ABSTRACT
I Preliminaries Brandom begins by distinguishing between two “explanatory strategies” one might pursue in attempting to understand the metaphysics of Intentionality:
1 Either one proceeds “bottom-up”, beginning with an account of “what it is for something to represent something else: paradigmatically what it is for a singular term to pick out an object” – in effect, with a theory of word reference – and then proceeds to an account of “the propositional content expressed by sententially shaped or labeled representations” – in effect, a compositional theory of the content of sentences (MIE, p. 651);
2 Or one proceeds “top-down”, adopting “a semantically and categorically converse strategy [which] … starts with a notion of the propositions expressed by whole sentences … [and then] seeks to understand the contributions made to the specification of such [sentential] contents by the subsentential expressions deployed in the sentences that express them” (MIE, p. 652).
