ABSTRACT
Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making It Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom, 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices as the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus, 1991, 1992; Todes, 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty, 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes:
The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (p. xiii)
Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively. MIE does not offer a systematic theory of how the domain of bodily interaction and the discursive domain fit together; indeed, Brandom makes the remarkable claim that it is merely a contingent matter that discourse is bounded by perception and action, and that in principle it could exist without them (MIE, p. 234). Hence even though he identifies as a pragmatist, the fact that it is agents with bodies and points of
view who are the necessary enactors of practices seems to play no essential role in his systematic vision. There is irony in this version of pragmatism: although Brandom wants to ground meaning in practices rather than syntax or autonomous semantics, his practices are individuated merely formally – almost syntactically – as shifts in abstract scorecards of commitments and entitlements. In this paper, we aim, from a position sympathetic to Brandom’s commitment to the foundational role of normative pragmatics in meaning and language, to plant discursive practices firmly within the embodied, material domain. We maintain that one cannot really understand meaning, content, inference, commitment or entitlement without seeing these as growing out of and being constituted within a systematic network of concrete, materially and socially incarnated actions, including transactions between agents, and between agents and the world about which they speak and inquire.
