Debunkings de dicto and de re : Brandom on Genealogical Explanation
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W. Clark Wolf
Abstract
One of the most surprisingly prominent themes in Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust is the role of genealogical explanations. Brandom sees genealogies or ‘debunking arguments’ as significant because of their ability to deprive our discursive acts (claims and actions) of the normative status they require to be genuinely discursive or conceptual. His solution to the problem of genealogy is to offer rationalizing reconstructions of others’ discursive acts, which credit them with normative status. He calls this “forgiveness” (a notion similar to Davidson’s “charity”). In this paper, I provide some additional conceptual resources to explicate Brandom’s notions of genealogy and forgiveness. These resources allow me to discriminate between two alternate and seemingly incompatible ways of responding to genealogies. One way depends on rationalizing explanations that still attempt to attribute commitments to their subjects, the other avoids making such attributions in favor of explaining commitments only in terms of norms accepted by the rationalizer. I argue that Brandom’s work sometimes promotes the latter response to genealogy but that this tendency should be eliminated from the account.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Brandom
- Research Articles
- Substitutional Accounting for Singular Terms: Some Problems and a Slightly More Kantian Solution for Brandom
- Indicative Conditionals and the Expressive Conception of Logic
- Brandom on Perceptual Knowledge
- The Normative/Agentive Correspondence
- Brandom and Quine on Perspectivally Hybrid De Re Attitude Ascription: A Solution to a Problem in the Explanation of Action
- Debunkings de dicto and de re : Brandom on Genealogical Explanation
- Forgiveness as an Approach to the History of Philosophy
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Brandom
- Research Articles
- Substitutional Accounting for Singular Terms: Some Problems and a Slightly More Kantian Solution for Brandom
- Indicative Conditionals and the Expressive Conception of Logic
- Brandom on Perceptual Knowledge
- The Normative/Agentive Correspondence
- Brandom and Quine on Perspectivally Hybrid De Re Attitude Ascription: A Solution to a Problem in the Explanation of Action
- Debunkings de dicto and de re : Brandom on Genealogical Explanation
- Forgiveness as an Approach to the History of Philosophy
