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Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

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Published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,

pp. 115-134: https://vernonpress.com/book/830

Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

Varieties of anti-representationalism

Pietro Salis

Università di Cagliari

Abstract

Anti-representationalism is the hallmark of Richard Rorty’s critique of the epistemological tradition. According to it,

knowledge does not “mirror” reality and the human mind is not a representational device. Anti-representationalism is a

family of philosophical theses, respectively dealing with the notion of “representation” in different ways. Though prima

facie one may feel entitled to think about anti-representationalism as a kind of uniform philosophical movement, things

stand quite differently. In fact, among many anti-representationalist options, we can identify two main versions: a global

anti-representationalism that entirely rejects the philosophical uses of the notion of “representation”, and a local version

that just removes the notion of “representation” from the explanatory toolbox. In this chapter I try to compare Rorty’s

global anti-representationalism and Robert Brandom’s local version, exploiting a recent discussion by Brandom and a

famous exchange between Rorty and Bjørn Ramberg about Donald Davidson’s take on the special role of the

intentional vocabulary.

Introduction

In this chapter, I mean to show how conceptions of anti-representationalism may differ. In

particular, I will analyze: 1) how the notion of representation can be used as an explanatory

primitive, for example in semantics and in philosophy of mind—and how the rejection of this role

for the notion characterizes certain kinds of anti-representationalism; and 2) how certain accounts

undermine the representationalist understanding of the mind by globally dismissing the notion of

representation. So, while some anti-representationalists purport only to get rid of representations as

explanatory notions, others purport to get rid of all representations, without restriction.

In what follows, I analyze and discuss the main differences between these forms of anti-

representationalism, considering especially points (1) and (2). In particular, I will show that even if
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

both views share a commitment to eschewing representational notions as explanatory primitives,

only radical anti-representationalism entails serious consequences for our understanding of the mind

and intentional phenomena. I will try to list the main problems deriving from this perspective and to

show how radical anti-representationalism is doomed to pay some high philosophical prices. I will

conclude by arguing for the overall superiority of light anti-representationalism, as it avoids many

of the problems highlighted. This discussion, concerning mainly the differences between Richard

Rorty’s and Robert Brandom’s views on representationalism, will come in two steps. First of all, I

will outline Brandom’s strategy for defending a moderate anti-representationalism, based mainly on

a recent Brandom’s paper. 1 Secondly, I will present a similar point due to Davidson.2

Rorty and the anti-representationalist challenge

The notion of representation has played a crucial role in the epistemology, theory of mind, and

semantics of western philosophy. A widespread view in epistemology affirms that our beliefs, when

true, represent things as they are. According to this view, our epistemic practices aiming at

knowledge strive for an accurate representation of reality. There are accounts of the human mind

according to which intentionality, the capacity of mental states to be about, or to represent, extra-

mental objects or states of affairs, is “the proper mark of the mental”. In such accounts, the human

mind is understood as a representational cognitive device—what Richard Rorty famously called

“the mirror of nature”. There are also accounts according to which concepts and, for some,

linguistic meanings, are (forms of) representation: to entertain a conceptual content C is to be in a

representational state R (accounts differ in their explanations of how such states occur). These

1
Robert Brandom, “Global anti-representationalism?” Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism, ed. Huw
Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 85-111.
2
As it emerges in Ramberg’s discussion of certain tensions between Davidson and Rorty. See Bjørn Ramberg, “Post-
ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson”, in Rorty and his critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), 351-370. This point is somehow strengthened by Rorty himself, who in his own replay to Ramberg
conceded the main point. See Richard Rorty, “Response to Ramberg”, Rorty and his critics, 370-377. As we will see, this
change would amount to a weakening of Rorty’s view (and in particular of his anti-intentionalism).
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

ideas, rooted in the thought of central figures such as Descartes and Kant, compose a framework

that is intuitively coherent and explanatorily advantageous (e.g., in classical cognitive science).

Anti-representationalism is a reaction against this theoretical framework. Rorty’s version is quite

radical: he does not merely deny that mirroring is essential to knowledge and language;3 he claims

that the mind must not be understood as a representational device at all. Furthermore, for Rorty,

anti-representationalism is also a form of anti-intentionalism. According to this view, basic

intentional states like beliefs and desires must not be understood as representational in nature, or as

having a primarily representational function. His definition of beliefs as “habits of action to better

cope with reality” provides a good example of this shift.4 Rorty countered mainstream

representationalism with his straightforwardly pragmatist reading of our doings and attitudes. To

put some of Rorty’s famous views briefly, “coping with reality” is better than “representing it

accurately”, “epistemic justification” is more useful than “truth”, “solidarity” is better than

“objectivity”, and so forth.

