Inferentialism and Conceptualism

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (University of Oulu)

The main goal in this lecture is to understand Brandom’s inferentialism in more depth. A key idea of inferentialism is that implicit conceptual contents are made explicit by drawing inferences in a social-discursive situation. Conceptual contents entail and forbid some kinds of inferences, which is playing ‘the game of giving and asking for reasons’ in other words. Another Brandom’s presupposition is that our ordinary use of language is fundamentally normative. But where do our claims get their normative force? What is knowledge in the Brandomnian inferentialist framework? These and many other related questions are studied in detail.