Brandom1/14/19Sellars Week 51. One thing that is desparately wanted—indeed, a whole field of study that is wanted—is a non-logical theory of description(s). This would be in two (inevitably) interrelated parts. One is an account of the act of describing: what one is doing when one is describing something. The other is an account of the content something is described as having: how it isdescribed. (Description has “the notorious ‘ing’/‘ed’ ambiguity”.) 2. A theory of this sort could be compared to a theory of definition(s). Belnap and Gupta pointed out that traditionally logic involved not only a doctrine of consequence, but also a doctrine of definition. (From my point of view, the latter was infected by—but also contributed to—the traditional order of logical explanation, which was bottom-up.) Both of these need to be generalized from the formal logical (genus formal, species logical) notions of consequence and definition, to encompass material consequences and definitions.3. In thinking about the issues WS addresses, the concept of description (a constellation of elements along the two dimensions distinguished in (1) above) is important in a number of connections:a) One might establish in other terms [what are the philosophical constraints on, and considerations regarding the choice of, vocabularies to specify these?] a notion of description, and then adopt a dismissive attitude towards (in this context, that means in effect sweeping into a garbage-can called ‘pragmatics’) uses of language and their distinctive contents (if any) that are not ‘descriptive’ in this sense. In general, this has been the strategic trajectory of empiricism, in its traditional, and 20th century logical versions, and also in contemporary less self-consciously empiricist heirs (e.g. Jackson and Chalmers—and more generally the literature to which they are central [cf. the “phenomenal concepts strategy” that Erhan Demircoglu discusses in his thesis]). This is descriptivism, as Sellars describes and deplores it.b) One could then ask what relation normative claims (and claimings and claimables) have to descriptive ones, in the (black-box) sense of (a). One might treat them to be: i) disjoint, ii) exhaustive, iii) disjoint and exhaustive, iv) overlapping. This is asking how the normative is related to the non-descriptive.c) On the other hand, one might establish in other terms [what are the philosophical constraints on, and considerations regarding the choice of, vocabularies to specify these?]a notion of normativity. One could then put into a single box everything that is not normative. This is asking how the descriptive is related to the non-normative. Once again, one could take these to coincide (corresponding to (b-iii), or to stand in any of the other basic Boolean relations corresponding to (b). d) All of this is in relation to a notion of saying, which, taking this to apply to cases we would describe as saying that, amounts to that of declaring. Declarativism about tmpsdz54lrt 1 1/14/2019Brandomdescription is the view that anything that serves as a declaration (which, “ing/ed”, is an articulated constellation involving both acts of declaring and contents declared) thereby counts as a description. (See also (4) below re declarativism about facts.)e) Now we can ask about the relations between: i) description ii) declaration iii) norm-applying vocabularies, with the possibility of any two being identified with (possibly the converses or anti-extensions of) any of the others, or being defined thereby. 4. There is also the question of the relation between descriptions and statements of facts. One can be a declarativist about facts, which is quite a different position from declarativism aboutdescriptions (mentioned in (3d)). One might also distinguish talk of facts from talk of propositions. I think these come in one bundle. Propositions are thinkables=claimables, ‘thoughts’ in Frege’s usage (sharply distinguished from thinkings). And, as he memorably said, “A fact is a thought that is true.” But there is still some distinction between the class of claimables and the class of facts. (Williamson speaks for a group—thinking of itself as rejecting ‘verificationationism’, which leads to ‘idealism’, all of its stemming from contaminating one’s understanding of semantic issues by epistemic conditions, paradigmatically the Dummettian-Davidsonian view that sees meaning and understanding as coordinate concepts—for whom it is important that the facts might not be found among the claimables, the two classes at most overlapping.)5.6. ttmpsdz54lrt 2