ABSTRACT
In Making It Explicit1 Brandom develops and defends an inferentialist semantics according to which conceptual contents are to be understood in terms of the formally and materially valid inferences they underwrite. Because, Brandom thinks, inferentialism entails that “it makes sense to specify the content of a state only from some point of view, relative to some set of collateral concomitant commitments, which can serve as auxiliary hypotheses in inferences involving it” (p. 608), the only way he can understand knowing is perspectivally, in terms of I-Thou sociality.2 Objective truth, on his account, is to be understood “as consisting in a kind of perspectival form”: “what is shared by all discursive perspectives is that there is a difference between what is objectively correct in the way of concept application and what is merely taken to be so, not what it is – the structure, not the content” (p. 600). If Brandom is right, an inferentialist semantics entails perspectivalism, which in turn can fund only a formal distinction between believing that p and p. Significantly, neither Sellars nor Frege, both of whom are enlisted as fellow inferentialists in Making It Explicit, draw these conclusions. According to both, though in different ways, an inferentialist conception of meaning is compatible with, indeed constitutive of, a substantial notion of objective truth. My aim is to clarify the differences between these three varieties of inferentialism, and also to indicate the prospects of each regarding the notion of truth.3
