Brandom and singular terms:
anaphoric externalism.
Justina Díaz Legaspe
UNLP / CONICET
justinadiazlegaspe@yahoo.com.ar
Brandom is a rare character within the field of philosophy. His perspective and his
particular approach to the main problems of philosophy of language, of mind and normativity are
so imbued with his philosophical thought that it is difficult, sometimes, to discover the bridge
between his ideas and other’s; a superficial reading of Making It Explicit1 can convey the feeling
that this ideas2 are expressed almost in a different dialect. However, it is clear for anyone who
has gone deep into MIE that Brandom makes, in his own terms, fundamental contributions to a
variety of debates central to all these areas.
One of the main contributions Brandom makes that shouldn’t be overlooked is located
within the field of philosophy of language; more precisely, in the core of the theories of singular
terms. Here Brandom introduces novel ideas that could be classified, if I may, under the label of
“external anaphorism”. In what follows I will try to throw some light on these ideas showing that,
even when he starts off from a completely different perspective, Brandom manages to provide
an account of the main features that the traditional perspective ascribes to singular terms.
Semantic content in Brandom’s perspective
Most theories of singular terms rely heavily on the concept of semantic content. This is
usually identified with what is meant, what is understood by the hearer and said by the speaker.
Within the traditional frame of the philosophy of language, the semantic content of sentences
has been related to their ability of represent the world; hence, sentential content has been
related to the truth conditions of sentences. In turn, the content of singular terms3 has been
related to the contribution of these expressions to those truth conditions; their semantic value or
reference, the object constituting their contribution to the proposition expressed by the sentence
containing them. Thus, the concept of representation provides the basis for the traditional
philosophy of language4 and the question for the meaning of sentences and singular terms is
posed as a question for their semantic content.
Some answers to this question have determined several features of these expressions
considered today as definitive of them. As a link between language and world, the use of
singular terms displays an objective dimension; when talking about objects we have to be able
1
Brandom, R. Making It Explicit. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1994. MIE from now on. See also
his Articulating Reasons.
2 Also developed in his Between Saying and Doing. Towards an Analyitic Pragmatism. Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2008.
3 I understand by “singular term” not only simple expressions as proper names, but also complex
expressions as complex demonstratives. Given different theories, this class of expressions will contain
definite descriptions used referentially or not.
4 Alternative theories consider that the reference alone won’t do, so they add something else: for example,
elements taken by the context of utterance.
to refer to the same object from different perspectives and by means of different expressions;
we have to be able to make referential mistakes, using singular terms referring to an object with
the intention of referring to some other. Related to this is what, from Naming and Necessity,5
has been considered as the ultimate feature of singular terms: their abbility to designate rigidly,
a feature linking terms and objects that allow speakers to successfully refer without having any
knowledge whatsoever about the referred object and even without having the apropriate
referential intention. Now, these are all features that derive from the representational
perspective of semantic content. Brandom, however, starts off from a different launching point:
the concept of inference instead of the concept of representation. Even if one could fear that
this would prevent Brandom of accounting for the semantic content and the aforementioned
features of singular terms, I want to show how they are perfectly accountable from the
Brandomian perspective if we appeal to anaphoric externalism.
One of the novelties introduced by Brandom is the disolution of the semantic content as
it is understood by the representarional tradition. While semantic content is traditionally
conceived as a semantic property possessed in virtue of the language’s representational
dimension, Brandom thinks of it as the result of different aspects of a normative social practice.
Language is understood as a normative practice similar to a game with rules entitling moves,
forbidding them and committing to further moves. Because of these rules, participants in the
game ascribe meaning to every possible move6 within it. This adscribed meaning is constituted
by the score that each of the participants carries over the moves of the rest. Thus, from the very
beggining semantic content presents as something that we build up when we keep score of
their moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons.
Since Brandom starts from the concept of inference, he takes the sentence as the
minimal meaningful unit of language, for it can play the role of premise or conclusion in
inferences. However, being a premise or being a conclusion have to be both understood as the
result of human actions; it is the normative assessment of our moves, carried out by our
scorekeeperes, what determines that some of our utterances entitle us to other moves or forces
us to commit to them because of our previous moves. And these normative attitudes belong to
the same family of actions to which sanctions and rewards belong. The notions of commitment
and entitlement are just devices to make explicit something that is eminently practical: the
conferral or denial of entitlement to new moves within the practice, under the risk of being
outcasted from the community of speakers.
Starting, then, from sentences, the first movement towards semantic content is the
inferential step: the inferences in which a sentence could participate confer inferential content to
sentences. Thus, two sentences would have the very same content if they followed from the
very same circumstances and if from them arised the very same consequences. This inferential
5
Kripke, S. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1980.
