The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices, the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational (...) expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise, selfcontained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom’s imposing theoretical apparatus, the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism, till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom’s work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism. (shrink)

Recent attempts to define and support realism in semantics seem to acknowledge, as the only defence from skeptical attacks to the notion of meaning, a flat acceptance of the existence of representational relations between language and things in the world. In this paper I reconsider part of the mistrust about the normative character of meaning, in order to show that some of the worries urging the realists to cling to representationalism actually rest on misconceptions. To the contrary, I suggest that (...) normativity is the main strength of a stable realist stance in semantics. Support to this suggestion comes from the reanalysis of some oft-ignored Sellarsian themes. (shrink)

Recent attempts to define and support realism in semantics seem to acknowledge, as the only defence from skeptical attacks to the notion of meaning, a flat acceptance of the existence of representational relations between language and things in the world. In this paper I reconsider part of the mistrust about the normative character of meaning, in order to show that some of the worries urging the realists to cling on representationalism actually rest on misconceptions. To the contrary, I suggest that (...) normativity is the main strength of a stable realist stance in semantics. Support to this suggestion comes from the reanalysis of some oft-ignored sellarsian themes. (shrink)

John McDowell articulated a radical criticism of normative inferentialism against Robert Brandom’s expressivist account of conceptual contents. One of his main concerns consists in vindicating a notion of intentionality that could not be reduced to the deontic relations that are established by discursive practitioners. Noticeably, large part of this discussion is focused on empirical knowledge and observational judgments. McDowell argues that there is no role for inference in the application of observational concepts, except the paradoxical one of justifying the content (...) of an observational judgment in terms of itself. This paper examines the semantical consequences of the analysis of the content of empirical judgments in terms of their inferential role. These, it is suggested, are distinct from the epistemological paradoxes that McDowell charges the inferentialist approach with. (shrink)

Che cosa vuol dire per le espressioni del nostro linguaggio avere un significato? Secondo un approccio oggi sostanzialmente standard in semantica, avere significato vuol dire prima di tutto avere un contenuto rappresentazionale, cioè poter rappresentare qualcosa. Secondo un inferenzialista come Robert Brandom, invece, le espressioni del nostro linguaggio hanno contenuto perché sono inserite in una rete di relazioni inferenziali, rispetto alla quale possono essere utilizzate per dare e richiedere ragioni. Il libro di Pietro Salis, Pratiche discorsive razionali, presenta e discute (...) alcuni degli aspetti più interessanti dell'inferenzialismo normativo di Brandom. Si tratta della seconda monografia in lingua italiana dedicata alla filosofia del linguaggio brandomiana dopo quella di Giovagnoli (2004). Per trovare elementi di paragone con il lavoro di Salis occorre allora guardare alle pubblicazioni in lingua inglese. Tra queste ci sono le raccolte di saggi curate da Stekeler-Weithofer (2008), Prien e Schweikard (2008), e Weiss e Wanderer (2010). Ma anche le introduzioni monografiche di Wanderer (2008) e Turbanti (2017). La prima di queste introduzioni, in particolare, è quella più simile al libro di Salis, soprattutto dal punto di vista tematico. (shrink)

The notion of conceptual normativity is grounded on the idea that our conceptual contents are established by the norms of the discursive social practices we engage in. This idea involves two major problems. First, where do the norms of discursive practices come from and how can the contents that they establish be objective? Second, what is the role of the vocabulary that we use to express such norms as explicit rules? This article draws the outline of an account that could (...) possibly answer both questions. First, it explores the viability of a naturalism about conceptual normativity. Second, it defines the characters of a rational expressivist analysis of the language of the rules. (shrink)

In the fifth of his John Locke Lectures, Robert Brandom takes up the challenge to define a formal semantics for modelling conceptual contents according to his normative analysis of linguistic practices. The project is to exploit the notion of incompatibility in order to directly define a modally robust relation of entailment. Unfortunately, it can be proved that, in the original definition, the modal system represented by Incompatibility Semantics (IS) collapses into propositional calculus. In this paper I show how IS can (...) be technically amended so to overcome this failure: the required modifications are already known and consist in adapting and including the main notions of Kripke's standard framework of possible worlds. I also show that the modifications do not jeopardize Brandom's original project. (shrink)

In our paper we aim to update and revise the pragmatist conception of the relationship between science and common sense. First of all, we introduce two technical notions (MI and SI), with which we identify the normative spaces of the manifest and the scientific image, and we highlight the differences between these two notions and their Sellarsian cognates. Secondly, within each normative space we investigate the connections between languages and practices: we ground linguistic contents on the normative relations that are (...) established in the practices of the corresponding normative space. Finally, we rely on Brandom’s meaning-use analysis to provide a representation of the different ways in which MI and SI practices and languages may interact. Our pragmatist proposal is to trace back the ontological conflict that is usually believed to exist between scientific and common sense objects to the differences between scientific and common sense practices. (shrink)

This volume is a Festschrift in honour of Enrico Moriconi, to celebrate his 70th birthday and retirement. It consists of twelve original short essays by some of his friends, colleagues and former students, in the areas of general logic, proof theory, history of logic, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology and philosophy of language, mainly focused on some of his favourite research topics.

