Expressive Completeness in Brandom’s Making It Explicit
Expressive Completeness in Brandom’s Making It Explicit

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, I focus on the notion of expressive completeness in Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit. For Brandom as a normative pragmatist, a theory of meaning is expressively complete if it specifies a human practice that is sufficient to confer on expressions conceptual contents so rich that the very conferring practice can be described by means of these expressions. I put the notion of expressive completeness in contrast with the related, but non-identical notion of self-referentiality of a semantic theory. Further, I examine the position of the concept in Brandom’s philosophical project: I assess the justification Brandom provides for his claim of expressive complete-ness of the presented theory, and I outline the consequences he can draw for his overall project provided that expressive completeness is achieved. Whether it is actually achieved, remains however an open question.

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