Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary by Robert B. Brandom (review)

Whether through the passage of enough years or the self-descriptions of enough scholars, at a certain point a given philosophical approach comes to be seen as a tradition. The range of commentaries on the history of pragmatic thought—Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2002), John P. Murphy’s Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson (1990), or Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin’s The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce to the Present (2011), to say nothing of various contributions to this journal—suggests not only that pragmatism has achieved such status but also that its current and future applications remain the subject of vital debate. Into this group comes Robert B. Brandom’s Perspectives on Pragmatism, which seeks to identify the origins of pragmatism, diagnose its early mistakes, reconstruct an intellectual trajectory to correct those mistakes, and explain how this trajectory might bear on future currents in both practical and philosophical life.

Considering that each of its chapters has been adapted from articles previously published in other journals, the first measure of the work’s effectiveness is simply whether it displays a coherent and original thesis. In spite of some jarring transitions between some of its chapters, Perspectives maintains a consistent line of analysis across the book’s text. Readers familiar with Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing (2010) will observe that Perspectives covers similar ground, as both books argue that pragmatism best remains relevant if we understand pragmatics as providing special resources for extending and expanding the semantic analysis from concern with relations among meanings to encompass relations between meaning and use (165). The current work likewise recalls certain aspects of Brandom’s Making It Explicit (1998), including the claim that “every inference we make at once sustains and transforms the tradition in which the conceptual norms that govern the [inferential] process are implicit” (149). Yet while the arguments offered in Perspectives overlap considerably with these other works, the present book differs from these others in that Brandom has now placed his arguments within a historical trajectory extending from Kant to the present. As Brandom puts it, his corpus is the material with respect to which this work simply describes the philosophical space that makes it worthwhile (34).

Chapters 1 and 2 describe what Brandom sees as pragmatism’s distinctive origins. In chapter 1, he argues that pragmatism began with Kant’s most basic idea, which is that “what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to a kind of normative assessment” (1). The classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) extended the Kantian emphasis on norms by placing discursiveness within a continually unfolding environment characterized by statistical probabilities rather than a priori certainties. Reconciling empiricism with a certain type of naturalism—subject naturalism, which seeks to observe what naturally situated subjects do, as opposed to what status objective concepts have in nature—classical pragmatism represented a shift in philosophy from a Newtonian paradigm of scientific laws to a Darwinian paradigm of scientific probabilities (8–10). Rather than an ephemeral, parochial movement, a dying gasp of utilitarianism, pragmatism represents for Brandom no less than a “second Enlightenment,” in which “reason is the sovereign force in human life, and is to be understood on the model of the natural sciences” (40).

Chapter 2, which distinguishes among various forms of pragmatism, also describes what Brandom sees as the central weakness of classical pragmatism: its instrumentalist understandings of language and truth. The classical pragmatists (particularly James and Dewey) sometimes suggested—or were at least susceptible to the interpretation—that “the truth is what works” (18). According to Brandom, such instrumentalism concerning truth left pragmatism open to the charge of radical subjectivity, and insofar as it characterized language instrumentally as a “tool of tools,” failed to provide pragmatic methodology with an understanding of language adequate to philosophy’s “linguistic turn” (22). Linguistic instrumentalism also weakened pragmatism’s...