The main problems with representationalism, Rorty argues, were pointed out decisively by

Wilfrid Sellars and Willard Van Orman Quine. Sellars’ dismissal of the sensorily given as a

sufficient condition for having perceptual knowledge and Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic

distinction struck at the foundations of the representationalist tradition and, in particular, of

empiricism. According to Rorty, they made the main epistemological difficulties of

representationalism explicit.5 He claims that if we abandon both the sensorily given and

analyticities (a range of expressions having intrinsic meanings), then we end up without the basic

set of privileged representations providing the ground for a representationalist epistemology. There

3
“By an antirepresentationalist account I mean one which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right,
but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality”, in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism,
and Truth. Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), i.
4
Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth”, in Rorty and his critics, 4.
5
Though none of them fully appreciated the point made by the other: Quine did not reject the given and Sellars
remained committed to some form of analyticity. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979), 102.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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is no purely perceptual foundation of empirical knowledge, and there are no meanings that are

immune from empirical revision.

The account proposed by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, according to which social

practices are crucial in providing the contents of intentional states and attitudes, offered Rorty an

alternative. Rorty endorses this account as a straightforward pragmatist response to

representationalism: the metaphor of mirroring must be replaced with that of coping with one’s

social and natural environment. Knowledge, says Rorty, is a social practice like many others: it

deals more with the rules of the game than with representing essences or things-in-themselves.

The final step of this epistemological overturn is Rorty’s take on Donald Davidson’s arguments

against representationalism.6 Rorty understands Davidson’s attack on the scheme/content

dichotomy as getting rid of representations as epistemic intermediaries between mind and world. In

this view, representationalism entails epistemological complications rather than advantages by

postulating a third entity between the objects of our knowledge and the meanings of our words.

This criticism, Rorty points out, revives an old point made by William James. Davidson’s view that

only a belief can justify another belief, furthermore, independently strengthens the former Sellarsian

and Quinean points:7 beliefs are not justifiable merely on the basis of the meanings in which they

are expressed—indeed distinguishing sharply between the contribution of these meanings and that

of the world is a rather desperate enterprise; nor are they justified merely on the basis of perceptual

episodes—since these play just a causal and not a rational, or justificatory, role. Beliefs are

justified on the basis of justificatory inferences, and this operation, due to our epistemic limitations,

is heavily influenced by our actual web of beliefs.

6
Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, Vol. 47 (1974), 5-20.
7
Donald Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective”, in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz
(Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1989), 221-240.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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According to Rorty, these points make representationalism a rather odd enterprise: it strives to

get in touch with the very nature of things in themselves through accurate representations, getting

rid also of what it sees as the limitations of our practices and vocabularies—our actual ways of

coping with reality—for being too local and contingent for this epistemological goal. Skepticism is

an obvious upshot. Representationalism, furthermore, amounts also to a substantial submission to a

nonhuman authority: the way things are. Such a submission is a danger of the metaphysical realism

embedded in representationalist epistemology. Another danger is using the accuracy of

representation as a standard of legitimacy for vocabularies, and for the scientific value of

disciplines.

Anti-representationalism, however, is a wider family of philosophical theses than this brief

reconstruction of Rorty’s version may suggest, with other versions dealing with the notion of

“representation” in different ways. For example, a view in the philosophy of mind called eliminative

materialism is another kind of anti-representationalism. Likewise, enactive approaches to cognition

appear to be a valuable challenge to representationalism in cognitive science. Huw Price recently

provided a new anti-representationalist push to the philosophical debate with his view called

subject-naturalism, which is an attempt to detach naturalism from representationalism.8 Another

recent anti-representationalist perspective is that of Robert Brandom, a view devoted to

understanding conceptual content and discursive practice within a framework in which inference

replaces the notion of representation. Brandom’s perspective agrees with Rorty’s in maintaining the

Wittgensteinian primacy of discursive practice over intentional and conceptual contents. This

emphasis on praxis is one of the main axes of their shared pragmatism. But things are not so simple,

and, as we will see, there are relevant differences concerning the understanding of anti-

representationalism.

8
Huw Price, Naturalism without Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Huw Price, ed.,
Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

The main difference between the types of anti-representationalism sketched above is one of

scope. According to (1), anti-representationalism is a program that avoids using “representation” as

one of its explanatory primitives. According to (2), anti-representationalism may be seen as a

stronger philosophical claim, one devoted to denying the very ideas of “intentionality” and of

“mind”—if these are understood just in terms of representations. Acceptance of (1) is usually

implicit in (2), but not vice versa: one may in fact accept (1) without endorsing (2), by rejecting the

view that “representation” has explanatory import without undermining the goal of explaining a

representational dimension of thought, language, and knowledge. If, following Sellars and

Wittgenstein, one accepts that this cognitive function is just one among many, i.e., that language

does not have a primary representational goal, one avoids the consequences highlighted by Rorty.

This anti-representationalism is quite different from the version endorsed by those who are willing

to adhere to both (1) and (2).

