From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars

by Robert B. Brandom

The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading twentieth-century critics of empiricism―a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Sellars stood in the forefront of a recoil within analytic philosophy from the foundationalist assumptions of contemporary empiricists. From Empiricism to Expressivism is a far-reaching reinterpretation of Sellars from one of the philosopher’s most brilliant intellectual heirs.

Unifying and extending Sellars’s most important ideas, Robert Brandom constructs a theory of pragmatic expressivism which, in contrast to empiricism, understands meaning and knowledge in terms of the role expressions play in social practices. The key lies in Sellars’s radical reworking of Kant’s idea of the the idea that the expressive job characteristic of many of the most important philosophical concepts is not to describe or explain the empirical world but rather to make explicit essential features of the conceptual framework that makes description and explanation possible.

Brandom reconciles otherwise disparate elements of Sellars’s system, revealing a greater level of coherence and consistency in the philosopher’s arguments against empiricism than has usually been acknowledged. From Empiricism to Expressivism clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase, and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.

Genres: Philosophy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2014

About the author

Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism.

Reviews

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good source for thinking about Sellars's views on language, and as is typical of Brandom's historical readings, his own more full-bodied theories. I don't think he deals with Sellars's naturalism in a particularly compelling or insightful manner, which is unsurprising given Brandom's rationalist tendencies, but that is a minority of the work and doesn't take away its value. The "Kant-Sellars modal thesis" that guides many of these essays, and his idea of thinking about the categories as metalinguistic, with both pragmatic and semantic components, are all fascinating ideas. Per usual, I don't feel like I understand his own views or the "other side" enough to really come down on things, but I find much of what he says about the necessity of modal concepts to the content of empirical concepts very persuasive (and profound). The last two essays which move to some metaphysical debates I'm less familiar with were difficult to follow but I still found them interesting, particularly his conclusions about the identity of sortals. I need a break from Brandom, but I certainly want to come back to both him and Sellars. I find their picture of language and concept use as compelling as any other I've encountered, but also recognize that there a number of unusual things they both end up saying, which I need to investigate more.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brandom’s approach to Kant is mediated by Sellars own approach (which is questionable, and plagued with Sellars own demons), which in turn mediates Brandom’s approach to Hegel, whom he sees as responding in part to Kant. As McDowell often says of Pippin: he goes wrong in misreading Kant into Hegel.

[Mills College Library]

170.42 B8191 2015