Not necessarily these moves will belong only to the linguistic realm. Many times it is perception what
entitles us to certain assertoric moves and action the commitment following some of them. This is due to
the broadness of Brandom’s inferentialism.
6
content is also the freestanding content of the sentence, possessed by it when it is not
embedded in some more complex context.7
The content of sub-sentential expressions is explained by the second step in Brandom’s
perspective: substitution. This Fregean device allows us to discriminate different segments of
the sentence and to determine their semantic content8 by treating them as substitutional
variants of one another. Once a frame of substitution has been fixed, two expressions will be
considered as belonging to the same gramatical category whenever it is possible to substitute
one for the other without making the sentence loose meaningfulness. Different patterns of
substitution will help us differentiate between singular terms and predicates: the class of
predicates, understood as a substitutional equivalence class, follows mainly asymmetric
patterns of substitution, 9 while the substitutional class of singular terms only follows symmetrical
substitutional patterns.10 According to this, the content of each singular term could be
understood as what is common to all the singular terms in its very same equivalence class. 11
Sentential content dissolves in a web of moves and normative attitutes towards them.
The content of singular terms dissolves in the same way. The content of these terms is
constituted by the substitutional equivalence classes to which they belong; when using a
singular term, the speaker has to committ himself to a class of terms that he would be willing to
substitute for the one he used. For this reason it is possible to keep a score on his singular term
use, on the substitutional commitments undertaken by him. However, there is an obvious
difference between the substitutional committments ascribable to the speaker and those
undertaken by the scorekeeper himself, or, in other words, a difference between the information
that speaker and scorekeeper have over the same object and between their different ways of
referring to it. To understand this third element we have to focus in the last step in the
development of Brandom’s semantic ideas: the anaphoricity.
Anaphoric chains
7
When the sentence is thus embedded it contributes to it with its ingredient content; two sentences will
have identical ingredient content whenever their substitution for one another in the frame of a complex
sentence does not affect this sentence’s freestanding content. It can be thougth that two sentences with
identical ingredient content (or multivalue, in the terhs of Lindenbaum’s classic multivalued logia to which
Brandom appeals in his MIE) will have consequently the same freestanding content. However, I’m not
sure that this is so. In other words, the equivalence classes grouping sentences with identical freestanding
content does not necessarily have the same extension of the classes of identical ingredient content.
8 It is in this way that Brandom adheres to the Fregean dictum of understanding the content of each subsentential component as its contribution to the whole content of the sentence in which it appears.
9 It is not denied here that predicates can follow symmetrical patterns in some cases. The difference lays in
the fact that the substitutional class grouping singular terms cannot follow, ever, asymmetrical patterns of
substitution.
10 Determining, at the same time, equivalente substitutional classes that provide an accpun, in Brandom’s
system, of the concept of co-referentiality.
11
Things are not, of course, as easy as they seem: each substitutional equivalence class is generated by
the substitution of an expression for a different one within a substitutional frame. However, the nature of
the sentence functioning as substitutional frame determines the nature of whatever the members of the
equivalence class have in common. Thus, if the substitutional frame is “John believes that ___ is his best
friend”, the substitutional equivalence class would contain not only co-referential singular terms but also
ways of naming a particular person by John’s standars. Above we are only taken into account equivalence
classes generated by simple sentences, lacking intensional or hyper-intensional operators.
As we have seen, content is not conferred to sentences by virtue of their
representational dimension; it is the social dimension of the game of giving and asking for
reasons what constitutes linguistic practice and what confers what we usually call semantic
content. Actually, there is no content; all we have is the scorekeeping practice and the
normative attitudes on which it is based. The same thing happens with the content of singular
terms, which is related to this social dimension and not to the representational links between
term and objects. The dissolution of the concept of singular content in terms of practices of
social interaction, appeals to the anaphoric chains that we can establish among them.
Singular terms are grouped in symmetric substitutional equivalence classes; these
posses a representational dimension in virtue of which we can talk about objects and which
allow, for this reason, the phenomenon of objectivity: we can talk about objects outside of our
minds in different ways and with other speakers. All these posibilities are due to the existente of
an objective dimension of singular terms derived from this representational dimension, and
providing an account for these posibilities equals to accounting for that dimension. For this it is
necessary to make it possible to use different singular terms to refer to one and the same thing.
