Is there a bifurcation in ordinary empirical description vocabulary vs vocabularies where there isn’t a good correspondence between parts of the sentence and parts of the world? -E.g. “Jupiter has moons” vs “The universe is infinite” and “Love is the only law”
Representationalists can either 1.) postulate objects represented by the latter claims (e.g. love) or 2.) consider such sentences that don’t fit the representational mould as defective/inferior.
These latter claims definitely have a meaning though, as observable by the reason relations they stand in.
Brandom claims that the representationalism-vs.-antirepresentationalism issue is distinct from the realism vs antirealism one, because the latter issue arises only for representationalists.
Is “coping” talk just an evolutionary biology / memetic thing?
This ‘reductionist’ interpretation is not true for Rorty:
Language is not a tool, as Dewey would have it, though it’s a nice metaphor for some purposes, it can be stretched too far:
Tool requires a common purpose that you can compare different tools for (e.g. nails / glue / screws all are tools for sticking wood blocks together)
But we cannot formulate the goal of language without already having language (we don’t have access to “nature’s true language” to do this, either).
Thus the meaning coping must be within to some vocabulary.
Brandom summarizing Wittgenstein: ‘Meaning’ is a theoretical object-kind, postulated to codify proprieties of practice
it is no truer that: - “atoms are what they are because we use ‘atom’ as we do” - than that “we use ‘atom’ as we do because atoms are as they are.” - Both of these claims, the antirepresentationlist says, are entirely empty. - Both are pseudo-explanations. - It is particularly important that the antirepresentationalist insist that the latter claim is a pseudo-explanation.
The most general lesson of the discussion of Davidson is that the overall collision is between
the intrinsically holistic demands of reason-relations, understood in interpretivist terms by Davidson, and (also) in social-practical terms by Rorty,
Interpretism: to say someone is a believer is to invoke the possibility of interpreting their beliefs and actions together (in a way that maps onto our own beliefs)
While having a conversation with someone is how you learn what they mean by X, the fact you can have a conversation is what it means for them to mean something by X.
To say that someone believes something is to claim we can have a conversation with them.
and the claims representational relations determined independently of social practices of giving and assessing reasons, for instance (and paradigmatically) by objective, causal relations describable in alethic modal terms
Davidson is happy to impute extensions (referents) as an intermediate stage of interpretation. But he insists that the process be top-down, starting from reason-relations to assignments of referents.
Davidson’s big contribution:
flipping Tarski’s theory of truth:
Tarski: if you take meanings fixed, I can give you a recursive theory of which statements are truth.
Flipped: You can take ‘meanings’ to be the truth conditions (of all of the language). The starting point is the reason relations, and from those we derive the meanings.
We can argue about which order of explanation is better. Bottom up vs top down.
Bad theories
E.g. witches, phlogiston
We often find ourselves saying “Hard to say whether they’re talking about real things but are wrong about most of them or not talking about real things”
To what degree do ‘witch’ and ‘phlogiston’ refer?
It’s a matter of degree and a pragmatic decision.
So any theory that has as a consequence that there is a precise line between reference or non-reference is wrong.