Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment

1. Introduction

Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment is a systematic treatise in the philosophy of language, mind, and logic that advances a distinctive picture of what it is to be a thinker and speaker. Its central claim is that to have and express thoughts is to participate in a norm-governed social practice of giving and asking for reasons, and that the contents of thoughts and utterances are fixed by their inferential roles within that practice.

Rather than beginning with word–world relations such as reference or truth-conditions, the book starts from discursive practice: what people do when they assert, infer, challenge, retract, and justify. Brandom develops a framework of normative pragmatics, treating such activities as moves in a “game” of taking on and attributing commitments and entitlements. These deontic statuses are socially instituted and continually updated by “scorekeepers” who keep track of what follows from what others and they themselves have said.

Within this framework, the work pursues several interconnected aims:

• to provide an inferentialist account of meaning, on which conceptual content is determined by patterns of material inference and incompatibility;
• to explain logical vocabulary as primarily expressive, making explicit inferential relations that are otherwise only implicitly grasped;
• to reconstruct representation, objectivity, and aboutness from within inferential and normative structures, rather than treating them as primitive;
• to show how self-consciousness, agency, and autonomy arise when practitioners can adopt a scorekeeping stance toward their own commitments.

Throughout, Brandom engages with and reworks themes from Frege, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and American pragmatism, positioning his project as an attempt to articulate what Wilfrid Sellars called “the space of reasons” in a detailed, technically precise way. The book is widely regarded as both foundational for contemporary inferentialism and challenging in its density and scope; it has generated extensive discussion across philosophy of language, logic, mind, and social philosophy.

2. Historical Context and Intellectual Background

2.1 Analytic Philosophy in the Late 20th Century

Making It Explicit emerged in the early 1990s against a background dominated by truth-conditional semantics, possible-worlds analyses, and cognitive-scientific approaches to mind. Within analytic philosophy, debates about meaning were largely framed in terms of:

Brandom’s project situates itself within these debates but proposes that semantic content be explained primarily in terms of inferential relations and social normativity.

2.2 The Pittsburgh School and Sellarsian Pragmatism

The book is often associated with the so-called “Pittsburgh School,” centered around Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and Brandom at the University of Pittsburgh. Sellars’s critique of the “Myth of the Given” and his insistence that empirical knowledge is essentially inferential and conceptually articulated are key precursors. Brandom develops a distinctively normative and social interpretation of Sellarsian ideas, treating discursive practice as a network of deontic statuses.

James O’Shea and other commentators have emphasized how Brandom radicalizes Sellars’s “normative turn,” making the notion of deontic scorekeeping central and using it to reconstruct semantics, logic, and subjectivity.

2.3 Pragmatism, Kant, and Hegel

Brandom also explicitly aligns his project with classical American pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey) and with a Kant–Hegel line in German philosophy. From Kant, he adopts the idea that concepts are rules for judging, and that judgment is the basic unit of cognitive responsibility. From Hegel, he takes themes of mutual recognition and the social institution of norms, especially in the account of agency and selfhood.

These influences are integrated into a broadly inferentialist and expressivist framework: what is crucial is not a prior realm of semantic facts, but how norms are instituted and made explicit in practice.

2.4 Wittgenstein and the Rule-Following Problem

Post-Wittgensteinian concerns about rule-following and communal standards of correctness also inform the background. Brandom can be read as offering a systematic response to the question: how can normativity be both binding and socially grounded? His answer turns on the socially articulated practices of attributing and acknowledging commitments and entitlements, elaborated in the model of scorekeeping.

3. Author and Composition of Making It Explicit

3.1 Robert Brandom’s Philosophical Development

Robert B. Brandom (b. 1950) was trained at Yale and taught for most of his career at the University of Pittsburgh. His early work developed themes from Sellars, particularly concerning the normativity of meaning and the inferential structure of reasoning. Articles in the 1980s on assertion, inference, and the pragmatics of modality provide much of the material later systematized in Making It Explicit.

Brandom’s position in Pittsburgh placed him at the intersection of analytic philosophy of language, pragmatism, and renewed interest in Kant and Hegel. This institutional and intellectual environment shaped the book’s combination of technical argumentation and historical engagement.

3.2 Period of Composition and Publication Context

The core ideas of Making It Explicit were developed from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, with the book appearing in 1994 from Harvard University Press. It was dedicated to Wilfrid Sellars and to the memory of Richard Rorty, reflecting both a Sellarsian analytic lineage and a Rortyan pragmatist orientation.