It is here where anaphoricity plays a fundamental role. In many cases, as with proper names,
every utterance of the same semantic type conveys the same content. In many other cases, cotypificity is not enough to assure co-referentiality, as happens with demonstratives and
indexicals. It is necessary to pick up the content of the expression by a different term of a
different type to keep talking about the same object; we have to be able to resort to recurrent
expressions whose representational content is inherited, so to speak, from its anaphoric
antecedent. This relation of inheritance of content or anaphora happens both between singular
terms in the same piece of discourse uttered by the same speaker and between different
singular terms used by different speakers. In developing his perspective of the objectivity of
discourse, Brandom emphasizes the significance of these last interpersonal anaphoric relations;
it is the study of this kind of chain what allows us to understand what speakers do when they
refer to the same object, and therefore, how communication and linguistic understanding are
possible.
These chains allow us to face, besides, one of the problems menacing inferentialism:
inferential relativism. Since the content of a sentence is determined by its inferential role (so to
speak), and since every speaker could be committed to different beliefs playing an auxiliary role
in his or her inferences, it follows that there won’t be two speakers to whose utterance of the
very same sentence we could adscribe the very same content. Semantic content becomes
perspectival. However, this is not an obstacle for interpersonal communication, since this is no
longer construed as a community or identity of mental contents between speakers, but a matter
of their abbility for tracking their own commitments and the other’s, their abbility to navigate
between the commitments of the audience and one’s own, discerning points of convergence
and divergence between them. This inferential perspectivism is iterated at the level of singular
content: each speaker is committed to a potentially different class of intersubstitutable singular
terms, having only some elements in common, if any, with those classes to which their
audiences are committed. How can we know, then, that people are referring to the same object
as we? How is the interpersonal reference possible?
The answer to this problem lays in the interpersonal anaphoric links between these
different singular terms. Of course, these links are based the scorekeeping conducted on the
substitutional commitmnents undertaken and ascribable to other participants of the game. In
facing a sentence containing a singular term, the scorekeeper understands that something is
said about a particular object whenever he is able to establish an anaphoric link between that
singular term and one of the terms to which he himself is committed. Thus, the singular term he
would use to refer to that object is recurrent with respect to the term used by the speaker, which
functions as its anaphoric antecedent. This chain of attributions, allowing inter-reference and
establishing the foundation of the objectivity of discourse about the world, is made explicit in
reports of the contents of utterances, which can be specified as de dicto or as de re. Thus, if the
speaker claims:
(1) Robert Brandom is in Argentina
the scorekeeper can report this by saying any of these:
(DD) The speaker says that Robert Brandom is in Argentina
(DR) The speaker says of the author of MIE that he is in Argentina.
Both ways of specifying content present different singular terms referring to the same object,
Robert Brandom. However, while everything said on the subordinate sentence in the (DD)
specification is ruled by the substitutional commitments attributed to the speaker, everything
outside the subordinate and under the of operator in the (DR) specification is ruled by the
commitments undertaken by the scorekeeper himself, commitments the speaker could even not
accept (suppose that he ignored that Brandom was the author of MIE). It is in this double game
of specifications of the content expressed by the speaker that it can be clearly acknowledged
how the establishment of anaphoric interpersonal chains is produced: when the scorekeeper is
commited to the intersubstitutability of his own singular term and that used by the speaker, he
establishes a link between the class of substitutional commitments that he undertakes and
those that he ascribes to the speaker. The scorekeeper cannot ascribe to the speaker
commitments not acknowledged by him (for example, that Brandom is the author of MIE). But
he definitely can recognize that both him and the speaker are talking about the same object
when they use the terms “author of MIE” and “Robert Brandom”, since this is a substitutional
commitment that he, the scorekeeper himself, acknowledges. Thus, the content of a singular
term is not merely determined by the substitutional commitments that the speaker is willing to
assume. It is determined, besides, by the substitutional commitments that other speakers are
disposed to undertake, as long as it is possible to establish anaphoric links relating both
classes.
Externalism
This leads us to the last of the elements in Brandom’s considerations on the content of
singular terms: its externalism with regards to each of the speakers. A we have seen, what
confers content to singular terms is not the representational link but their belonging to a
substitutional symmetrical class with which each speaker is committed, plus the possibility of
establishing anaphoric chains between different classes. The content of a singular term, hence,
goes beyond the beliefs of one speaker about the object; since it is possible to tend anaphoric
bridges between these different substitutional classes, the class broadens in the interpersonal
level. This has several interesting consequences that I would like to consider.
