"). Causal
chains become in this perspective a disguised way to speak of anaphoric chains. Dis-
cussing the basic role of indexicals and demostratives (deixis) in the structuring of our
context dependent utterances,Brandom reaches a strong conclusion: deixis presup-
poses anaphora, given that no use of demostratives can be properly set out unless in a
chain of anaphoric links; to use a demonstrative is first of all to put an anaphoric ini-
tiator (MIE 307-310).
Donald Davidson is another main source of inspiration for Brandom, from the the-
ory of triangulation to the treatment of indirect speec; here I want to point to one of
the main tenet of Davidons's philosophy, that is meaning holism. The mastery of the
meaning, or the use of an expression involve mastery of the uses of many expressions.
Meaning holism has been accused of making communication impossible; an aswer is
to pass from the idea of communication in terms of sharing or grasping a common
meaning to an idea of communication as cooperating in a joint activity (MIE 479).
3 Assertion and Inference
One of the central point of Brandom's original inferentialism is the definition of the
meaning of a sentence in terms of its inferential power, as a development of what
Frege had said in his Begriffsschrift (§3). To understand a sentence is to understand
its consequences, given certain collateral assumptions, and to understand the grounds
for asserting it (grounds which may be logical but also perceptual: apparently to see
something red is a ground to assert that something is red). Brandom develops his
particular way of an inferential semantics, where the definition of conceptual content
is specified (grossly) as a point in a network of inferences. Apparently one need not to
know the impossible task to know all the inferences connected to a concept; one will
count as mastering the concept if he is able to make enough of the right inferences in
the context in which the concept is used. Inferential semantics alone would take a lot
of space to be summarized; here I want to point to the way in which inferential se-
mantics is embedded inside a normative pragmatics.
Normative status and material incompatibility of commitments
We might see the attempt to connect inferential semantics to normative pragmatics
as a way fo specifying - in Austin terminology - felicity conditions of assertions.
Going back to Sellars terminology we may say that to make an assertion implies to be
able to play the game of giving and asking for reasons. Standard felicity conditions
for an assertion say that the speaker should sincerely believe what he assert and also
have justifications for the content of the assertions. Brandom, as we have seen, insists
also on the necessity to give space to the recognition of the consequences of an asser-
tion. He gives us therefore two normative dimensions which form what we might call
the felicity condition of a correct assertion:
1 entitlements: a speaker must have justification for what she asserts, she must be
entitled by some objectively recognizable grounds (either logical or emprical)
2 commitments: a speaker must commit herself to the consequences of what she as-
serts, given her mastery of the conditional relation.
Commitments and entitlements are normative statuses needed for a speaker to per-
form a correct speech act of asserting. These "normative" statuses correspond to the
traditional primitives of permission and obligation. In this distinction Brandom places
a central tenet of his theory: the notion of material negation or incompatibility:
"two notions are incompatible with each other if commitments to one pre-
cludesentitlement to the other" (MIE 160).
Apparently the significance of making a claim - whose content is expressed by the
use of a particular sentence - depends on other collateral commitments other people
may have. Therefore there may be different consequences derived by different sets of
beliefs that are held by different persons. This makes a systematic theory of meaning
almost impossible: how can we define the meaning of a sentence in terms of its possi-
ble consequences when they depend on collateral assumptions and commitments?
How communication become possible? This question is a traditional one against
holism - made by Dummett 1973: if meaning is defined holistically, if it depends on
the different perspectives of different speakers, what you mean with an expression
will be different by what I mean with the same expression; therefore agreement or
disagreement will become impossible and communication will become a mistery
nobody can really explain. Here the move made by Brandom as we shall wee now -
is another pragmatic move.
Normative attitudes and the answer to the problem of holism
We are not only driven by linguistic exchange to have entitlements and commit-
ments to what we claim; we also report what other people say. Reported speech is a
long debated topic since Frege, and its main problem is the substitution salva veritate
of coreferring expressions. Brandom realizes that we have different kinds of reported
speechs, which depend on the attitudes we have towards what other people say. We
may simply report what another person has said, without being committed to the con-
tent of what is said, but attributing commitments the the speaker. On the other hand
we may acknowledge what a person claims and undertake what she claims.
Attributing and Undertaking are two different (normative) attitudes towards what
other people claim. When we make an assertion we undertake a certain kind of com-
mitment, and we make it manifest in the way we accept or reject substitutions, for
instance, in reported speech. If I say that Mary does not believe of Benjamin Frank-
ling that is the inventor of the lightning rod I do not undertake what she says, but I
attribute her that belief; on the other hand, if I say that John believes that Benjamin
Franklin is the inventor of the lightning rod, I undertake John's assertion, and in so
doing i accept to substitute "BF" with "the inventor of the lightning rod".
We have so far distinguished two levels of norms: (i) commitments and entitle-
ments, which are the basic status of our treating the sentences we assert; (ii) attribut-
ing and undertaking, which are the basic attitudes we have towards the contents of
other people assertions. This should be enough1 to face the above mentione problem
of defining communication in a holistic vision: communication does not require the
previous sharing of common contents, but it is a process in which speakaers converge
towards the same concepts in the activity of attributing and undertaking commitments
to certain inferences and substitutions.
Asserting and infererring are threfore internally related practices. Assertion be-
comes the basic tool in inferential semantics and pragmatics; in fact verbal practices
like orders acquire their inferential meaning only in a language where we already
have assertions. A case it made by Brandom also relatively to promises, which be-
come understandable only on the background of assertions, and the entitlements and
commitments which are defining the act of asserting (MIE 163-165). In the new
terminology of Between Saying and Doing assertion becomes "the minimal kind of
doing which counts as saying" (BSD 42). Put in semantic terms we may say that only
what can stand in inferential relations can count as the content of an assertion (BSD
43).
References
Brandom R. B. 2008 Between Saying and Doing, Towards and Analytic Pragmatism, Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Brandom, R. B. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commit-
ment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Chastain, C. 1975. “Reference and context”. In K. Gunderson (ed), Language, Mind and
Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 194–269.
Dummett, M. 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth.
McDowell J. 1984 "Wittgensten on following a rule", Synthese 58 (325-363)
Lewis D., 1974 "Scorekeeping in a Language Game", in Journal of Philosophical Logic (re-
print in D. Lewis, Philosophical Papers, ch. 13)
Sellars W. 1997 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Introd R. Rorty, comment by R.
Brandom, Harvard U.P., Cambridge (Mass.) [first. edition 1956]
1 Actually Brandom suggest that we need a third step, which permits us to do for deontic at-
titudes what those attitudes do for deontic statuses (MIE 637); but some simplification is
needed is such a short introduction.