The work was conceived as a large-scale treatise rather than a collection of essays, aiming to articulate a comprehensive framework—from the most basic features of discursive practice to representation and self-consciousness.

3.3 Relation to Brandom’s Other Works

Later writings, notably Articulating Reasons (2000), present a more accessible introduction to the main theses of Making It Explicit. Subsequent collections and monographs elaborate particular strands (e.g., Hegel interpretation, pragmatist semantics), but Making It Explicit remains the central, systematic statement of his inferentialist project.

Commentators often note that Brandom himself treats the book as providing the “background theory” for a wide range of later applications in epistemology, metaethics, and social philosophy. Its internal architecture and terminology—such as “deontic scorekeeping” and “the game of giving and asking for reasons”—are referenced and refined but not fundamentally replaced in his later work.

4. Structure and Organization of the Work

Making It Explicit is organized into four large parts, each building on the conceptual resources developed in the preceding sections.

4.1 Overview of the Four Parts

4.2 Internal Progression

Part I develops the basic normative-pragmatic model: what it is to make a move in the “game of giving and asking for reasons,” how deontic statuses are instituted, and how material inferences structure conceptual content.

Part II then introduces logical and semantic vocabulary—negation, conditionals, quantifiers, modal operators—and argues that their primary role is to make explicit the inferential patterns already governing practice. This part provides Brandom’s detailed account of logical expressivism.

Part III extends the earlier apparatus to capture intuitively representational notions. It offers accounts of aboutness, reference, and objectivity by appealing to reliable differential responsive dispositions and to de re ascriptions within the scorekeeping framework.

Part IV applies and further develops these tools to analyze self-consciousness, agency, and autonomy as achievements of creatures who can keep score not only on others, but also on themselves, and whose normative status as responsible subjects is socially instituted.

4.3 Use of Recurring Themes and Devices

Across all four parts, Brandom employs several recurring conceptual devices:

• the metaphor of the game of giving and asking for reasons;
• the scorekeeping model, with detailed notation for tracking commitments and entitlements;
• the distinction between implicit practical mastery of norms and the explicit articulation afforded by certain vocabularies.

This structural repetition is designed to maintain continuity as the book moves from basic discursive practice to increasingly sophisticated phenomena such as modality, representation, and selfhood.

5. Inferentialism and Normative Pragmatics

5.1 Inferentialism about Meaning

Brandom’s inferentialism holds that the content of a claim or concept is constituted by its role in inferences: what it can be correctly inferred from, what it licenses in turn, and what would be incompatible with endorsing it. To grasp a concept is to have (practical) mastery over these inferential connections.

This approach contrasts with representationalist or truth-conditional accounts that take semantic content to be fundamentally a matter of relations between language and the world (e.g., reference, satisfaction). On Brandom’s view, these representational notions are not primary but are to be reconstructed out of inferential roles and normative statuses.

5.2 Normative Pragmatics

Normative pragmatics is Brandom’s term for explaining meaning in terms of the norms governing discursive practice. Participants in conversation undertake commitments and may or may not be entitled to them; these statuses are instituted and tracked socially.

The pragmatic dimension lies in the actions speakers perform—asserting, challenging, withdrawing—while the normative dimension lies in the deontic statuses these actions alter.

5.3 Social Institution of Norms

For Brandom, the norms that fix inferential roles are not private or merely psychological; they are socially articulated. A community of speakers acts as scorekeepers, attributing commitments and entitlements to one another and themselves. It is within this network of mutual assessment that inferential roles become determinate enough to count as semantic content.

Proponents of this approach emphasize that it promises to explain how meaning can be both normative and publicly accessible, by tying it to patterns of endorsement and criticism. Critics, by contrast, question whether such a social model can secure robust normativity without collapsing into mere regularity—a topic taken up more fully in later discussions.

6. The Game of Giving and Asking for Reasons

6.1 The Game Metaphor

Brandom models discursive practice as a game of giving and asking for reasons. The metaphor is intended to highlight several features:

• there are moves (assertions, inferences, challenges, retractions);
• moves are governed by rules (norms of commitment, entitlement, incompatibility);
• participants adopt roles (speakers, audience, scorekeepers) that can shift dynamically.

What distinguishes discursive creatures is, on this view, precisely their participation in this rule-governed game.