In particular, Rorty would endorse this latter view, both (1) and (2) being the core of his radical

anti-representationalist program, which expels representations from our philosophical vocabularies.9

The former attitude can be instead exemplified in the work of Brandom.10 We may call the Rortyan

perspective “global” or “radical” anti-representationalism,11 while the second may be called “light”,

“local”, or even “expressivist/deflationary” anti-representationalism.

As one would expect in connection with these authors, and as it has emerged from our

reconstruction, these varieties of anti-representationalism are connected, in general, with various

pragmatist insights. This pragmatist turn means, as highlighted above, that intentional and

conceptual contents are not matters of accurate representation but rather of social practice. Rorty

and Brandom characterize differently the role of these practices. Where Rorty emphasizes our

9
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
10
Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1994).
11
For the term “global anti-representationalism”, see Robert Brandom, “Global anti-representationalism?” in
Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism, 85-111.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

using, inventing, and replacing our vocabularies in order to better cope with our social and natural

environments, Brandom emphasizes the normative structure of discursive practice, what he calls

“the game of giving and asking for reasons”. While Rorty puts great emphasis on the local and

contingent character of our practices and vocabularies—recalling Wittgenstein’s plurality of

language games—Brandom conceives discursive practice as having a center which is both rational

and normative. Though “normative” and “rational” are often assimilated to the representationalist

tradition, Brandom uses them in a rather different, pragmatist, way. For him, normativity is a layer

of norms implicit in practice, and rationality is intended in elucidative (expressive) terms, the kind

of elucidation required to make the norms implicit in practice explicit in propositional form. Rorty,

on the contrary, sees normativity as embedded in the use of a particular vocabulary: in using a

vocabulary you follow certain rules, and by changing the vocabulary you basically change the rules

of the game.

Anti-representationalism as anti-intentionalism: overturning the mirror of nature

One of the main consequences of Rorty’s anti-representationalism concerns intentionality.12

According to Rorty, intentional talk is just talk. The mind, understood as a representational device,

is an invention of Descartes (later improved by Kant), he says. Since the mind is an invention, the

intentional vocabulary is just one among others, without any special philosophical privilege or

significance. Intentional ascriptions are not special. Rorty here shows a strong skeptical attitude

towards the intentionality of mental states. Beliefs, desires, and intentional states and attitudes must

not be understood representationally—they can be described in more useful ways.13 They are not

12
More famous are other consequences, including support for abolishing invidious comparisons between different
disciplines and vocabularies based on their putative degree of correspondence with reality. If this is just a bad metaphor,
then we should move toward a liberated culture in which different vocabularies and disciplines are equally useful for
our coping with reality.
13
It is also interesting to register that Rorty started first with an eliminativist view that understood intentional notions as
fictional. Early in the 1980s, he changed his view by understanding states like beliefs as habits of action. It is
noteworthy that Rorty did not feel the need to change his anti-representationalism accordingly. He went on defending
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

representations and their primary role is not that of representing anything. They are more like rules

or habits that, in a context of social practices, help us to fare better (better or worse being relative to

this perspective—no vocabulary works for every goal). This view is radically anti-

representationalist. It is, for example, a straightforward denial of intentional realism, which holds

that folk-psychological notions like beliefs and desires track real patterns and are not merely façon

de parler.14 Furthermore, Rorty here also denounces as illegitimate the idea of a representational

dimension for language and thought, because he is interested in dismissing the idea of language as

something devoted to representing the world. According to Rorty these states and attitudes simply

do not represent anything. Language and thought are not representational, and our cognition does

not work in terms of representations: Rorty here is resolute.

However, given that Rorty rejects representationalism while accepting the variety of local and

contingent vocabularies that we use (for many purposes), there is a possibly Rortyan response to

this: representationalism is just another local and contingent vocabulary with a particular usage. I

will not go into this, but it is interesting to note how radical anti-representationalism should, in its

own terms, provide a different understanding of representationalism. If use is the master criterium

to distinguish between different vocabularies, why cannot one consider a representational

vocabulary as a perfectly legitimate one? Why cannot one, for example, think about intentionality in

this way? I think this may be the basis of a Rortyan argument for the legitimacy of the intentional

idiom—a vocabulary and an idiom whose legitimacy Rorty never gave up trying to dismiss. In

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty explained why he thought this possibility was a

dangerous concession. He dismissed this representationalism from another point of view: since

an anti-representationalism shaped by his early eliminativist position, even though, strictly speaking, he had abandoned
eliminativism. I suspect that such a change could have relevant entailments for anti-representationalism.
14
According to intentional realism, folk-psychological notions refer to actual mental states, possessing causal influence
on behavior. For a defense, see Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of
Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987) and Jerry Fodor, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1998).
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

judgements of the accuracy of representations generate invidious comparisons between

vocabularies, with a tendency to dismiss those vocabularies that do not correspond to reality, we

ought to defend the free plurality of our language games by dismissing those showing less tolerance

towards other games.15

There are, however, further reasons to preserve a representational dimension for pragmatism. I

am skeptical that we can sharply distinguish between the use of a vocabulary and what that

vocabulary is about.16 This point seems to push the issue to a higher level: is the aboutness involved

in the use of vocabularies determinative in choices between them? Is the intentional idiom

intertwined with our talk about “use” and “justificatory practices” (since these always show a

purpose and are about something)? As we will see in the next section, these questions are on the

right track.

