Abstract

How do our minds grasp the world? The nlajor task in explaining the relation between mind and the world is to indicate how facts, experiences, and judgments stand in justificatory relation. This paper examines three ways of explaining the cognitive relation between mind and world: inferentialism, conceptualism, and social pragmatism. These three theories differ from the traditional foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism in that they no longer attempt any analysis of the epistemic notions such as knowledge and evidence abstractly; rather, they explore, in a Wittgensteinean way, these notions in relation to linguistic practices. In this paper, I will first examine the debate between inferentialism and conceptualism, a debate involving Sellars, Davidson, McDowell, and Brandom. I will show that both inferentialism and conceptualism have difficulties in giving a complete account of empirical justification and that their difficulties can be remedied only by resorting to some social pragmatisnl notions such as the social development of conceptual capacities and the social recognition of cognitive performance.