Taming Holism: an Inferentialist Account of Communication

Acta Analytica 38 (4):593-612 (2023)
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Abstract

Robert Brandom’s inferentialism notoriously entails meaning holism, which has often been seen as unacceptable because it seems to make communication impossible. This paper aims to improve Brandom’s conception of communication as “navigation-across-perspectives” to reconcile meaning holism and the possibility of communication. The conception proposed here entails keeping track of speakers’ own and the other’s scores of commitments and entitlements. I argue that the whole of commonly endorsed inferences in each practice should determine the contents of utterances and those of the commitments of the participants. The local norm defined by such inferences is holistic and can make sense of each other’s commitments. Contents or meaning can be primarily determined at the level of each practice, not that of an individual, the whole community, or the objective world.

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References found in this work

Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):278-279.
A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s phenomenology.Robert Brandom - 2019 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism.Robert Brandom - 2002 - Philosophical Quarterly 52 (206):123-125.
Inferentialism: Why Rules Matter.Jaroslav Peregrin - 2014 - London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

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