Robert Brandom

A key element of early modern philosophers’ response to the rise of the new science was to move from thinking of appearance in terms of its resemblance to reality to thinking of it in terms of its representation of reality. Kant took a further step away from the original perceptual paradigm of the appearance/reality distinction by focusing on specifically conceptual appearances. Kant was a conceptual phenomenalist rather than a conceptual realist, in seeing conceptual structure only on the side of representings. An isomorphism between a minimal bilateral pragmatics of assertion/denial and giving reasons for/against and a truthmaker semantics articulates a contemporary form of conceptual realism.

Here we reply to comments by Mark Jago (Making it Exact), Luca Incurvati (A Plea for Multilateralism), and Federico Pailos, Agustina Borzi & Joaquin S. Toranzo Calderón (Many More Reasons). We thank the commentators for their stimulating and constructive reactions. They not only raise illuminating worries about our view but often already gesture toward solutions. A case in point: Incurvati as well as Pailos, Borzi, and Toranzo Calderon worry that the range of speech acts (or attitudes) we consider is too narrow, yet they also propose remedies. Likewise, while Jago objects to our defining consequence by appeal to modal notions, he sketches a way to obtain a consequence relation with similar properties (in certain respects) without relying on modality. Before responding individually, we note that many comments point to possible extensions, variants, or modifications of our view. Exploring such suggestions is not only compatible with but wholly in the spirit of our book, and we encourage it enthusiastically. Whether or not we ultimately accept the philosophical motivations or implications of these developments, they are sure to deepen our understanding of a largely unexplored intellectual territory.

In Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons, we combine a way to think about the contents of declarative sentences, namely semantic inferentialism, a claim about logic, namely logical expressivism, and a way to think about representation, namely the broadly neo-Aristotelian idea that (in the ideal case) our thought and talk about the world shares its form, which we call its “rational form,” with the (perhaps not actual) parts of reality which it is about. We present all of these ideas in a setting that allows for the defeasibility of implication and incompatibility. In developing our ideas with formal rigor, we draw on bilateralist interpretations of sequent calculi, truthmaker semantics, and substructural logics.

This chapter analyzes the complex “expressivist, nominalist project in ontology” that Sellars sought to develop from Carnap’s initial proposal that ontological-categorial terms such as ‘property’, ‘kind’, and their genus ‘universal’ are covertly metalinguistic. After providing a sympathetic treatment of Sellars’s account, the author argues that Sellars nonetheless misconstrues the significance of this analysis in light of Sellars’s own distinction between pragmatic and semantic metalanguages. The result of this confusion was Sellars’s revisionary ontological nominalism, according to which only nameables (ultimately, ‘pure processes’) exist ‘in the world’—a view that brought in its train Sellars’s lingering non-realist, empiricist attitude toward the alethic modalities (necessity, possibility). The author’s recommended emphasis on Sellars’s pragmatic expressivist metalinguistic account of the function of categorial vocabulary seeks to preserve key aspects of his Carnapian metalinguistic account of universals, but in a way that entails no revisionary ontological nominalism and no resulting hostility to modal realism.