The Brandomian Substrate

Abstract Underlying the proposals made in previous chapters is the largely unacknowledged influence of Robert Brandom’s discursive-commitment approach to language and communication. This chapter spells out the debt owed to Brandom’s framework, and highlights points of divergence. It starts by considering the relationship between commitment and content, noting that while Brandom equates the two, the current account sees commitments only as a means of articulating a content that is otherwise determined. The chapter then goes on to consider the notions of word meaning and public languages, highlighting Brandom’s decompositional approach to the former and his deferential approach to the latter. Finally, the implications of both Brandom’s model and the current proposals for research into the development of a representational theory of mind are considered.