This essay seeks to clarify the meaning and nature of normativity in metaethics and offers reasons why comparative religious ethics (CRE) must properly address questions about normativity. Though many comparative religious ethicists take CRE to be a normative discipline, what they say about normativity is often unclear and confusing. I argue that the third‐wave scholars face serious questions with respect to not only the justification of moral belief but also the rationality of moral belief and action. These scholars tend to (...) view the justification of moral belief to be a matter of process (that is, discursive social practice) rather than evidence‐possession, thus overlooking crucial differences between the two. They also run the risk of confusing motivating and explanatory reasons with normative reasons for moral belief and action. Consequently, their account of normativity would be insufficient for determining the rationality of moral beliefs and actions as well as for justifying moral beliefs. (shrink)

The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist (...) Charles Sherrington and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in favor of movement components. This essay examines these and other brain scientists’ evolving notions of representation during the first eighty years of the muscles versus movements debate (c. 1873–1954). Although participants agreed about many of the superficial features of representation, their inferences reveal deep-seated disagreements about its inferential role. Divergent epistemological commitments stoked conflicting conceptions of what representational attributions imply and what evidence supports them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to investigate Brandom’s conception of the objectivity of norms. In Making It Explicit Brandom supports a weak notion of objectivity based on his understanding of the perspectival structure of linguistic practices. In his following works, he resorts to the Hegelian notion of recognition, adding a historical dimension to his account. I contend that this notion of objectivity can be successfully defended against the objections raised by the commentators. In particular, it does not jeopardise the (...) same possibility of communication, as claimed by Habermas and others, unless a strongly objective notion of communication is assumed. However, the paradigm shift from a strong to a weak understanding of objectivity entails a consequent revision of the conception of social criticism. (shrink)

Brandom is one of the main advocators of the idea that meaning is instituted within basic linguistic practices through mutual exchanges. The aim of this paper is to show that such framework cannot do the required job if the dynamics of mutual exchanges is understood in interpretational terms. After arguing that the interpretational framework does not work, the paper presents an alternative second-personal conversational model capable of meeting the challenge.

In this paper I argue against Brandom's two-ply theory of action. For Brandom, action is the result of an agent acknowledging a practical commitment and then causally responding to that commitment by acting. Action is social because the content of the commitment upon which one acts is socially conferred in the game of giving and asking for reasons. On my proposal, instead of seeing action as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowledge commitments and a non-rational capacity to reliably (...) respond to these commitments, we should see action as the coupling, or potential coupling, of a capacity to reason practically and a capacity to act on habits and bodily skills. In putting forward this alternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom's rationalist brand of Pragmatism with a more classical kind, one that will let us see action as social not only at the level of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills. (shrink)

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant’s view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, (...) but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections. (shrink)

According to McDowell, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind the myth of Jones has the purpose of completing the account of experience that Sellars needs to argue against traditional empiricism. In particular, on McDowell's view the myth of Jones should explain how to conceive of non-inferentially knowable experiences as containing propositional claims. This article argues that the myth of Jones does not succeed in providing such an account, especially on McDowell's own terms: assuming McDowell's epistemological distinction between inferential and (...) non-inferential knowledge, it turns out that in Sellars' thought experiment perceptual experiences can contain propositional claims only at the price of being known inferentially rather than non-inferentially. Therefore McDowell's Sellars' attack fails against traditional empiricism. (shrink)

On Brandom’s view, we can understand objectivity in terms of the view that what is objectively correct potentially transcends any given attitude. But Levine challenges this view. He distinguishes between two questions of objectivity: ‘How do we grasp the concept of objectivity?’ and ‘What determines the difference between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct?’ And he argues that Brandom’s account of objectivity fails to address the second question of objectivity. Furthermore, based on classical pragmatist views, (...) he defends an alternative account, which he calls ‘an experiential-theoretical account of objectivity’. I agree with Levine that Brandom’s structural account of objectivity can hardly answer the second question of objectivity. In this paper, however, I argue that we can answer the second question of objectivity without accepting Levine’s claim that experience has a rational bearing on the contents of empirical thoughts. (shrink)

According to the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the application of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the norms governing its application. But this view faces some serious objections. In particular, according to Rosen, Glüer and Wikforss, this view leads to a vicious regress of norms. The purpose of this paper is to defend a version of the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts (...) against this objection. I argue that we can deal with this problem along the lines of a coherentist account of justification. (shrink)