6.2 Types of Moves in the Game

Within the game, different speech acts are characterized by the way they modify deontic statuses. Assertion is taken as the paradigmatic move: by asserting, one undertakes a commitment and implicitly acknowledges responsibility for its inferential consequences. Other moves include:

The interplay of these moves constitutes the practice of reasoning, rather than reasoning being a separate, internal process.

6.3 Asking for and Giving Reasons

To ask for reasons is to challenge another’s entitlement to a commitment: one demands that the speaker show how it follows from other commitments or how it is supported by appropriate observations. To give reasons is to respond by exhibiting appropriate inferential connections or evidential links.

Proponents of this model emphasize that it makes justification an essentially social phenomenon: one’s entitlement depends not only on internal mental states but also on how one’s commitments fare under communal scrutiny. Critics sometimes argue that this may underplay the role of private reflection, though Brandom interprets such reflection as internalized participation in the same game.

7. Commitments, Entitlements, and Deontic Scorekeeping

7.1 Commitment and Entitlement

Brandom distinguishes between two central deontic statuses:

A speaker can be committed without being entitled (e.g., making an unwarranted assertion), or entitled without currently being committed (e.g., having good evidence to assert something but not yet doing so). This distinction allows fine-grained tracking of rational responsibility.

7.2 Deontic Scorekeeping

Deontic scorekeeping is the activity by which interlocutors keep track of one another’s commitments and entitlements. Each participant maintains a “score” for every other, as well as for themselves, updating it as moves are made in the game of giving and asking for reasons.

Scorekeeping involves:

• attributing commitments and entitlements in light of assertions, retractions, and inferences;
• applying rules of material inference and incompatibility to derive consequences;
• revising attributions when new information or successful challenges arise.

This model treats understanding another’s utterance as the ability to place it correctly within the evolving deontic score.

7.3 Social Articulation of Norms

On Brandom’s account, the very existence of commitments and entitlements depends on shared scorekeeping practices. Norms are socially articulated insofar as they are sustained by patterns of mutual recognition: practitioners treat certain inferences as good, certain assertions as defeasible, and certain moves as incompatibility-inducing.

Supporters of this view argue that it accounts for the public, rule-governed character of meaning and reasoning without positing mysterious intrinsic normativity. Critics raise concerns about whether such socially grounded norms can underwrite robust notions of correctness that transcend any particular community’s attitudes, an issue explored more extensively in discussions of objectivity and criticism.

8. Logical Vocabulary and Expressivism

8.1 Logical Expressivism

Brandom’s logical expressivism claims that logical and semantic vocabulary—terms like “and”, “if…then”, “not”, quantifiers, and modal operators—serve primarily to make explicit inferential and incompatibility relations that are already implicit in practice. They do not introduce a fundamentally new kind of content but articulate the structure of reasoning.

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Logical vocabulary does not add to what we can say, but changes what we can do in saying it.

— This captures a central Brandomian theme (paraphrased)

Logical operators thus function as tools for codifying, systematizing, and reflecting upon inferential roles that would otherwise remain only practically mastered.

8.2 Roles of Specific Logical Devices

Brandom assigns distinctive expressive roles to different kinds of logical vocabulary:

On this view, learning such vocabulary allows practitioners to represent and manipulate the inferential structures that give concepts their content.

8.3 Logic as Internal to Practice

Brandom’s expressivism also implies a distinctive conception of logic. Logic is not an external foundation for thought, delivering rules from outside discursive practice; rather, it is a set of expressive resources that participants develop to take explicit responsibility for the inferential norms they are already implicitly following.

Proponents argue that this position makes sense of the normative authority of logic—its rules articulate commitments we have in virtue of the meanings we already use. Some critics suggest, however, that this risks blurring the distinction between describing existing inferential practices and prescribing improved standards of reasoning, raising questions about how logical revision and disagreement are to be understood.

9. From Inferential Roles to Representation and Objectivity

9.1 Reconstructing Representation

A central ambition of Making It Explicit is to show how representation—notions like aboutness and reference—can be recovered from inferentially articulated practices, rather than presupposed. Brandom proposes that representational purport arises when certain commitments are treated as answerable to how things are, mediated by reliable connections between language users and their environments.

Reliable differential responsive dispositions play a key role: noninferential reports (e.g., “That is red”) are taken as normally reliable responses to environmental stimuli. Within the scorekeeping framework, such reports provide defeasible entitlements that connect discursive moves to worldly circumstances.

