Brandom1/15/19“Being and Being Known” (1960) Passages1. I shall be defending the thesis that knowledge involves an isomorphism of the knower with the known at both the sensuous and intellectual levels… [209]2. Now whereas the Cartesians postulated a domain of contents to mediate between the intellectand the real order, the extreme realists of the early decades of the present century expanded the real order to include all the items which had puzzled previous philosophers into the theory of contents. [210]3. But my concern is not to elaborate the characteristic doctrines of this new extreme realism, but simply to emphasize that like the Cartesians it interpreted the difference between intellectual acts as extrinsic, a matter of having different relata. [211]4. But what is the alternative? In general terms it is to hold that acts of the intellect differ intrinsically qua acts in a way which systematically corresponds to what they are about, i.e. their subject-matter. [211]5. I shall be concerned to contrast two of these forms, one of them the Thomistic doctrine (to the extent that I understand it), the other a view which has its roots in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and which I am prepared to defend. [211]6. But first some general considerations are in place, considerations common to all theories of the mental word. (a) We must distinguish between mental words, mental statements, mental questions, etc. (b) We must distinguish between varieties of mental word: names, predicates, logical words, abstract singular terms, etc. (c) But above all we must distinguish between mental words as acts and mental words as dispositions or propensities. This last distinction corresponds to that drawn by Thomists between the intellect in second act and the intellect in first act. The intellect is in first act with respect to a certain mental word, e.g. man, when it has this word in its ‘vocabulary’, i.e. is able and disposed to think in terms of it. When the intellect is in second act with respect to the word man, it is by virtue of actually thinking of something as a man. If the intellect is in first act with respect to this word, we shall say that it has the concept  man. [211] ftnt: I shall form the names or mental words by putting the corresponding English expressions within dot-quotes. [BB: This might be his very first use of dot-quotes—and not evidently the same use he has by the 1963 AE]7. The three basic questions which any theory of the mental word must answer are: (1) What is a mental word? (2) How do we come by them? i.e. how do we acquire our mental vocabulary? (3) How are mental words related to the real order? [212]tmp0ls0xtt2 1 1/15/2019Brandom8. It will be useful at this point to extend to mental words the familiar distinction drawn by C. S.Peirce between word tokens and word types. In this terminology each particular act of the intellect which is informed by the nature triangular will be said to be a token of the mental word triangular as type. Thus, the mental word triangular as type would be the naturetriangular qua capable of informing (immaterially) the possible intellect. The nature triangular as that which is capable of informing both pieces of wax and intellects, i.e. considered in abstraction from its role as word and its role as physical form, will be referred to as the absolute nature triangular. 9. Sensations are sign events—natural signs if by this is meant that they are not conventional, though they are not (or, better, not merely) natural signs in the sense of symptoms or signals. The act of sense does not need to be noticed in order to play its role as sign. [213]10. What, then, are the distinctive features of the vocabulary of sense (if I may so call it) as contrasted with the vocabulary of the intellect? One might well expect to find some such distinctions as the following: (a) The vocabulary of sense contains only such predicative words as stand for the proper sensibles. (b) The vocabulary of sense does not include abstract singular terms (formal universals), e.g. triangularity. The intellect somehow forms these words from their predicative counterparts. (c) The vocabulary of sense does not contain such mental words as mental word or signifies. Query: does mental word belong to the vocabulary of inner sense? of the reflexive awareness of intellective acts? [213]11. My thesis will be that sense is a cognitive faculty only in the sense that it makes knowledge possible and is an essential element in knowledge, and that of itself it knows nothing. It is a necessary condition of the intentional order, but does not of itself belong to this order. This thesis was first advanced by Kant, but can, fortunately, be separated from other, less attractive, features of the Kantian system. [214]12. The first thing to note is that the expressions by which we refer to and characterize sensationsdo show a remarkable analogy to the expressions by which we refer to and characterize itemsbelonging to the intentional or cognitive order. Thus we speak of a sensation of a white triangular thing and this shows a striking grammatical similarity to the language by which we refer to and characterize thoughts; thus we speak of a thought of a white triangular thing. 13. But it is doubtful if [BB: Should be ‘whether’.] this temptation would be strong enough to carry the day if it were not for the considerations which [BB: Should be ‘that’.] generate theidea that the natures white and triangular inform the act of sense in an immaterial way. [215] [BB: This is the Thomist doctrine, which is his target.]tmp0ls0xtt2 2 1/15/2019Brandom14. Now it certainly must be granted that the sensation of a white triangular thing is neither whitenor triangular (nor, for that matter, a thing) in the way in which its external cause is a white triangular thing. And, I believe, it must also be granted that unless the sensation of a white triangular thing were in some way isomorphic with its external cause, knowledge of the physical world would be impossible. Finally, I believe, it must be granted that whiteness and triangularity are somehow involved in the form or species of the act of sense. It is, unfortunately, only too easy to suppose that these admissions add up to the Thomistic theory of sensation. It is therefore important to see that all of these theses can be accounted for in a radically different way which involves no