| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | Contemporary philosophy |
| Robert Brandom | |
| Birth Date: | March 13, 1950 |
| Education: | Yale University (BA, 1972) Princeton University (PhD, 1977) |
| Institutions: | University of Pittsburgh |
| School Tradition: | Analytic Pittsburgh School (analytic Hegelianism)[1] [2] Neopragmatism[3] |
| Main Interests: | Pragmatism Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Philosophy of logic History of philosophy |
| Notable Ideas: | Semantic inferentialism Logical expressivism Antirepresentationalism |
| Thesis Title: | Practice and Object |
| Thesis Year: | 1977 |
| Thesis Url: | https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Practice%20and%20Object%20(Princeton%20PhD%20Thesis).pdf |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Richard Rorty David Lewis |
| Doctoral Students: | John McFarlane |
Robert Boyce Brandom (;[4] born March 13, 1950)[5] is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use ("meaning as use", to cite the Wittgensteinian slogan), thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."[6]
Brandom is broadly considered to be part of the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy.[7] [8] In 2003 he won the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award.
Brandom earned his BA in 1972 from Yale University and his PhD in 1977 from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis.[5] His doctoral thesis was titled Practice and Object.[5]
Brandom's work is heavily influenced by that of Michael Dummett, his doctoral advisor Richard Rorty, and his Pittsburgh colleagues Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. He also draws heavily on the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He is best known for his investigations of linguistic meaning, or semantics. He advocates the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences (see inferential role semantics). This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000); a chapter of that latter work, "Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism", outlines the main themes of representationalism (the tradition of basing semantics on the concept of representation) vs. inferentialism (the conviction that an expression is meaningful due to being governed by rules of inference) and inferentialism's relationship to logical expressivism (the conviction that "logic is expressive in the sense that it makes explicit or codifies certain aspects of the inferential structure of our discursive practice").[9]
Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), a critical and historical sketch of what he calls the "philosophy of intentionality". He is the editor of a collection of papers about Richard Rorty's philosophy, Rorty and His Critics (2000). Brandom delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, which Oxford University Press published under the title Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (2008). In 2019 he published A Spirit of Trust, a book about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
