ABSTRACT
Brandom’s work aims, in part, to give an account of this shared capacity, the sense in which we are both creatures that think, understand and are “subject to the peculiar force of the better reason” (MIE: 5). One may want to gloss this in terms of having a mind, a gloss however that needs to be treated with care. First, it is important not to think of the mind as some kind of thing, be it mental or physical, the possession of which is supposed to explain these capacities. Brandom’s preferred vocabulary is to talk not of having a mind, but of “being minded” or of “mindedness”, a way of talking that avoids the tendency towards reification. Secondly, he concedes that there is more to mindedness than having these cognitive capacities.