But, first, let us go back to some questions about the intentionality of thought and language. Is it

really possible to get rid of intentionality? Is it just talk? Are the things we talk about irrelevant for

what we say? Setting aside truth for such things, what about their usefulness? What about their

capacity to provide justifications? These questions point to two notions dear to Rorty: successful

use and justification (as opposed to truth). Here, I think Rorty is in a delicate balance. It seems that,

15
There are also other reasons that prevent me from developing such an argument against radical anti-
representationalism, which depend on a number of open problems in the debate that I’m still working hard to explore
and fully understand. One depends on the ongoing discussion about the scope of anti-representationalism between
Brandom and Price. Connected to this, there is Price’s recent view according to which representationalism is the upshot
of a conflation of two distinct concepts of representation: i-representation (its role in a conceptual scheme) and e-
representation (its role in referring to external items outside our conceptual scheme). This distinction provides an
alternative to Rorty’s diagnosis. Finally, there is a problem concerning the implications of the connection between anti-
representationalism and expressivism, where Brandom and Price still see the issue in different terms. See their full
exchange in Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism.
16
When talking about vocabularies, Rorty loosely uses aboutness in a nonrepresentational sense (i.e., without
ontological commitments) that avoids the above doubts. In what follows, however, I will show that such loose talk is
not enough when fundamental resources of our linguistic practice are at stake. When it comes to Rorty’s attitudes about
intentionality, we should distinguish between the two main dimensions of intentionality: aboutness and contentfulness.
The target of Rorty’s view, to be clear, is just aboutness.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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in getting rid of intentionality, he cannot afford even the roles that he assigns to practices and

vocabularies. It seems to me that if the intentionality of our states, attitudes, and utterances does not

make a difference to our successful usage and attempts at justification within our practices, then our

vocabularies can be totally arbitrary (and the role of the world is again well lost17). This strikes me

as a real difficulty. Rorty insists that the role of the world in our talk, practices, vocabularies, and

justifications is merely causal and not representational. But to affirm that a rational role for the

world is possible only in a context of use and justification does not preclude a representational

dimension of thought. Rejecting the Myth of the Given obliges us to admit that the causal role of

perception is not sufficient to ground perceptual knowledge; we need normative and conceptual

resources. Yet this perspective only rules out the possibility of having representations and

intentional states before mastering a public language. And nothing prohibits our understanding

intentional states and representations as possible and useful only in this cognitively enriched

environment. Here it seems that Rorty, willing and eager to remove representations from the

foundations of knowledge and cognition, ends up ruling them out even in less contentious contexts.

But that indiscriminateness is, at least prima facie, rather arbitrary. Our vocabularies and

justificatory practices must show some intentional dimension. This seems to be an expressive

requirement to having a use and a purpose. As we will see, the discussion of Brandom’s view about

this representational dimension will enlighten this issue much more.

Anti-representationalism and pragmatism are two ideas that, for many, are closely associated.

The lesson of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that most supported pragmatist

developments was his insistence on the priority of social practices over meanings, beliefs, and

knowledge. The latter are meaningful and are appropriately understood only insofar as they are

embedded in a context of enforced social norms (they are matters of “authority” and

“responsibility” for certain doings). Wittgenstein was more radical than other pragmatists on this

17
The famous title of a paper that Rorty later disendorsed. See Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost”, in Consequences
of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3-18.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

point: it is not just social practice that gives the correct background for understanding language and

intentionality; rather, adding a further contextualist twist, particular language games are crucial in

this task. This is a point that in some ways influenced Rorty’s pragmatism, in what Rorty called our

ability to invent, deploy, dismiss, and change “vocabularies”.18 These abilities invoke the

Wittgensteinian contingent plurality of language games with a pragmatist turn: language games are

not just games; they are tools for coping with reality, and they are not as tiny as Wittgenstein’s

examples may suggest. We would better understand them as vocabularies, as linguistic ways to

organize, transform, and improve social practices to better cope with our problems and lives.

Here a particular question is crucial: does the emphasis on practices and vocabularies ask us to

admit or deny a role for the intentional idiom? Different answers to this question shape different

versions of pragmatism. And, as we will see soon, these differences in the very idea of pragmatism

are well reflected in differences in understanding the scope of anti-representationalism. What we

defined as radical anti-representationalism avoids granting a role for the intentional locutions, while

light anti-representationalism explicitly preserves an important role for them.