We have seen that the different specifications of a content report show the anaphoric
linkt between the different terms involved. Anaphora links in this way two substitutional
equivalence classes, the speaker’s and the scorekeeper’s, and thus it builds up a third class out
of them: a substitutional class conformed by all the terms involved in those two classes. It is not
correct to ascribe to the speaker the acknowlegment of the substitution of “Robert Brandom” for
“the author of MIE”, but from the perspective of the scorekeeper it is clear that both terms are
interchangeable even when the speaker does not know it. On the other hand, the speaker could
have information about the object translatable into singular terms that the scorekeeper could
ignore. Thus, even when each speaker is commited to a certain class of intersubstitutable
singular terms, the content of the singular term -the interpersonal class of all the singular terms
intersubstitutable for one another determined by the context of the discourse- transcends those
two classes; the chain is broadened to the point of becoming external to all the participants.
This phenomenon shows up in two points: in the first place, in the possibility of speaking
of an object without knowing what object it is exactly. Indeed, the content of the singular term
understood in interpersonal terms transcends whatever the speaker knows about the object: it is
not even necessary that the speaker knows anything about it, since he can always link a
singular term anaphorically to an antecedent located in the discourse of another speaker, hence
locating himself in a chain culminating in an object he does not know. In this way it is possible to
imagine a speaker entering a conversation about Robert Brandom without even knowing that he
is talking about him. Lets suppose that, after announcing that Brandom is in Argentina, speaker
A claims that he (Brandom) must be tired because the plain arrived here just two days ago.
Speaker B, who enters the conversation right at that point, does not know that they are talking
about Brandom but, based on her ideas about how tiresome is to travel, claims: “He shouldn’t
be that tired”. Speaker B ignores who she is talking about, but her use of the pronoun he is
anaphorically related to whoever it is the referent of the singular term functioning as his
antecedent. Thus, even without knowing it, she talks about Robert Brandom: she says, of
Robert Brandom, that he shouldn’t be that tired. Therefore, the anaphoric link and the
externalism allow us to speak of objects of which we do not know anything, as long as, in this
situation, we accept the substitutions undertaken by whoever uttered the anaphoric antecedent.
On the other hand, this externalism provides us the possibility of explaining a
phenomenon widely ascribed to singular terms: rigidity. Traditionally, it is considered that a
singular term designates its object rigidly when it refers to the same object in every possible
world in which it exists. Possible worlds don’t have a place within Brandom’s thought, but even
so from this perspective we can explain the rigidity as the trait that allows a speaker to talk
about an object even when he intends to speak about a different one: if I use the name
“Brandom” willing to refer to McDowell, according to the theorry of rigid designation, what I say
will be true of Brandom and not about McDowell, contrary to my referential intentions. Rigidity
allows referential mistake. In Brandom’s terms, since it is possible to use singular terms without
having any belief whatosever about the referred objet, it should be possible to use a term
referring to an object thinking that we referred to a different one. In other words, a speaker can
use a proper name to enter an anaphoric chain thinking that he is actually entering another.12
On the other side, in the same way as Kripke’s ideas on the use of singular terms imply an initial
baptism and a causal chain for the transmision of the reference, the ideas in Brandom allow us
to speak of a first epistemic priviledged contact with the object, constituting part of the content of
the singular term and to speak of an externalist anaphoric chain extending from this first
epistemic contact with the object to every use of a singular term in the interpersonal
substitutional class. Thus, rigidity can be explained, in Brandom’s terms, by the determination of
the content of singular terms by the substitutional commitmens at the interpersonal level,
external to particular speaker.
Final remarks
Along this work I have tried to present what I take to be one of the most interesting
approaches to the understanding of singular terms. As we have seen, even when Brandom’s
launching point is radically different from that of the traditional perspectives in the field, this does
not prevent him to provide an account, in his own terms, of what traditionally are considered
significant features of singular terms: objectivity, rigidity and the possibility of referential mistake.
Even so, it is necessary to underscore the differences between both perspectives: for starters,
both semantic and singular content dissolve in Brandom’s perspective; it is not possible to find
semantic properties of sentences or their components in his work, but only a web of normative
attitudes conferring to them what we call content. The question for the content, thus, must be
reformulated in terms of the question about the attitudes we have towards each other and on
whose basis we sanction and reward each others. Within this frame, Brandom determines the
content of singular terms in a descendent path: from inferential content to the substitutional
components of sentences and from them to their anaphoric links. In this way he manages to
account for their representational and objective dimension without appealling to the concept of
representation. Finally, the externality of these anaphoric chains considered from the
interpersonal perspective opens the door to the possibility of referential mistakes and with it to
12
In this case, he will be subject to correction by the rest of the participants when they detect the mistake,
but even so he will be referring to an object and believing to be referring to another.
the phenomenon of rigid designation. Thus, singular content, in Brandomian terms, constructed
by means of anaphoric externalism, is transformed in a device for answering to all of the
traditional problems in the study of singular terms in an alternative, novel and completely
original way.
Justina Díaz Legaspe.