ABSTRACT
In his acute review essay of Tales of the Mighty Dead, Robert Pippin compellingly argues that Robert Brandom’s Hegel-inspired social pragmatist inferential holism is, from an Hegelian perspective, “indistinguishable from a kind of ‘inferential positivism’”. This strikes me as partially correct, pointing to a patent lacuna in Brandom’s first formulation of his inferential semantics. Brandom’s positivist misidentification of the locale and character of the normative underpinnings of cognition is even more emphatic when the objects of reflection are practical rather than theoretical, when what is being examined are the norms that are meant to regulate social interactions themselves. Surprisingly, perhaps, connecting mutual recognition and absolute knowing in this way appears to be the ambition of A Spirit of Trust; it is what marks out Brandom’s grand reading of Hegel from his earlier, more pragmatist writings—or so a generous reading of the text might urge.
