Once of the things I’ve most appreciated about Brandom has been his unwillingness to reduce normativity and value judgments to non-normative factors. Repeatedly in Making It Explicit, he speaks of norms “all the way down”. There is even a subheading for “all the way down” in the index entry for “norms” (p. 732). But in conjunction with this, he repeatedly suggests that the relation between pragmatics and semantics, while symmetrical in many respects, also includes an asymmetry, according to which it is more appropriate to say that normative pragmatics grounds representational semantics than vice versa. This is in distinction both to common views that privilege representation over inference and semantics over pragmatics, and to the purely symmetrical view of semantics and pragmatics that he seems to propound in Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons.
The symmetrical view can be seen in the favorable light of other symmetries that Hegel argues for in his campaign against “one-sidedness”. But it also implies that there is no sense in which normative pragmatics ought to be seen as coming before representational semantics.
Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which is partly framed as the elaboration of a new form of pragmatism, makes links between the pragmatism it advocates, and a priority of pragmatics over semantics in philosophy of language. But as mentioned above, this year’s Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons, while applying inferentialist explanation to semantics in new ways, and while remaining as much as ever committed to an inferentialist order of explanation in general, nonetheless seems to back off from claiming any priority for pragmatics over semantics.
My worry is that this new symmetry and parity between pragmatics and semantics could end up weakening the commitment to “normativity all the way down”. The new thesis of full symmetry builds on his previous analogy between normativity and modality or subjunctive robustness, which I take to be sound. It may be that normativity all the way down does not really require the relative priority of pragmatics over semantics that Brandom claims in the dissertation and Making It Explicit, but I think more on this needs to be said.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 