From Discursive Practice to Logic? Remarks on Logical Expressivism
This paper investigates Robert Brandom's programme of logical expressivism and in the processattempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a comparison with the works of sociologistand anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. The key claim of logical expressivisim is the ideathat logical terms serve to make explicit the inferential relations between statements which alreadyhold implicitly in a discursive practice that lacks such terms in its vocabulary. Along with this, itis claimed that the formal validity of an argument is derivative on so-called material inference, inthat an inference is taken to be logically valid only if it is a materially good inference and cannotbe made into a bad inference by substituting nonlogical for nonlogical vocabulary in its premisesand conclusion. We note that no systematic account of logical validity employing this substitutionalmethod has been offered to date; rather, proposals by e.g. Lance and Kremer, Piwek, Kibbleand Brandom himself have followed the more conventional path of developing a formally definedsystem which is informally associated with natural language examples. We suggest a number of refinementsto Brandom’s account of conditionals and of validity, supported by analysis of linguisticexamples including material from the SNLI and MultiNLI corpora and a review of relevant literature.The analysis suggests that Brandom’s expressivist programme faces formidable challengesonce exposed to a wide range of linguistic data, and may not in fact be realisable owing to thepervasive context-dependence of linguistic expressions, including 'logical' vocabulary. A furtherclaim of this paper is that a purely assertional practice may not provide an adequate basis for conditionalreasoning, but that a more promising route is provided by the introduction of imperatives,as in so-called "pseudo-imperatives" such as "Get individuals to invest their time and the fundingwill follow". We conclude the resulting dialogical analysis of conditional reasoning is faithful toBrandom's Sellarsian intuition of linguistic practice as a game of giving and asking for reasons, andconjecture that language is best analysed not as a system of rules but as a Wittgensteinian repertoireof evolving micro-practices.