I’ve figured out that I won’t need to understand too deeply the semantics of “true” and “refers” to do what I want to do in my honors thesis. I probably won’t say much about deflationary accounts of truth. It is important, however, to see where Brandom’s deflationism coincides with what he says about realism, facts, etc. Also, I won’t need to understand too deeply the stuff in chapters 6 and 7 (substitution and anaphora), although knowing why Brandom thinks we need sub-sentential expressions is clearly important; for some people (Ken) think that a good way into Brandom-type norm-centric theories of meaning is the fact that sentences are semantically prior to singular terms and predicates. So I will try to read 6 somewhat carefully although I might skip 7. By Sunday I plan to start reading chapter 8 and hopefully by Friday I will be done with it.

Many philosophers these days (and in times past) have tried to provided systematic explanations of philosophically puzzling phenomena. (We might be take this to be a result of the philosophical obsession with the scientific form of explanation. Most philosophers, however, do not go all the way by grounding their systematic theories on detailed empirical data.) For example, one of Brandom’s goals in Making It Explicit is to explain the how the pragmatic significance of any contentful speech act can be derived “systematically” from its content any context of utterance. We now have the necessary context to understand Wittgenstein’s many warnings against philosophical theories. The reason he so frequently tells us things such as “don’t think but look” is that he thinks that philosophical explanations should not be systematic but rather be applied only in the particular case. What I have said here is not meant to justify Wittgenstein’s position on philosophical methodology but only to provide some context to it.

Some of the above questions are genuinely philosophical; the rest are terminological. Most of them related to the naturalism/realism work I’m going to be starting. (Except I guess, for the third question, which also has to do with what norms are.) I’m going to look at some of Huw Price’s work on naturalism and representationalism over break. Hopefully that will give me some direction here.

“We can begin at once with that peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them. The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human being consists of water; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the annual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior; sees a connection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and the oral openings at either end of the same tube – such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human illusions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favor as being impeccably scientific. Certainly they demonstrate the love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation of such a kind.”