Brandom-related Reading List
January 27, 2011
In my last post I finally got far enough into my discussion of Making It Explicit to give a first-pass articulation of what I take to be the core of Brandom’s argument about the origins of normativity. There’s a lot of exegesis still to do, but this seems like a good point to take a breather.
In case it isn’t obvious, all this Brandom stuff is meant to contribute to Part One of my megalomaniacal larger intellectual project – that is, this is meant to be part of an empirically adequate theory of social practice. Before I started writing on Brandom at length, I had the (in retrospect rather overoptimistic) idea that I could articulate my interpretation of Brandom in the format of an academic paper. Since it’s taken me circa 20,000 words just to get to the main argument, that may not be realistic. So I’m now thinking that I’ll try to get a scholarship at some point, and write this thing up as a doctoral thesis if at all possible. It may very well prove not
be possible, of course – but even if it isn’t that’s roughly the length of the piece of writing I think I need to be aiming for here, and so I want to start thinking about the end result in something like those terms.
The purpose of this post is just to serve as a repository for a list of texts that I probably ought to read if I really want to write this up in a long-form and academic way. I’ll drop more texts in as I run across them or they occur to me. If anyone has any suggestions, those would of course be more than welcome.
~~
A list of Brandom’s publications is available at Brandom’s website here:
http://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/publist.html
Books about Brandom:
Weiss, Bernhard & Wanderer, Jeremy (eds.) Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit, Routledge, 2010.
Wanderer, Jeremy, Robert Brandom, McGill Queens University Press, 2008.
More Heath:
Heath, Joseph, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint, Oxford University Press, 2008.
I see that Jon Cogburn is teaching a course that involves a bunch of Brandom and the following two works:
Okrent, Mark. 2007. Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality. Columbus: Ohio University Press.
Macdonald, Graham and David Papieau. Editors. 2006. Teleosemantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Much more to follow I’m sure.
January 27, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Paper by Tadeusz Szubka, ‘On the Very Idea of Brandom’s Pragmatism’, here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/5r7221pn4578vr73/
The same very common failure to understand the legitimacy of certain kinds of circular argument, which results in missing the structure of Brandom’s argument, and its point.
January 27, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Baert, Patrick, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism, Polity Press, 2005.
January 27, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Glad you’re considering a PhD on all of this. Sorry I haven’t been responding, but it’s made for some interesting reading.
I recommend this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Robert-Brandom-Analytic-Pragmatist-Philosophy/dp/3938793775/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296144224&sr=8-1
It’s another collection of essays along the lines of Reading Brandom, with responses from Brandom. It covers some different topics than those seen in the latter though. Of particular interest is the paper on the distinction between ordinary and fundamental norms, and the paper on Brandom’s account of perception.
There’s also an issue of Pragmatics and Cognition dedicated to Brandom, edited by Permin Stekeler-Weithofer, with a bunch of interesting papers in it (not that I’ve read them all). I can’t find a link for it right now, unfortunately.
However, I can find a link to Bernd Prien’s paper ‘Brandom on Communication, Reference and Objectivity’ , which is really interesting: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a925187798~frm=titlelink
January 27, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Many thanks Pete – this is great stuff. Sorry your comment got held in moderation – I think the links got it caught by the spam filter, I’ll try to make it stop doing that.
The PhD of course may not happen. But I’d definitely like to do something thesis-length on Brandom if I at all can. As is obvious from the blog, I’ve been just blown away by how rich and dense and well-thought through his work is. I was saying the other day IRL – I think MIE is the cleverest book I’ve ever read. In terms of range of resources drawn on, ingenuity of argument, and complexity (and unity) of architectonic structure, I think it beats Kant (for instance). Now I realise we have a tendency to overestimate the works of our peers – at least those that speak to our own concerns, and therefore seem richer to us than comparable works from other social spaces, because they are more resonant. But even so – it’s a hugely impressive thing.
I hope your own work is going well. Best…
March 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Note for self: I’m reading the symposium on MIE in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Mar., 1997). McDowell, like many people I think, has failed to understand what Brandom means by ‘material inference’, not understanding that it includes perceptual dispositions, and that this is how Brandom incorporates experience into his apparatus. This is something I need to address – Brandom’s use of the concept of ‘material inference’ stretches the category of ‘inference’ way beyond the term’s normal usage, and this is part of why Brandom feels entitled to call his system an ‘inferentialist’ one. If one doesn’t understand the capaciousness of the category of ‘inference’ in Brandom, his system will indeed appear to lose the capacity to give an adequate account of reference (as it does to McDowell). But it isn’t so.
March 26, 2011 at 2:55 am
In his introduction to Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Rorty recommends the following work as “a good account of the development of American pragmatism” – I should check it out:
Murphy, John P., Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson, 1990, Westview Press: Boulder, Colo.
August 20, 2011 at 3:39 am
I should look at the debate here:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?decade=2010&jid=BBS&volumeId=34&issueId=02&iid=8242468
Especially:
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory, 2011, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 34, Issue 02, pp 57 – 74
August 28, 2011 at 4:18 am
Probably worth following up a lot of the links here (including comment thread):
http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/the-missing-hominids.html
August 28, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Maybe this:
http://uu.academia.edu/ThomasFossen/Papers/568292/Taking_Stances_Toward_a_Performative_Conception_of_Political_Legitimacy
Taking Stances: Toward a Performative Conception of Political Legitimacy, by Thomas Fossen
August 30, 2011 at 6:41 am
I’ve decided to use Durkheim and Bourdieu as my two social-theoretic counterpoints to the Brandomian apparatus I’ll be advocating. Durkheim and Bourdieu both advocate foundational theories of practice, and explain normative content as formed in practice. They represent (I’ll be arguing) two different ways in which this kind of argument can fall short. Bourdieu is too fixated on the micro, and psychologises ‘structure’ (through the concept of habitus) – a social form for Bourdieu is basically a bodily/psychological set of dispositions that self-replicates through the practices it generates – there’s no sense of norms as emergent out of complexes of divergent practices. Durkheim, by contrast, focuses on the macro, but falls short on a) explaining how the macro-social structures he regards as generative of norms are instituted in concrete small-scale practices, and b) accounting for how a macro-social structure can itself be taken to be normatively misguided (i.e. he has problems with what Brandom calls ‘regularism’). There’s a lot more that could be said (with a lot more detail and nuance) about both of these figures – and I’ll try to say a lot of it in the document. But this is my basic idea for bringing out what’s social-theoretically novel and important about Brandom’s apparatus.
Which is by way of saying – I should focus on this intention in my reading. I’ve already read the major works of Bourdieu and Durkheim – but I should at some point look at some of their more minor works, and I should also try to get a sense of the (very large) secondary literature.
October 5, 2011 at 4:43 am
Book of papers here: The Pragmatics of ‘Making It Explicit’
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_pragmatics_of_making_it_explicit.html?id=WsFa-wlNDdAC
December 4, 2011 at 10:16 am
Richard J Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn
Amazon.com: The Pragmatic Turn (9780745649085): Richard J. Bernstein: Books
January 16, 2012 at 12:57 pm
Stephen P. Turner, Brains/practices/relativism: social theory after cognitive science
February 18, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Hey Duncan, I’m writing up a paper on Brandom and social science in International Relations right now and just wanted to say this list of links was really helpful – so thanks!
Cheers,
Nick
February 19, 2012 at 1:36 am
No worries
Will be very interested to read your piece when it’s all done…
March 3, 2012 at 1:32 pm
William A. Woods, “What’s in a Link: Foundations for Semantic Networks”. In D. Bobrow and A. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, New York: Academic Press, 1975.