Non-monotonicity in logic is a symptom that may have many causes. In the formalisation of defeasible reasoning, an epistemic diagnosis has largely prevailed according to which some inferences are non-monotonic because they are provisionally drawn in the absence of relevant or complete information. The Gabbay-Makinson rules for cumulative consequence relations are a paradigmatic example of this epistemic approach. In this paper a different approach to defeasible reasoning is introduced, based on the idea of inferential perspectives. According to this approach, some (...) inferences are non-monotonic because they are drawn as from another reasoner’s perspective. Rules are introduced and discussed for a Perspectival Calculus, which show both similarities and interesting differences with respect to cumulative systems. (shrink)

One of the most striking clashes between the results of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on language games and Robert Brandom’s normative analysis of pragmatics concerns the pride of place granted by the latter to assertional practices. While Wittgenstein believes that there is no privileged language game, Brandom maintains that the game of giving and asking for reasons is fundamental for the possibility of any linguistic practice to be properly meaningful. Recently, Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance proposed to generalize Brandom’s normative pragmatics (...) in order to provide a more fine–grained analysis of the normativity that governs discursive practices. It is a courageous enterprise that challenges the predominance of the cognitive approach in pragmatics by underpinning a different way to understand the notion of meaning. Their proposal, however, requires to take into account many different sorts of speech acts on a par and, by doing so, it is in tension with Brandom’s approach. This paper explores the shape of this tension in order to see whether or not a unitary characterization of rationality can be envisaged in Wittgenstein’s and Brandom’s way of accounting for the ability to deploy conceptual contents in linguistic practices. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to characterize the semantic notion of trust, as it has been introduced by Robert Brandom. Traditionally, the concept of trust does not play any central role in semantics. This, I suggest, depends on the fact that the very social dimension plays a rather marginal role in the traditional representationalist theory of meaning. In Brandom’s normative inferentialism, instead, trust is essential to the constitution of the discursive communities, whose rules are taken to define contents.

The early writings of Wilfrid Sellars are characterized by the analysis of themes and problems from Rudolph Carnap's philosophy of language. In particular, Sellars investigated the notion of "material'' rules of inference and explored the possibility of a "pure'' pragmatics. In these initial researches Sellars laid the foundations for his inferentialist analysis of meaning. A crucial component of such an analysis is the seminal form of rational expressivism that Sellars began to develop at the time. In this paper I address (...) the genesis of this idea and some of the main implications that it has on the characterization of the space of reasons. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the assumptions orienting the debate about logical pluralism. I argue that these assumptions are grounded in the truth-conditional character of the semantic metavocabularies in which the debate is conducted. Then, I suggest an expressivist strategy to reinterpret the pluralist claim that there are different logics and I show how the expressive role of logical vocabularies can be equally well characterized by means of different expressive resources not involving the notion of truth.

Dynamic approaches to semantics like Discourse Representation Theory or Jaszczolt's Default Semantics provide more and more effective tools to represent how speakers handle meanings in linguistic practices. These deeper perspectives may give us a lever to lift some of the philosophical perplexities crowding semantics and to catch a glimpse of what hides beneath them. In this paper, I exploit these approaches with relation to the analysis of belief reports. However, it will emerge that, despite their benefits, the theories that support (...) these representational advances may be themselves question begging from a philosophical point of view. Brandom's remarks about normative character of intentional content offer an important contribution to bring into focus the right path to drive these representational improvements towards really acceptable answers to philosophical questions about semantics. (shrink)

One of the most striking clashes between the results of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on language games and Robert Brandom’s normative analysis of pragmatics concerns the pride of place granted by the latter to assertional practices. While Wittgenstein believes that there is no privileged language game, Brandom maintains that the game of giving and asking for reasons is fundamental for the possibility of any linguistic practice to be properly meaningful. Recently, Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance proposed to generalize Brandom’s normative pragmatics (...) in order to provide a more fine–grained analysis of the normativity that governs discursive practices. It is a courageous enterprise that challenges the predominance of the cognitive approach in pragmatics by underpinning a different way to understand the notion of meaning. Their proposal, however, requires to take into account many different sorts of speech acts on a par and, by doing so, it is in tension with Brandom’s approach. This paper explores the shape of this tension in order to see whether or not a unitary characterization of rationality can be envisaged in Wittgenstein’s and Brandom’s way of accounting for the ability to deploy conceptual contents in linguistic practices. (shrink)