I think I should start at Sellars instead of Brandom here.
The issue is that, yes, while Inferentialism is the strong claim that meaning is constitutive solely of inferential relations, Brandom builds far beyond that and I don’t actually grasp the implications of that yet.
Sellars and his space of reasons is a anchoring point I can manage.
Inference and Meaning
So if Quine & Meaning Postulates are like attacking the notion of a “privileged state space filter”, Sellars takes another angle on Carnap that I did not know because I am not a Carnap scholar (though, if I keep on sitting in 1950s philosophy of language, I may become one…)
P rules versus L rules are basically:
L rules are arbitrary rewrite rules you can apply
anywhere, whereas P rules are rewrite rules that are
dependent on the predicates that go into the rewrite; they are
contextual. P rules, similar to meaning postulates,
are part of the framework, but the point is is that they need
outside justification to be a part of said framework.
Now, rather than take Quine’s approach and attack this kind of
“arbitrariness”, Sellars takes this and notices that, perhaps
there’s something interesting here and valuable. Perhaps
these P rules (not literally by the end; but the
intuition) are the things that constitute meaning.
Now personally, this is a genius observation. I mean, inferentialism, if you actually try and understand what it’s saying, is very unintuitive, and completely opposite of normal intuitions (a chair is a chair because… it’s situated in the space of reasons???). But even the base intuition - I have no idea how you’d think of meaning as being constituted in terms of its consequences, and only that.
Of course, it remains to prove that we’re actually onto something, and not merely looking at one quirky part of Carnapian logic (e.g. Quine took a completely different lesson from his dive into Carnap).
I’m personally split. It feels so obvious that, I say something is red because, well, I see red, and I somehow, through psychology/biology, remember that it’s red, and through the combination of all of that, I can tell that something is red.
But for something like a “Hydrogen atom”, it’s plain to me that this concept is very much determined by its downstream implications between theories. I mean, sure, we could try to make the one master definition of the Hydrogen Atom and then keep revising it, but I think inferentialism here is a much better account of what’s going on. It unifies both the intuitive side and how theory revision actually attempts to work.
Maybe empiricist concepts, ironically enough, work for simple, intuitive, biological things, while higher-level concepts are needed for higher-level things. Not sure why there is a need to privilege one absolute basis. But admittedly, I haven’t thought things through.
Note: Actual “modern” philosophy of science (post “is there a scientific method” debate) and inferentialism have been exciting to read and actually influential in my behavior. Granted, it’s probably a recursive thing - I get more singal out of these fields, so I read more, which grants more signal, whereas IDFK what Heidegger is saying.
Descriptivism
Despite all of this, I still don’t really understand the “puzzles” around descripitivism.
From the way I’m seeing it, it’s the classic engineering problem - you set out to solve a problem, but how do you “solve the problem?” You solve a proxy of the problem.
Similarly, it’s the “paradox” of how we have a mind-independent world, yet because we are limited human beings, our way of interactign with the world is necessarily insufficient compared to the world (not just language - this applies to any endeavor).
That’s how I’m viewing the central “issue” of descriptivism. It’s not trying to be Cartesian doubt or anything, it’s trying to frame this as a central concern and then “pick a side”.
And inferentialism sidesteps this, and this “central issue” is most of what Rorty says is unproductive when privileged.
The only issue is that this isn’t actually descriptivism. I
brought up in a previous post how this was sort of like trying to
access a database element by doing some werid ad-hoc query to
isolate just said element (this resembles a lot of tricks that
Russel, and in general the “logical form” people used, for
example). I have this framing. But apparently the problem of
reference goes beyond this aspect - more specific?
more general? Not sure.