| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 59 with the same semantic content satisfy equivalence relative to the substitution inferences they yield, whereas predicates need not (MIE 372). Although I am sympathetic to Brandom's inferentialist program, I do not think it shows that sentential propositions, or sentences, are the primitive carriers of semantic content. At most it shows that sentential propositions can be construed in this way. But in order to show that they really are semantically primitive, or primary, Brandom must ground this construal in more fundamental considerations that go beyond the bidirectional explanatory flexibility that, as he has acknowledged, both decompositional and compositional methodologies allow. The pragmatics of normative linguistic usage are the more fundamental considerations that Brandom offers to anchor his decompositional analysis. However, in order for the pragmatics of normative linguistic usage to function in this way - i.e. to have explanatory import over and beyond Brandom's decompositional analysis itself, they must correspond (you will pardon the term) to the actual norms according to which speakers use sentences, predicates and singular terms. And this desideratum comes into collision with his deployment of the Fregean principle of substitutional invariance for fixing the semantic content of strictly subsentential expressions. This principle succeeds in demonstrating when two sentences with different singular terms have the same semantic content, but it does not provide a criterion for identifying those which do. The principle presupposes that we already know when two singular terms have the same semantic content and when they do not. In order to make use of the principle of substitutional invariance between sentences, we first need to know which singular terms are mutually equivalent such that sameness of semantic content between sentences is preserved. Unless we first know that "Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals" is true whereas "Clark Kent invented bifocals" is false, and why, namely that "Benjamin Franklin" and "Clark Kent" do not denote the same concrete particular, there is no way for us to determine whether intersubstitution of these two singular terms in the respective sentences preserves semantic content or not - nor, therefore, whether using the respective sentences interchangeably preserves pragmatic force or not. Actual linguistic application of the Fregean principle requires that the semantic content of strictly subsentential expressions have been fixed in advance. And this, in turn, argues in favor of ascribing a causally and epistemically primitive role to those strictly subsentential expressions. Yet Brandom barely considers the possibility that the causal and epistemic primacy of singular terms in early acculturation and subliterate psychological processes such as dreaming and fantasizing might suggest an answer to the question of grammatical primacy: It is one thing to claim (how could it be denied?) that causal interactions of various sorts with particular objects is a necessary condition of being © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
