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Maximilian de Gaynesford, “Worn Out” review of Between Saying and Doing: Towards an analytic pragmatism,  by Robert B. Brandom (Oxford U Press), Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 2009, 29.

 ”Between Saying and Doing has two central topics.  The first is the relation between the meaning of expressions and their use, which Brandom sometimes articulates as the relation between what is said and the activity of saying it.  The second is the relation between the classical project of philosophical analysis and pragmatism, which he portrays as a confromtation between a project primarily concerned with logically elaborating the meanings of expressions and an approach which focuses more on the use of expressions, the primacy of their practical significance, what they are for.  These topics are related in their turn: the first is the battleground for the second.

“Not all are prepared to recognize pragmatism as a challenge to analytic philosophy, but those who do tend to assume that the outco me must be disastrous to the latter.  They thing what pragmatic cnsiderations show is that one ought to stop theorizing in terms of the meaning of expression altogether, and concentrate instead on their use.  Whether this pragmatist turn could lead to more than piecemeal idagnosis of philosophical confusion is something Brandom appears dubious about.  He is more scathing about the common alternative strategy: to ignore pragmatism altogether, refusing to recognize a challenge to analytic philosophy from considerations which imply the primacy of practical signficance.  His option is to chart a course between these extremes, retaining due appreciation of pragmatism’s power to discomfort without seeking the destruction desired by some who wield it.  His core proposal is that we reconceive the pragmatist challenge so that it becomes the long-sought instrument that renews and regenerates analytic philosophy. 

“But it is a description of the promised land…. “Between saying and doing, many pair of shoes is worn out” (Italian proverb). …  Amid the heavily technical discussion of automaton theory, computational inguistics, modal semantics and consequence-intrinsic logic, it is possible to discern something like the following picture.  Pragmatism ought to be able to see its way through to a milder form, one that retains its insistence on the primacy of use, but is prepared to accept the possiblity that this might be consistent with the systematic analysis of meaning.  conversely, analytic philosophy ought to be able to see its way through to a broader base, on that retains its focus on semantic theorizing, but accepts that an appeal to the meaning of expressions gets its point and purpose from attempts to codify and explain their use, and that only their use explains the expression on meanings.”