Between Saying and Doing Towards an Analytic Pragmatism

by Brandom, Robert B.

• ISBN13: 9780199585540
• ISBN10: 0199585547
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Between Saying and Doing aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic philosophy. It investigates the relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to what one has to do in orderto count as saying various things and to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings, makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts) and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relationsamong meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classic analytic core programs of empiricism, naturalism,and functionalism are offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations between subjects and objects.

Author Biography

Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, a fellow of the Center of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the A.W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award. His interests centre on philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of logic. He has published more than 50 articles on these and related areas and is the author of Making it Explicit and Tales of the Mighty Dead (Harvard University Press).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xxiii
List of Abbreviations	p. xxiv
Extending the Project of Analysis	p. 1
Elaborating Abilities: The Expressive Role of Logic	p. 31
Artifical Intelligence and Analytic Pragmatism	p. 69
Modality and Normativity: From Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars	p. 92
Incompatibility, Modal Semantics, and Intrinsic Logic	p. 117
Intentionality as a Pragmatically Mediated Semantic Relation	p. 176
Afterword: Philosophical Analysis and Analytic Philosophy	p. 201
Bibliography	p. 236
Subject Index	p. 241
Name Index	p. 250
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