Inferentialist Philosophy of Language and the Historiography of Philosophy

Abstract

This article considers the implications of inferentialist philosophy of language for debates in the historiography of philosophy. My intention is to mediate and refine the polemics between contextualist historians and ‘analytic’ or presentist historians. I claim that much of Robert Brandom's nuanced defence of presentism can be accepted and even adopted by contextualists, so that inferentialism turns out to provide an important justification for orthodox history of philosophy. In the concluding sections I argue that the application of Brandom's theory has important limits, and that some polemics by contextualists against presentists are therefore justified.

Keywords:

• historiography
• contextualism
• Robert Brandom
• inferentialism

Notes

1 I wish to thank Robert Brandom, Luca Corti, David Glidden, David Marshall, and an anonymous referee from BJHP for their insightful comments on this article. I also wish to thank my colleagues Ingrid Albrecht, David Concepción, Kalumba Kibujjo, and Juli Thorson for their patient discussion of a very early draft.

²Schmalz, ‘JHP and the History of Philosophy Today’ provides a helpful and recent outline to the relevant debates. He seems to lean in the direction of the deflationary view.

³The philosophy of language was integral already to Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, and to a greater extent Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Kremer, ‘What Is the Good of Philosophical History?’ offers a more updated approach.

⁴The initial arguments in defence of Brandom's historiographical method appeared in a prefatory essay to Tales called ‘Pretexts’. Recent essays that develop the arguments include ‘History, Reason and Reality’ from RP.

⁵See especially Tales, RP, and PP, although Brandom began his historical work already in MIE.

⁶For a fuller account focused exclusively on Brandom (but not oriented towards the historiography of philosophy in particular), see Marshall, ‘Implications of Robert Brandom's Inferentialism’.

⁷On this issue, see Baynes, ‘Gadamerian Platitudes’.

⁸For a review of Brandom's relationship to Sellars, see Redding, Analytic Philosophy, Chap. 2.

⁹For a very basic account of this, see the ‘Preface’ to AR.

¹⁰Brandom does not do enough dismissive work on this topic, although Rorty's notion of ‘doxography’ (Rorty, ‘On the Historiography of Philosophy’, 61ff.) and its proposed banishment go further.

¹¹Compare this issue to Brandom's remarks on systematicity in Tales, 116.

¹²Nuzzo thus appropriately asks of Brandom: ‘why does analytic philosophy – which in its youth was hostile to history – see the need to appropriate a tradition that goes back to Hegel?’ She wishes to imply, wrongly I think, that Brandom has no answer for this point of self-analysis.

¹³The classic version of this thesis is defended by Collingwood, Autobiography, 53–76.

¹⁴In an uncharacteristic slip, Nuzzo, ‘Life and Death’, 36–7 takes Brandom to pose these as mutually exclusive options.

¹⁵Rorty, ‘On the Historiography of Philosophy’, 52 and Brandom (Tales, 104) both approve of Strawson's Kant, whereas Rorty, ‘On the Historiography of Philosophy’, 53 shows less approval of Wolfson. But these particular evaluations, on my account, are independent of the general argument for philosophical presentism. Contextualist historians may still, as they often do, reject Strawson, Bennett, and others as presentist historians of philosophy. My argument implies only that they should not attempt to do so solely on the basis of general considerations about language and historiography.

¹⁶Fischer, Kritik der kantischen Philosophie opens with the following representative proclamation: ‘We have reached the right conception of the system, as it was present to the mind of its author.’

¹⁷Compare Nuzzo, ‘Life and Death’, 48, who rightfully objects to the distinction between the method and system implied by the format of Tales.

¹⁸Rorty's famous essay, ‘Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental’, 399–420. Brandom has published his reaction to this in ‘Vocabularies of Pragmatism’ and again in PP 107–115.

¹⁹In Rorty, ‘Pragmatist's Progress’, 138 states this plainly. After arguing that interpretations are always relative to the purposes of interpreters, he claims that ‘one thing we try to do is prove that we are right.’

²⁰For Brandom's arguments on this point, see Tales, 106.

²¹For a classic statement of this requirement, see Ricoeur, History and Truth, 41–66.

²²The strongest expression of Brandom's pluralism about history appears in ‘Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise’ in RP, 111–29.

²³Rorty insists that ‘we should do [rational and historical reconstructions] separately’ (49).