| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 57 as having semantic primacy aims for "the grounding and illumination of representational tropes secured by displaying the implicit features of discursive practice that are expressed explicitly by their use" (MIE xxii). That is, he aims for a demonstration that representations of things are grounded in the sentences that embed them, rather than the other way around. The semantic primacy of sentences, in turn, is grounded in the pragmatics of their normative social use. Brandom's strategy is first to offer an inferential explanation of the semantic content of subsentential expressions that are themselves sentences and constituent parts of compound, multi-sentential expressions; and then to derive from it a related form of explanation of the semantic content of strictly subsentential expressions such as singular terms or predicates. Brandom invokes Dummett's account of Frege's distinction between force or "freestanding sense" - what a sentential assertion commits the speaker to inferentially, and content or "ingredient sense" - how the sentential components of a compound, multi-sentential assertion contribute to the semantic content of the assertion itself. But it is notable that, as Brandom indirectly acknowledges (MIE 341), Dummett himself conceives ingredient sentences in the standard way, as having a bottom-up role in the compound sentences in which they appear: [S]entences may also occur as constituent parts of other sentences, and in this connection, may have a semantic role in helping to determine the [content] of the whole sentence: so here we shall be concerned with whatever notion of [content] is required to explain how the [content] of a 6 complex sentence is determined from that of its components. Brandom proposes instead that the preservation of a compound sentence's force through substitution of one of its sentential constituents serve as a tool for understanding the semantic or ingredient content of that constituent. Two sentences have the same such content if and only if substituting one for the other preserves the force of the compound sentence in which one is a 7 constituent (MIE 341). Similarly, two sentential propositions have the same force, or inferential content, if and only if substitution of an instance of the one for an instance of the other "never turns a good inference into one that is not good, no matter whether the sentence appears as a premise or as part of the conclusion of the inference" (MIE 347). Conjointly, these two conditions impose two requirements on substitution of a subsentential expression that is itself a sentence: first, it must preserve semantic content, or ingredient sense; 6 Michael Dummett, Frege's Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 417; quoted in Brandom MIE 339 with added italics. 7 This gloss on Brandom simplifies his proposal with regard to terminology and scope, but does not affect its import for present purposes. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
