Searle’s social ontology suggests that one can make an epistemically objective claim from a domain that is ontologically subjective, an ontology that would seem to give, among other things, an empirical dimension to Freudian science after Wittgenstein’s demotion/promotion of that science to myth (Wittgenstein arguably does this, too, with the demotion/promotion). Yet at the same time Searle’s “collective intentionality” as repeated representations via logical form of declarations puts the mirror back into the progressive sociality of meaning suggested by Brandom’s and Sellars’s rational pragmatism—the Hegelian “interpersonal inferential commitments” (42) that not only rescues rationality from liberalist epistemology, as Searle’s does with the idea of a collective epistemic, but locates the normative in a conceptual contentfulness “socially instituted through mutual recognition” (Macbeth 198), i.e., without “taking representation as its fundamental concept” (Brandom 28). Though Brandom notes that such “methodological commitment” still acknowledges an “important representational dimension to concept use” (28).
Brandom, Robert B. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Macbeth, Danielle. “Inference, Meaning, and Truth in Brandom, Sellars, and Frege.” Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit. Ed. Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer. London: Routledge, 2010.
STEVEN WEXLER 