9.2 De Dicto and De Re Ascriptions

Brandom distinguishes between de dicto and de re ascriptions of commitment. De dicto ascriptions concern what is said under a particular description (“Lois believes that Clark Kent is a reporter”); de re ascriptions concern commitments that are about an object across different descriptions (“Lois is committed of that man to being a reporter”).

He argues that de re attributions are crucial for explaining how speakers track and coordinate on the same objects and properties, thereby giving rise to robustly object-involving content.

9.3 Objectivity and Correctness

On Brandom’s view, objectivity is not a primitive property of propositions but a feature of how discursive practices are structured. Claims have objective correctness conditions insofar as they are subject to assessment in idealized practices that combine:

• socially articulated norms of inference and evidence,
• reliable environmental coupling,
• openness to challenge, revision, and improved information.

Objectivity is thus reconstructed as a matter of how our inferentially articulated commitments are constrained by both social norms and worldly feedback. Supporters see this as a way to reconcile social normativity with robust notions of correctness. Critics question whether such an account can avoid collapsing into either relativism (if correctness is too practice-bound) or circularity (if idealized practices are defined in terms of getting things right).

10. Self-Consciousness, Agency, and Autonomy

10.1 Self-Scorekeeping and Self-Consciousness

In Part IV, Brandom extends the scorekeeping model to explain self-consciousness. A discursive subject becomes self-conscious when it can take up toward its own commitments and entitlements the same evaluative stance it takes toward others. That is, it can:

• attribute commitments to itself,
• assess its own entitlements,
• revise its commitments in light of recognized incompatibilities or challenges.

Self-consciousness thus consists, on this view, in a reflexive capacity for deontic scorekeeping directed at oneself.

10.2 Agency and Responsibility

Brandom ties agency to the capacity to undertake and manage commitments within the space of reasons. An agent is someone who:

• can intentionally incur commitments (e.g., by asserting, promising),
• understands the inferential consequences of those commitments,
• can respond to challenges by giving reasons or revising their commitments.

Responsibility is accordingly a matter of being the subject of such commitments and answerable for how one’s commitments hang together inferentially. This account resonates with Kantian ideas of persons as bearers of obligations and answers to Hegelian themes of recognition of persons as responsible agents.

10.3 Autonomy and Social Recognition

Autonomy, in Brandom’s sense, is not sheer independence from others but the ability to govern one’s commitments by reasons that one can endorse. Autonomy requires:

• internal control over one’s inferential attitudes,
• the capacity to critically assess and revise one’s commitments,
• participation in social practices that recognize one as a responsible scorekeeper.

Proponents suggest that this yields a richly social yet normatively robust account of personhood. Some critics, however, worry that making autonomy dependent on social recognition may marginalize solitary or socially excluded agents, and raises questions about how to assess defective or oppressive recognitive practices.

11. Philosophical Method and Style in Making It Explicit

11.1 Systematic Ambition and Architectonic Method

Making It Explicit is notable for its systematic ambition. Brandom aims to construct an architectonic that starts from minimal features of discursive interaction and builds, step by carefully articulated step, toward accounts of logic, representation, and subjectivity. The book uses a substantial technical apparatus—formal notations for scorekeeping, complex taxonomies of deontic statuses—to secure explanatory connections.

This method reflects a Sellarsian and Kantian aspiration to present a “synoptic vision” of the space of reasons within a unified framework.

11.2 Pragmatic Starting Point

Methodologically, Brandom adopts a pragmatic starting point: rather than beginning with sentences and assigning them truth-conditions, he begins with practices of asserting, inferring, and challenging. Semantics is derived from pragmatics understood normatively.

This inversion of the traditional order (pragmatics after semantics) is central to the project:

The method relies on carefully specifying how discursive roles and statuses can be defined without presupposing the semantic notions they are meant to explain.

11.3 Historical Engagement

The work also employs a historically informed method. Brandom engages extensively, though often programmatically, with classical figures (especially Kant, Hegel, and Frege) and with 20th-century analytic debates (Sellars, Wittgenstein, rule-following). These engagements function less as exegesis and more as sources of conceptual tools and orientation.

Commentators note that this method situates the book at the intersection of analytic and so-called “Continental” traditions, contributing to its wide but sometimes contested reception.

