ABSTRACT
I regret that the essay that follows is wholly critical. For this reason it may give a very wrong idea of my opinion of Brandom as a philosopher. He is unquestionably a brilliant and consistently interesting and important thinker. I wish to stress that my criticism of his paper is almost entirely limited to one aspect: his depiction of classical American pragmatism. Indeed, Brandom's paper could be turned into an excellent essay very simply: all he would have to do is change ‘Pragmatism … centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants’ to ‘Richard Rorty centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants’, etc. Indeed, I suspect that Brandom's real target may well be Rorty, and he is simply using ‘the classical American pragmatists’ as a sort of stand-in for his real target. 24 But the fact remains that serious students of pragmatism have spent almost a century rebutting the sort of travesty of what the classical pragmatists thought that Brandom relies on, and it must not be allowed to go unrebutted now.
