Robert Brandom
b. 1950 · American philosopher of language and mind, inferentialist
Robert Brandom (born 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works mainly in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and is broadly regarded as part of the American pragmatist tradition. He earned his degrees at Yale and at Princeton, where he completed his doctorate under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis.
His best-known project is an account of meaning in terms of inference: to grasp what an expression means is to know what follows from it and what justifies it, so meaning is not primarily a matter of representing things in the world. He developed this at length in Making It Explicit (1994) and more briefly in Articulating Reasons (2000). His historical work, such as Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), and his reading of Hegel in A Spirit of Trust (2019) treat the history of philosophy as a resource for systematic questions.
His influence is most visible in contemporary debates between representationalism and inferentialism, and in the revival of analytic pragmatism.
Key ideas
- Meaning as use: the sense of an expression is fixed by its role in the inferences we accept or reject.
- Reasons and commitments: speaking means undertaking commitments and recognising others' authority to demand reasons.
- Logical expressivism: logic does not describe the world but makes explicit the inferential structure of our discursive practices.
- Critique of representationalism: intentionality can be explained without treating representation as the basic concept.
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