From as early as Plato and up through Descartes, philosophers have drawn attention to the fact that rigorous philosophical thinking is both an outgrowth of our natural wonder and contrary to our instincts. The examined life conflicts with our tendency to believe things uncritically.

Yet, philosophy does, at its best, bring clarity to our confusion and help us disentangle complicated issues and make sense of apparent nonsense. And, because of its general approach, the fruits of its inquiries remain relevant to future generations and reevaluations of past ones. Philosophy’s problems, questions and answers are ever open, ever undecided, and can be revisited again and again as they perennially arise in the ever-unfolding history of human thought.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~soames/forthcoming_papers/Quine_Carnap.pdf

(Or just follow this link if the previous URL cut-paste doesn’t appear as a link).

This really involves a few issues. My main question is, what are the empirical hallmarks that tell us a bunch of critters is engaging in the deontic scorekeeping required to create meanings?

Perhaps the key subquestion is to what types of objects does such deontic scorekeeping apply? Assuming it applies to sentences, how are we to demarcate nonsentential communication systems (as in dogs, arguably) from sentential communication systems (as in humans)? What are the empirical hallmarks of a sentence-based communication system?

Also, could someone be a Brandomian but claim that the objects whose score is kept are not public utterances, but sentences in a language of thought? That is, import the whole Brandomian pragmatist machinery into the head of a single creature, where there is a kind of deontic scorekeeping among its thoughts. The role of the scorekeeper could be played by some neuronal module elsewhere in its brain (or whatever), a scorekeeper that must learn the score during ontogeny, must learn the material implications of its internal sentences, as the creature interacts with the world.

Finally, has he written anything about the data on child language acquisition and how it resonates with his theory? Children typically begin with single word utterances, holophrases, that seem to express entire propositions (e.g., ‘Up’ when they want to be picked up). This is really a special case of my original question, as we can treat children at various stages of linguistic development like an alien species, and ask how Brandom’s framework would apply.

The only thing the positivists did was reveal their own arrogance. They read a mirror and liked what they saw- which was themselves. They had sense of considering that the Tractatus might have more truth than their own heads.

The reason why Wittgenstein read the members of the Vienna Circle poetry when he was asked to help them work through the book is quite obvious; they needed to get some understanding of irony, which they lacked completely.

And that is what so many people have difficulty in understanding Wittgenstein, claiming contradictions, inconsistencies, etc. This is all but a revealing of the interpreter’s thoughts. That reader needs to come to terms with the notion of irony.

Additionally, the so called ‘facts’ for Wittgenstein need to be understood in a deeper manner. W also notes that ‘a picture is a fact’. Wittgenstein’s facts have more in common with Leibniz’s Monads than any matter-of-fact. That is why he states that all propositions of logic are tautologies.

As for Bertie, I can only recommend that you do not read his words for ‘help’. He completely missed the whole of the Tractatus, as can be seen by his uneasiness with ‘das Mystique’. That is what the Positivists concluded. Maybe someone should have read Bertie some poetry.