Brandom’s anti-representationalism: preserving a representational dimension of thought and talk

A first step into Brandom’s anti-representationalism is made by focusing on his definition of

representationalism as “a commitment to having the concept of representation play a fundamental

explanatory or expressive role in semantic theory”.19 This formulation directly connects with the

way we formerly defined light anti-representationalism as the rejection of an explanatory role for

the concept of representation. Brandom’s definition offers us more, by introducing expressivism.

Expressivism is an important axis of Brandom’s perspective, and it is strictly connected with his

pragmatism and with his understanding of language and social practices. Very generally,

18
A passage where he connects language games and vocabularies may be found in Richard Rorty, Objectivity,
Relativism, and Truth, 80-83.
19
Robert Brandom, “Global anti-representationalism?”, 87.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

expressivism is the idea that in speaking certain words, one is fundamentally doing something—

especially, one is giving explicit propositional form to something that was only implicit in certain

doings. Without the conceptual and/or pragmatic resources to use those words, one would be

incapable of performing such a doing. Therefore, those words represent an expressive enrichment of

our discursive practices (and of our vocabularies). Conversely, the absence of such resources would

be an expressive impoverishment of our practices (and of our vocabularies).

The easiest example dealing with locutions that are powerful from this point of view is given by

logical vocabulary, namely logical connectives. In particular, our ability to use conditionals and

negation is the mark of the expressive role of logical vocabulary in a discursive practice. Without

the use of conditional expressions—in cases such as “if the litmus paper is blue, then the solution is

basic”—we would not be capable of stating explicitly “what follows from what” when dealing with

our claims (and so, according to inferentialism, of spelling out their content). Without negation, we

would not be capable of making incompatibilities between claims explicit—for instance, to say that

“the referee has just whistled” is incompatible with “the referee has not yet whistled”. This is the

basic case for the expressive power of logical vocabulary, but Brandom provides further interesting

cases. Among the many, a place of honor is given to truth-expressivism (a deflationary approach

that develops the prosentential theory of truth), the idea that locutions such as “true” or “is true”

play a fundamental expressive role.20 In general, an expressivist conception of certain bits of our

vocabularies is the claim that such bits play a fundamental expressive role: without them we would

not be able to say and do many important things that we are actually able to say and do.

Understood this way, expressivism is also the idea that certain core parts of our vocabularies are

more important than others by virtue of this expressive role: they are less dispensable because of

their expressive power. The question arises: is the degree of indispensability of expressive locutions

a tenable way to distinguish between more and less important locutions? This question ramifies if

20
Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit, chap. 5.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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we use the idea of expressive indispensability to investigate the role of the controversial (for Rorty)

notions of representation and intentionality. Do intentional and representational vocabularies play

an expressive role of this kind? Would a positive answer to this question give sufficient reason to

reject Rorty’s view that intentional talk is just talk and that this vocabulary has no special

significance? Before going back to these questions, let us look more closely at Brandom’s approach

to representational vocabulary.

Brandom, even though sharing many of Rorty’s pragmatist insights, does not want to follow his

Doktorvater to this radical outcome concerning the representational dimension of thought and talk.

Even granting that representations do not play an explanatory role, Brandom thinks it is important

to preserve a representational dimension of discourse. In particular, he seems to be careful to

preserve a role—a pragmatic one—for the representational vocabulary. He defends this view in a

number of ways, but I will focus just on his treatment of representational locutions. We do

something particularly useful, he says, when we use such locutions. Such representational locutions

appear to be part of the very structure of discursive practice, rather than just one vocabulary among

others. It is not a set of locutions we can dismiss at once, or at will—as Rorty would have suggested

on the basis of their representational nature. For they play an important role in the evaluation of

claims advanced, and of commitments undertaken, by speakers in discursive interactions. Brandom

refers to this use as an ability to navigate across the perspectives of speakers. The representational

dimension of thought and talk is crucial in understanding what one’s claims commit one to and in

evaluating whether one may be also entitled to such claims or not.

