Some Strange Things they Say About Pragmatism: Robert Brandom on the Pragmatists’ Semantic “Mistake”

Abstract

The revival of interest in American pragmatism has been accompanied by attempts by philosophers working in the tradition of Anglo-American linguistic analysis to assess what pragmatism has to offer to their own tradition. In a 2004 essay, for example, Robert Brandom isolated “four distinct mistakes” of the pragmatists’ instrumentalist program. In this essay I will analyze one of his claims, namely, that because the pragmatists looked only “downstream” to the consequences of belief, they missed an important feature of contemporary semantic theories, namely that the antecedents of belief encountered “upstream” as the circumstances of appropriate application are correlative to consequences and therefore must also be taken into account. I demonstrate that Brandom’s account rests on a misreading of Dewey’s theory of inquiry, which looks both “upstream” to received meanings - meanings that have been secured by means of prior inquiry - and “downstream” to the ways in which meanings can be reconstructed in order to secure goods that would otherwise prove transient. As a part of my response to Brandom, I provide an analysis of Dewey’s identification of true belief as warranted assertibility.