ABSTRACT
In his acute review essay of Tales of the Mighty Dead, Robert Pippin compellingly argues that Robert Brandom’s Hegel-inspired social pragmatist inferential holism is, from an Hegelian perspective, “indistinguishable from a kind of ‘inferential positivism’” (2005, p. 392). This strikes me as partially correct, pointing to a patent lacuna in Brandom’s first formulation of his inferential semantics. I understand the formative gesture of both Hegel’s phenomenological method and the bare bones of Brandom’s inferential semantics to be abstractions and generalizations from the great insight of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction that the logical functions of judgment responsible for the unity of judgment would be epistemically idle unless they corresponded to or were isomorphic with (Brandom’s favored locution) the categories articulating the represented objects of judgment: transcendental syntax projects a transcendental semantics, a concept of an object in general. Generalizing Kant’s claim from his preferred set of categories to any proposed categorial set generates the idea that any sufficiently articulated form of consciousness will project its own truth concept, and hence its own transcendental syntax–transcendental semantics couplet, and—with some modest additions the nature of which will be central to my argument—the idea of a wholly internal process of self-correcting experience on the model of Anglo-American case law. The case-law formulation is Brandom’s; its conceptual presuppositions, I will argue, are Hegel’s.