This special role, which is both pragmatic and epistemic, is well exemplified by those locutions

that play an expressive representational function: namely, de re ascriptions of propositional

attitudes. Brandom helps himself to the Quinean distinction between de re and de dicto ascriptions

of propositional attitudes.21 While de dicto ascriptions report claims in the exact terms used by those

21
Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960), 96.
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who uttered them, as in “the president believes that war is not an option”, de re ascriptions

emphasize the res, the particular thing spoken about (and which we are ascribing beliefs about), as

in “the president believes, of war, that it is not an option”. De re ascriptions, thanks to their referring

to what we are talking about, provide an external source to evaluate the claims advanced in

discursive practice. These ascriptions, according to Brandom, are defined as the “fundamental

representational locutions in natural language”.22 They provide a discriminating standard for the

way things are and a referential test for our claims, when evaluating reasons pro or contra certain

inferentially articulated commitments. They specify “what is said” in terms of “what is talked

about”.23 In Brandom’s words: “The vocabulary I am interested in is this ordinary, non-technical

natural language vocabulary that expresses the idea that besides what we say or think there is also

what we are talking or thinking about”.24 Furthermore, these locutions make explicit the difference

between what people say and think about and what they say or think about it. Their expressive

power lets us say and think such things as “Adams believed, of the inventor of lightning rod, that he

did not invent lightning rod”. And these ascriptions provide useful and fine-grained tools for

grasping subtle differences in the commitments attributed and undertaken, depending on what they

are about. Indeed, they provide a direct account of the intentional directedness (the aboutness) of

thought and talk, an account that, however, is not compromised with representationalism.

The account is not representationalist because “representation”, again, is not an explanatory

primitive admitted and used; the representational dimension is only the explanatory target of

contents specified in different terms (i.e., in this case, thanks to a number of inferences). Using the

notions of “source” and “target”, we could say that Brandom is a “source” anti-representationalist

and a “target” representationalist: he eschews representationalist explanatory primitives, while he

accepts that our explanations may aim at a representational dimension (in this case, explaining “the

22
Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit, 499.
23
Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit, 138.
24
Robert Brandom, “Global anti-representationalism?”, 103.
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pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

representational dimension of conceptual contents” in non-representational terms). In this context,

de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes make explicit the representational dimension of

inferentially articulated commitments.25

According to Brandom’s picture, the representational dimension plays an important role in

discursive practice, one that is indispensable. The main reason for this indispensability, without

entering into the subtleties of Brandom’s expressivist stance, is that the role played by such

vocabulary relates to the global structure of discursive practice. Without this representational

vocabulary, our assessments of the goodness of our claims and inferences, and of the commitments

undertaken by means of these, would not themselves be as good as they are. Without being able to

make explicit what our words and thoughts are about, we would not be sufficiently precise in our

understanding of who is committed to what. And so, we would be much disadvantaged in our

reckoning of mutual commitments and entitlements.

Discursive practice without such representational locutions would be seriously impoverished: it

would not be fit for an adequate evaluation of conflicting and incompatible commitments, and it

would be difficult to understand which of these may deserve an entitlement. It would be difficult, in

other words, to state when our claims are justified or not and then to endorse some of them because

we think, thanks to this representational dimension, that they are true (read this, in the Sellars-Rorty

tradition, as endorsing those claims). Losing this representational dimension would be a structural

and expressive impoverishment for discursive practice.

In the Davidsonian jargon dear to Rorty, users of language always “triangulate”.26 In discursive

practice, there is always, first, the perspective of a speaker, second, an intersubjective dimension

25
Brandom also provided a similar treatment for the expressive role of the intentional vocabulary which could be very
useful in a hypothetical expanded version of this discussion. See Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing. Towards
an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 6. As Brandom himself did in “Global anti-
representationalism?”, I chose the account concerning the representational vocabulary as more relevant on the issue of
anti-representationalism. I wish to thank Sybren Heyndels for pointing out this possibility.
26
Donald Davidson, “Epistemology Externalized,” dialectica 45, no. 2-3 (1991): 191-202.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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given by other speakers and shared rules, and, third, a shared world of causal stimuli. The

representational dimension granted by de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes, in dealing with

the third of these three necessary corners of triangulation, secures an objective role for the way

things are in communicative exchanges between speakers. But there are also other reasons for

preserving a representational dimension of thought and talk.

Further Davidsonian insights: the normative inescapability of the intentional vocabulary

That Rorty’s global rejection of representations can be considered an overreaction against

representationalism is not, perhaps, only Brandom’s opinion. From this point of view, it is

interesting to look at certain disagreements between Rorty and Davidson about intentionality

revealed in a brilliant overview by Bjørn Ramberg, in which Rorty makes some surprising

concessions to the importance and philosophical significance of the intentional idiom.27 These

changes of mind, prima facie, would be very important for our main topic.

Rorty complained on various occasions about certain statements by Davidson, and Ramberg has

made an extensive taxonomy of these disagreements, trying also to understand who is right about

each issue.28 Ramberg’s discussion is crucial for our problem: at stake, among many topics, is

precisely the importance of the intentional vocabulary.

Rorty’s official view is that this vocabulary is one among many, with no special philosophical

import. Furthermore, Rorty regards the conferring of a special status on the intentional idiom as

something that falls somewhere between the suspicious and the noxious. Intentionality is, for Rorty,

a way to characterize the human mind in representational terms with the consequence of

establishing an ontology—in Rorty’s jargon, a non-human authority to which one must submit.

