Disagreement, Error and Two Senses of Incompatibility—The Relational Function of Discursive Updating

摘要

In Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, Robert B. Brandom puts forward a general method of formally representing relations between meaning and use (between vocabularies and practices-or-abilities) and shows how discursive intentionality can be understood as a pragmatically mediated semantic relation. In this context, the activity that pragmatically mediates the semantic relations characteristic of discursive intentionality is specified as a practice of discursive updating—a practice of rectifying commitments and removing incompatibilities. The aim of the paper is to take a closer look at the practice of discursive updating and to show that the role of inconsistencies and disagreements in discursive practice can only be fully understood if the interactional dimension of updating processes is taken into account—i.e. if one looks at the explicitly social, interactional role of discursive updating in cases of disagreements between different subjects.