I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people's minds. Each of these three kinds of empirical knowledge has its distinctive characteristics. What I know about the contents of my own mind I generally know without investigation or appeal to evidence. There are exceptions, but the primacy of unmediated self-knowledge is (...) attested by the fact that we distrust the exceptions until they can be reconciled with the unmediated. My knowledge of the world outside of myself, on the other hand, depends on the functioning of my sense organs, and this causal dependence on the senses makes my beliefs about the world of nature open to a sort of uncertainty that arises only rarely in the case of beliefs about my own states of mind. Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on further evidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me. But my knowledge of the propositional contents of other minds is never immediate in this sense; I would have no access to what others think and value if I could not note their behaviour. (shrink)

1. It seems plausible to say that a language is a system of expressions the use of which is subject to certain rules. It would seem, thus, that learning to use a language is learning to obey the rules for the use of its expressions. However, taken as it stands, this thesis is subject to an obvious and devastating refutation. After formulating this refutation, I shall turn to the constructive task of attempting to restate the thesis in a way which (...) avoids it. In doing so, I shall draw certain distinctions the theoretical elaboration of which will, I believe, yield new insight into the psychology of language and of what might be called “norm conforming behavior” generally. The present paper contains an initial attempt along these lines. (shrink)

Brandom’s attempt to motivate inferentialism is found wanting on a number of grounds, including a skepticism about how much recommendation for inferentialism can be derived from the evident unsatisfactoriness of the representationalism Brandom contrasts it with, which seems to be a straw man. Brandom’s appeal to authorities falls flat; in particular, his reading of Frege’s early work as inferentialist in Brandom’s sense is a misinterpretation. Given the programmatic character of Brandom’s recommendation for inferentialism, the quality of the motivation he offers (...) for it matters more than he has acknowledged. (shrink)

Brandom's attempt to motivate inferentialism is found wanting on a number of grounds, including a skepticism about how much recommendation for inferentialism can be derived from the evident unsatisfactoriness of the representationalism Brandom contrasts it with, which seems to be a straw man. Brandom's appeal to authorities falls flat; in particular, his reading of Frege's early work as inferentialist in Brandom's sense is a misinterpretation. Given the programmatic character of Brandom's recommendation for inferentialism, the quality of the motivation he offers (...) for it matters more than he has acknowledged. (shrink)

I give a rough outline of Brandom’s scorekeeping account of conceptual content. The account is meant to be phenomenalist, normativist, expressively complete and non-circular; the question is how and to what extent it succeeds in meeting these goals.

I give a rough outline of Brandom¿s scorekeeping account of conceptual content. The account is meant to be phenomenalist, normativist, expressively complete and non-circular; the question is how and to what extent it succeeds in meeting these goals.

The central challenge to Brandom's theory of propositional content, as he himself acknowledges, is to meet the following two apparently conflicting conditions of adequacy he lays down for such a theory: It must do justice to the objectivity of conceptual norms and it should embody a phenomenalist approach to normativity, according to which normative statuses must be understood as being instituted by practical normative attitudes. The strategy Brandom employs for reconciling these requirements is intricate and somewhat elusive. This paper aims (...) to make it more accessible by reconstructing its main outline. I hope to show thereby that an objection raised by Rödl against Brandom's account of objectivity is based on a misconception of that strategy. (shrink)

I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people's minds. Each of these three kinds of empirical knowledge has its distinctive characteristics. What I know about the contents of my own mind I generally know without investigation or appeal to evidence. There are exceptions, but the primacy of unmediated self-knowledge is (...) attested by the fact that we distrust the exceptions until they can be reconciled with the unmediated. My knowledge of the world outside of myself, on the other hand, depends on the functioning of my sense organs, and this causal dependence on the senses makes my beliefs about the world of nature open to a sort of uncertainty that arises only rarely in the case of beliefs about my own states of mind. Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on further evidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me. But my knowledge of the propositional contents of other minds is never immediate in this sense; I would have no access to what others think and value if I could not note their behaviour. (shrink)

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. (...) To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's.. (shrink)