Focusing on representing means conferring authority on what is represented. Once we abandon the

27
See Bjørn Ramberg, “Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson”, and Richard Rorty, “Response
to Ramberg”.
28
Bjørn Ramberg, “Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson”.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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“mirroring” metaphor to understand cognition, Rorty argues, we should also stop granting special

status to the intentional vocabulary. He defends this point on the grounds that vocabularies do not

correspond to reality and that, therefore, there is no privileged vocabulary which is better than

others as corresponding to reality. The argument goes: no vocabulary corresponds to reality; if no

vocabulary corresponds to reality, then no vocabulary is more important than others; the intentional

vocabulary does not correspond to reality either; hence, the intentional vocabulary should not be

considered more important than others. And the very idea of having more importance is here

suspicious.

Davidson, although generally sympathetic with many claims defended by Rorty, did not

subscribe to this point of view. He firmly resisted Rorty’s dismissive perspective. He maintained, in

fact, that the intentional vocabulary has a special philosophical significance.29 Though Rorty always

disagreed with this idea, in a later discussion with Ramberg, when pressed by a patient spelling out

of Davidson’s views on the importance of the intentional vocabulary, Rorty surprisingly conceded

the main point. Apparently, before this change of mind, he was misled by reading Davidson’s

perspective as somehow committed to certain dispensable Quinean ontological views. Let us have a

look at the details.

Ramberg pressed Rorty about the main point: even if at the beginning Davidson was unaware of

his view’s connection to ontologically minded distinctions (between descriptive vocabulary and

intentional vocabulary) and with the Brentanian idea of the irreducibility of intentionality, the main

reason to think that the intentional idiom is philosophically relevant is based upon Davidson’s

philosophy of language—and therefore, on the ideas of “radical interpretation” and of

“triangulation”.30 According to Ramberg, Davidson’s view is characterized by seeing “that the

29
But this significance is not to be understood in representationalist terms, i.e., as correspondence with reality.
Understood in this way, this certainly sounds less dramatic and more Rorty-friendly.
30
Radical interpretation is the attempt to understand a native speaker of another language from scratch, without
knowing anything about their language or beliefs. Davidson claimed that in order to do so, from a methodological
perspective, an interpreter should maximize the rationality attributed to the speaker’s utterances. According to
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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irreducibility of the vocabulary of agency [the intentional vocabulary] is due to features of that

vocabulary which are unique to it”.31 The idea is that the intentional vocabulary plays a crucial role

in the game of communication, in having a constitutive connection with a “community of minds”.

This point requires a clarification: it is not the intentional stance itself that is a prerequisite of

communication, but the layer of (social) norms that it presupposes. The intentional dimension of

thought and talk is strictly connected with a system of social norms in force—for example, those

that Davidson, under the heading “principle of charity”, calls norms of rationality.32 There can be a

common reference only where there is a common reference system, and the same holds for beliefs,

desires, and so forth. The intentional vocabulary is therefore special and irreducible because it is

strictly connected with a fundamental normative dimension. This dimension, being a relevant part

of the game, can hardly be dismissed. In Davidson’s words: “communication, and the knowledge of

minds that it presupposes, is the basis of our concept of objectivity, our recognition of the

distinction between true and false belief. There is no going outside this standard to check whether

we have things right”.33 Intentional vocabulary is not a dispensable feature of our discursive

practice. We systematically apply norms of rationality when we deal with other speakers/agents,

and these norms lie at the base of the intentional vocabulary. In Davidson’s words “[…] they [the

intentional concepts] are not an optional part of our conceptual resources. They are just as

triangulation, Davidson argued, objectivity of thought and speech depends on three factors playing a relevant role: first,
the presence of a speaker, second, the presence of a social environment of epistemic peers (a common language,
common beliefs, and norms of rationality), and, finally, a common world that is a shared source of causal stimuli.
31
Bjørn Ramberg, “Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson”, 359. Reduction here means a
relation between vocabularies and not between entities or categories.
32
In general, the principle of charity requires interpreting a speaker’s utterances to be rational and, in the case of
argument, considering its best interpretation. In its narrow sense, the aim of this principle is to avoid attributing
irrationalities, fallacies, or falsehoods to the other speakers’ utterances when a coherent reading of these is available.
Overall, it is a methodological attribution of rationality to other speakers: “We make maximum sense of the words and
thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimises agreement”. See Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth
and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 197.
33
Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, ed. A. Phillips
Griffiths (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 164. Emphasis mine.
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pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

important and indispensable as our common-sense means of talking and thinking about phenomena

in non-psychological ways.”34 For Davidson, the intentional vocabulary is special for its role in

communication, which is indispensable, and because it is strongly connected with normativity. In

general, his idea is that the normative vocabulary is always presupposed in the use and deployment

