[Xmca-l] Brandom Reads Sellars

[Larry Purss]

Andy
Anew book by Brandom titled "From Empiricism to Expressivism" has just been
published. Here is a blub:

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 categories: 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.


I thought the concept of "expressive pragmaticism" may have relevance to
others