Brandom and Davidson: what do we need to account for thinking and agency

Abstract

Most of the philosophers who call themselves naturalists believe that accounting for minds and agency does not require any conceptual tools over and above those employed by the natural sciences. But there are also some philosophers who, I think, could still be called naturalists and yet deny this.

The paper discusses the approaches of two of them: of Donald Davidson, who believes that to account for human agents we need at least the concept of truth and Robert Brandom, who argues that what we need are not specific concepts, but a specific mode of speech, namely the normative mode. The goal of the paper is to analyze these two approaches, and differences between them, in detail and to show that they need not be utterly incompatible.