Meaning and Interpretation: Can Brandomian Scorekeepers be Gadamerian Hermeneuts?

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls ‘the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes’. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto, and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an ‘ecumenical historicism’ that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead (hereafter cited as TMD), Brandom offers a variety of interpretations of the philosophical works of authors such as Leibniz, Hegel, Frege, or Heidegger. Although at first sight the book may seem like a compilation of highly diverse exegetical pieces, Brandom makes clear from the very beginning that ‘it is animated by a systematic philosophical ambition’ (TMD 1). Indeed, Brandom aims to offer a new way to look at the history of philosophy by showing that authors as diverse as Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, or Sellars belong to a common philosophical tradition deeply concerned with the metaphysics of intentionality. Since this aim represents a direct attack to the standard assumption that the Continental and analytic traditions have nothing to say to each other and thus requires breaking with the received wisdom that most philosophers working in both traditions actually share, Brandom feels the need to offer an explicit reflection and justification of the methodology of interpretation that guides his controversial approach. It is in that context that Brandom engages the Gadamerian conception of interpretation in a section of the book entitled ‘Hermeneutic Platitudes’. 2 Can Brandomian Scorekeepers be Gadamerian Hermeneuts? © 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00112.x Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The title of the section already reveals a sympathetic attitude towards the Gadamerian approach to hermeneutics. This attitude is immediately confirmed when Brandom offers a list of the main features of the Gadamerian approach that he denominates ‘the axial Gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes’ and declares that ‘the gadamerian platitudes are just the sort of thing it seems to me we should want to be entitled to say about the interpretation of texts’ (TMD 94). However, for those who may already suspect that Brandom will not turn out to be an orthodox Gadamerian, there is a warning signal directly attached to his endorsement of the hermeneutic approach. Brandom adds: But earning the entitlement to the commitments those platitudes express requires real work. In particular, it requires a theory of meaning that can provide a model validating such hermeneutic truisms. Making sense of hermeneutic practice, as codified in the gadamerian platitudes, should be seen as a basic criterion of adequacy of a theory of meaning. And conversely, being interpretable in terms of an independently motivatable theory of meaning should serve as a basic criterion of adequacy of our hermeneutic practice. (TMD 94) Now, taking into account that Brandom has already done the ‘real work’ of articulating an inferentialist theory of meaning in his book Making it Explicit (see also Articulating Reasons), one may begin to suspect that what will end up being at issue in the comparison between the two approaches is rather whether Gadamer is an orthodox Brandomian. This suspicion seems confirmed when Brandom contends that the specific aim in the comparison will be to indicate ‘how an inferentialist understanding of conceptual content underwrites and explains some of the axial gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes’ (TMD 94). If Brandom’s inferentialist theory of meaning indeed underwrites and explains the main features of Gadamer’s hermeneutics it would have offered the systematic support to the Gadamerian conception of interpretation that Gadamer himself did not even attempt to provide in his masterwork Truth and Method (hereafter cited as TM). In other words, if Brandomian scorekeepers can be Gadamerian hermeneuts whenever they engage in the interpretation of texts, this would offer indirect support to the Gadamerian approach to interpretation. But, even more importantly, to the extent that the main features of the Gadamerian conception have become platitudes, the fact that the Brandomian approach can incorporate them would also offer additional support to his inferentialist theory of meaning, as Brandom himself points out. Taking into account all these potential payoffs that are at stake in Brandom’s engagement with Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, let’s first of all analyze in detail whether his approach to interpretation can in fact underwrite and explain the gadamerian platitudes. The platitudes that Brandom discusses are the following: