Thought, Norms, and Discursive Practice: Commentary on Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit
2016; Wiley; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1933-1592
Autores Tópico(s)Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity
ResumoWhat is meaning? We might start our search for an answer by scrutinizing the question itself: What are we asking when we ask what something means? And here is a possible strategy for tackling this metaquestion: Observe that in our everyday lives together, we take each other to things by what we say. Explain, then, what this to mean consists in, and we'd know what judgments of meaning are. Now a theorist of meanings, we can imagine, stands outside the conversation to which she ascribes meanings. She may even stand outside the whole world of the conversation she's observing: she can run a thought experiment about meaning, taking as her subject a conversation she imagines. Still in ascribing meanings, we can say, she's doing the same thing conversants are doing. Explain how Jack and Jill regard each other as they take each other to Let's fetch some water, and we've said how Thea the outside theorist regards them in ascribing this same meaning to their words. These considerations point to a strategy for explaining the meaning of 'meaning'-for explaining what's at issue in the questions that theorists raise about meaning. The strategy is one I call expressivist.1 To illustrate the strategy, imagine a prosaic case of a theorist's ascribing meaning: Young Hans uttered the words Schnee ist weiss, and by his words, claims theorist Thea, Hans meant that snow is white. What does she by this? To say what she means, an expressivist proposes, explain what state of mind she expresses by her words. It won't be informative just to say that she expresses her belief that that's what Hans meant; we want something that will explain the content of her state of mind. An expressivist, then, explains the meaning of a statement by explaining the state of mind the statement expresses. In
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