11.4 Style and Accessibility

Stylistically, Making It Explicit is dense, technical, and often neologistic. Brandom introduces specialized terminology (“deontic scorekeeping,” “inferential articulation,” “nonmonotonic material inference”) and uses nested definitions that build on one another across chapters.

Supporters view this style as the price of systematic precision. Critics argue that the complexity can obscure central ideas and make the work difficult even for specialists, prompting demand for more accessible presentations, such as Articulating Reasons, and for secondary literature that unpacks the main constructions.

12. Key Criticisms and Debates

12.1 Circularity and Explanatory Priority

One prominent criticism targets possible circularity in Brandom’s inferentialism. Critics contend that appealing to practitioners’ grasp of material inferences may already presuppose an understanding of content, so that meaning is explained by structures that themselves require meaning to be intelligible. Brandom and sympathetic interpreters respond by emphasizing a distinction between practical mastery of inferential roles and theoretical articulation of content, arguing that the former can be specified in non-semantic, normative terms.

12.2 Status of Norms and Objectivity

Another central debate concerns whether Brandom’s social-practice account of norms can support robust objectivity. If all deontic statuses are instituted by communal scorekeeping, some argue, the view risks relativism or conventionalism: it may appear that what is correct is simply what a community treats as correct.

Defenders point to Brandom’s reconstruction of objectivity (via idealized practices sensitive to environmental reliability and challenge) as a way to escape this worry. Critics remain divided on whether these idealizations provide an independent standard or merely reflect existing communal attitudes.

12.3 Underplaying Representation and World-Directedness

Representationalists argue that Brandom underestimates the explanatory priority of word–world relations. They claim that reliable differential responsive dispositions and de re ascriptions already presuppose representational links to objects and properties, so that reconstructing representation from inferential roles may be insufficient. Debates here often focus on whether inferential relations can be understood without reference to truth or aboutness.

12.4 Naturalism and Cognitive Science

Some philosophers and cognitive scientists question how Brandom’s normative, socially articulated space of reasons integrates with naturalistic explanations of cognition. They argue that his framework may be too “high-level” or “norm-laden” to connect smoothly with sub-personal mechanisms studied in psychology and neuroscience.

Brandom’s defenders often interpret his project as complementary rather than competing with naturalistic accounts: he aims to describe the normative structure of discursive practice, not its underlying causal realization. Disagreement persists over whether this division of labor is stable.

12.5 Accessibility and Use of Technical Apparatus

Finally, there is debate about the book’s accessibility and the necessity of its technical machinery. Some reviewers suggest that the formal scorekeeping apparatus is overly complex and may not be essential to the core philosophical insights. Others maintain that this machinery is crucial for achieving the desired explanatory rigor, and that simplifying it risks losing important distinctions.

13. Legacy and Historical Significance

13.1 Influence within Analytic Philosophy

Making It Explicit is widely regarded as a landmark in late 20th-century analytic philosophy. It helped establish inferentialism as a major alternative to truth-conditional semantics and influenced debates on:

• the normativity of meaning and rule-following;
• the nature of assertion and justification;
• the role of social practices in fixing content.

Subsequent work in philosophy of language, logic, and mind frequently uses Brandom’s framework—whether in support or in critique—as a central reference point.

13.2 Impact on Pragmatism and Expressivism

The book also significantly shaped contemporary pragmatism and expressivism. Brandom’s logical expressivism influenced discussions in metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of logic, where analogies are drawn between his treatment of logical vocabulary and expressivist treatments of moral or normative discourse.

Huw Price and others have engaged extensively with Brandom’s project, sometimes developing rival pragmatist-expressivist accounts that contrast with or modify Brandom’s emphasis on inferential roles and deontic scorekeeping.

13.3 Cross-Tradition Significance

Because of its engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, the book has played a role in dialogues between analytic and so-called “Continental” traditions. Brandom’s Hegel interpretation, later expanded in separate works, draws heavily on the framework of Making It Explicit and has influenced contemporary Hegel scholarship.

13.4 Continuing Debates and Developments

Ongoing discussions address how Brandom’s framework might be extended or revised—for instance, to better account for perceptual content, emotions, or non-linguistic cognition, or to more fully integrate with empirical cognitive science. Collections such as Reading Brandom testify to the enduring and contested significance of Making It Explicit.

The work remains a central reference in discussions of how to understand the space of reasons, the relation between language and social practice, and the possibility of grounding representation and objectivity in normatively articulated discursive activity.