Returning to Brandom’s Spinoza lectures, he has been clarifying his relation to the tradition of American pragmatist philosophy, which is largely mediated by the work of his former teacher and colleague Richard Rorty.

“At the core of the capacious ‘big tent’ tradition Rorty retrospectively rationally reconstructs under the rubric of ‘pragmatism’ is this broadly naturalistic, anthropological-ecological conception of language as an evolving population of discursive practices that is a, indeed the, distinctive feature of the natural history of creatures like us” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 41).

Aristotle defines humans as animals that have logos, or meaningful discourse. Hegel says that “language is the Dasein [“existence”, literally “being there”] of spirit”. The pragmatists Pierce and Dewey were interested in Hegel, and notably took a down-to-earth attitude toward his work. Brandom picks up this somewhat loose link to Hegel, and strengthens and sharpens it.

“This is what motivates and justifies [Rorty’s] use of this term [pragmatism] to characterize not only philosophers such as Pierce and Dewey, who embraced it themselves, but others such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, who (sometimes explicitly and emphatically) did not. Rorty sees a stark contrast between this way of thinking about language and the analytic representationalist tradition that runs from Frege, Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus through Carnap and Tarski to his colleague David Lewis. This tradition models language on formal monological logistical calculi, justification on proof of theorems from axioms, and truth conditions on model-theoretic semantics for such artificial languages. What, Rorty asks, does any of that have to do with what users of natural languages do?” (ibid).

Brandom himself speaks of “pragmatism” in this same very broad and yet distinctly philosophical way. Here we get a glimpse of how he arrived at that.

“In taking this line, Rorty rightly understands himself as appealing to the Pierce-Dewey tradition of American pragmatism to amplify and radicalize Quine’s and Sellars’ criticisms of Carnap, and following up on Wittgenstein’s advice for philosophers to look not to the [formal, logical, representational] meaning of expressions, but to their use‘” (ibid).

Brandom more commonly cites Wittgenstein’s other formulation, that “meaning is use”. He clearly does not mean that there is no meaning. He means that meaning as use comes before meaning as representation. This focus on order of explanation as an alternative to reducing one thing to another, or denying one in favor of the other, is one of Brandom’s great contributions.

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of [logical] truth and representation), study use rather than meaning. When talking this way. he is following the later Wittgenstein (who recoils from his semantics-only Tractarian view to a pragmatics-only approach), James, and Dewey, but not Pierce, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. They should be understood as pursuing pragmatics-first, rather than semantics-first explanatory strategies, but not as trading the traditional neglect of pragmatics by the representationalist semantic tradition for a corresponding dismissal of semantics holus bolus. I think that another genuine strand in Rorty’s thought belongs in this tradition…. [H]ere we see both a subtle interplay and perhaps a residual tension between pragmatist naturalism and an insistence on a Kantian disjunction between norms and causes” (pp. 41-42).

“Rorty inscribes within his Piercean, broadly naturalistic account, a distinction between the social-normative and the nonsocial, so non-normative, merely natural world of vocabulary-less things. The norms that articulate vocabulary use are to be understood functionally, in terms of roles in social practices that include the adoption of normative attitudes. Practitioners adopt such attitudes by taking or treating each other in practice as committed or entitled, responsible or authoritative” (p. 42).

Vocabularies are a characteristic theme of Rorty’s. I take this to resemble my own attitude in examining usages of words — not looking for “the” meaning (as if there could be such a thing), but rather thoughtfully exploring what uses are better or worse, and why.

In contrast to reductionist views, naturalism should be understood in terms broad enough to encompass beings like us who have their being in language and normativity, and thus live mainly in “second nature”.

“In the sort of pragmatics-first order of explanation he recommends, we think of what one is doing in claiming, say, that the frog is on the log, as undertaking a commitment. Doing that is taking up a stance in a normative space, acquiring a distinctive kind of social status. Rorty understands such statuses ultimately in terms of interpersonal practices of justification. In adopting normative stances we make ourselves answerable to each other for doing so. We are liable to be challenged, and obliged to defend the normative statuses we claim. One commitment is treated by community members as providing a reason for another, as providing a justification for it” (pp. 42-43).

Every assertion we make has some kind of ethical consequences.

“The meaning expressed by using some bit of vocabulary is to be understood in terms of the role it plays in these practices of giving and practically assessing reasons: what its application provides reasons for and against, and what provides reasons for and against its application. All there is to confer meaning on our noises is the role they play in our taking up, challenging, and defending the stances taken up by applying them…. Understanding meaning or semantic content in terms of inferential roles read off of justificatory practices is a way of implementing the pragmatics-first order of explanation without giving up on semantics” (p. 43).

Ethics and hermeneutics come before epistemology. This is not to say that a theory of knowledge is impossible, but only that it should not be foundationalist. We never begin a philosophical account of things with certainty, but rather with questions and practices of questioning. The highest kind of certainty we can have is still only a “moral” certainty, not an absolute one.

“Rorty thinks such a pragmatist explanatory strategy can underwrite unobjectionable kinds of truth-talk. We just have to restrict ourselves to properties of truth that can be cashed out in pragmatic terms of what we are doing in taking or treating something as true” (ibid).

I don’t really see this as a restriction. There are ultimately ethical truths of reason and reasoning and emotional reasonableness that can be brought to light by Socratic dialogue, and there is poetic truth. Spiritual truth I take to be one or the other of these, or both. Neither of these is an authoritarian representational Truth with a capital T that I personally claim to know, but never mind how.

“Once the meanings are fixed, it is of course nonsense to think the community can in general make true whatever sentences it likes simply by taking or treating them as true. But our words do not mean what they mean apart from which sentences involving them we actually take to be true” (p. 44).