ABSTRACT
One helpful way of thinking about the overall project undertaken in Making It Explicit (MIE), one suggested by Brandom himself, is to consider it in the context of a broadly interpretationist approach to rationality.1 To be rational for the interpretationist is to be interpretable by us rational beings. To turn this interpretationist criterion of rationality into an account of rationality, contends Brandom, one needs to say something about the structure of our own discursive practice in virtue of which it deserves to count as rational. The central task undertaken in MIE attempts to provide just such an account. Using a gameplaying model, it outlines the structure of a set of performances within a social practice that, it is claimed, is both necessary and sufficient for the practitioners to be playing the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. Brandom’s “bold conjecture”2 is that these two notions of rationality coincide, so that any set of performances within a social practice exhibiting this structure will be interpretable by us.
