Most of us, at one time or another, find ourselves seeking the one right choice, the perfect option. I was reminded of this recently when both of my children experienced exhausting and ultimately futile attempts to find the perfect sofa. The discussions of the pros and cons of frames, seating support, arm heights, cushions, and filling were reminiscent of my early years of setting up new homes....

In spite of the routine acknowledgement of Richard Rorty's ubiquitous influence, those who have invoked his name en route to advancing their case for a pragmatist bioethics have not given us a very clear picture of exactly how Rorty's work might actually contribute to methodological discussion in this field. I try to provide such an account here. Given the impressive depth and scope of Rorty's ...

In this paper we want to establish two points of interest to Brandom’s project of analytic pragmatism. First, we aim to show how, in light of this project, Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping model can be used as a valuable descriptive tool for characterizing folk psychological interpretation, and how this reveals certain problematic assumptions underlying dominant positions in the debate on folk ps...

Abstract The noted Jewish scholar Harry Wolfson (d. 1929) claimed in youthful writings that the fifteenth‐century rabbinic thinker and physicist, Hasdai Crescas, was a pragmatist. This essay introduces evidence there are, indeed, significant analogies between elements of Crescas’s critique Aristotle Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. concludes primary work, Light Lord ( Or Hashem ), displays unique a...

Although Brandom does not go so far as to say that a pragmatist attitude to the relation between semantics and pragmatics requires an inferentialist semantics, his motivating arguments strongly suggest that a pragmatist ought to be an inferentialist. In what follows, I discuss the connections between Brandom’s pragmatism and his inferentialism. I’ll argue that pragmatism, as Brandom initially d...

We articulate John Dewey’s “independent factors” approach to moral philosophy and then adapt and extend this approach to address contemporary debate concerning the nature and sources of epistemic normativity. We identify three factors (agent reliability, synchronic rationality, and diachronic rationality) as each making a permanent contribution to epistemic value. Critical of debates that stem ...