Robert Brandom
| Robert Brandom | |
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| Born | March 13, 1950 |
| Alma mater |
Yale University (B.A., 1972) Princeton University (Ph.D., 1977) |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Pragmatism, Analytic |
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Main interests
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Pragmatism Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Philosophy of logic |
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Notable ideas
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Inferentialism |
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Influenced
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Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his work manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use ('meaning as use', to cite the Wittgensteinian slogan), thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."
Brandom is broadly considered to be part of the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy.
Brandom earned his B.A. in 1972 from Yale University and his Ph.D. in 1977 from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis. His doctoral thesis was titled Practice and Object.
Brandom's work is heavily influenced the by that of Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett and his Pittsburgh colleague John McDowell. He also draws heavily on the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He is best known for his investigations of linguistic meanings, or semantics. He advocates the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences (see inferential role semantics). This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book, Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000); a chapter of that latter work, Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism, outlines the main themes of representialism vs inferentialism and its relationship to logical expressivism.
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