of any descriptive vocabulary.35 The normativity of the intentional vocabulary makes it special,

significant, and indispensable. It is an axis of all our practices, especially those that closely deal

with our vocabularies. Ramberg is clear in emphasizing how the rational norms involved in the use

of intentional vocabulary are also involved in the use of every other descriptive vocabulary, and this

is why the intentional vocabulary and the norms governing it are not a dispensable layer of

communicative practices. As Ramberg puts it, also these cases concern norms; in fact, describing as

such emerges out of a basic background of “purposive behavior” on the part of the communicating

speakers involved, and this behavior can be perfectly specified in normative terms.36 Furthermore,

the main point of Davidson’s principle of charity is that this normative background is “inescapable”

for speakers, even if they use “for some particular purpose” only descriptive resources.37

Here, a further clarification is needed. Pragmatists, in general, would find it promising to

understand intentionality as depending on participation in certain normative social practices. For

example, Brandom, Sellars, and others defend the view that intentionality basically depends on

social norms.38

34
Donald Davidson, “Reply to Richard Rorty,” in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. L.E. Hahn (Open Court: La
Salle, 1999), 599. Emphasis mine.
35
This is a point that Brandom defends as well, and that he reads as going back to a trajectory of thought started with
Kant and revived by Sellars (the so-called “Kant-Sellars-thesis” about normativity and modality). See Robert Brandom,
Between Saying and Doing and Robert Brandom, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom reads Sellars
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
36
Bjørn Ramberg, “Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson”, 362.
37
Bjørn Ramberg, “Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson”, 362. Ramberg also adds that if
Davidson is right, “[d]escribing anything” is a capability that we master just because there is the possibility, for other
speakers, “to see us” as generally “conforming to the norms that the predicates of agency embody”, ibid.
38
This idea seems to be an important consequence of rejecting the Myth of the Given.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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When Ramberg made this reading of Davidson explicit, Rorty saw and appreciated the point.

And he conceded it to Davidson. His former mistake was reading these Davidsonian passages in

ontological terms39 rather than in a normative sense. Once the equivocation was clarified, Rorty

showed openness to this view. It is not that there is a representational/ontological layer in the

foundations of discursive practice (that would be clearly a wrong reading); rather, there is a

normative layer that shapes a fundamental intentional and representational dimension of discursive

practice.

Why is that dimension so fundamental? It is Rorty, in his reply to Ramberg, who explains and

defends the point. Without the intentional/normative idiom in place we would not have the

communicative abilities that we have, nor could we manage other vocabularies in the way we

actually can. So, the very Rortyan game of changing vocabularies in order to better cope with

reality would not be possible without the intentional/normative vocabulary playing such a pivotal

role. The intentional idiom is not just one among many, because it plays a constitutive role in the

very game of deploying, evaluating, and changing vocabularies. It is the basic condition for having

and using descriptive vocabularies. As Rorty puts it, we could not “deploy” our descriptive

conceptual resources unless we could also deploy the “normative” vocabulary, just as we could not

use “a screwdriver if we did not have hands.”40

I do not know whether these changes of mind fully shift Rorty’s anti-representationalism in the

direction of Brandom’s perspective, but surely they mark a tendency to lean towards such an

account.41 In particular, it seems that here Rorty is near to affirming that original intentionality

depends on normative practices, and this would mean a stronger allegiance with the perspective

39
To talk just about irreducibility is a point conceded to the idea of ontological reduction, and therefore to ontology and
representationalism.
40
Richard Rorty, “Response to Ramberg”, 372.
41
However, see the four final points of his reply purporting to circumscribe the consequences of this change.
Furthermore, it appears that Rorty, in his latest years, despite this discussion with Ramberg, again embraced global anti-
representationalism through his exchanges with the other great anti-representationalist theorist, Huw Price. Many thanks
to Robert Brandom for pointing this out.
Original version published in P.G. Moreira (ed.), “Revisiting Richard Rorty”, Vernon Press, Wilmington 2019,
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endorsed by Sellars and Brandom—the above quotation seems also to implicitly adhere to a

Brandomian expressivism. Recognizing this normative importance of the intentional stance,

furthermore, provides a revisionary Rortyan moral: intentional talk is not just talk; it is a dimension

provided by a layer of social norms that lies at the very heart of our practices.

Conclusion: a weakened anti-representationalism?

The discussion above, in my opinion, provides reasons to recommend what I have called “light

anti-representationalism” to those motivated to reject representationalism. In particular, radical anti-

representationalism seems to entail anti-intentionalism and hence the general rejection of a

representational dimension of thought and talk. According to radical anti-representationalism, the

representational mind is just a modern Cartesian invention, and intentional talk is just talk. This

view, according to the last sections of our discussion, would definitely count as a substantial

impoverishment of our resources and capacities.

On the contrary, the light anti-representationalism defended by Brandom does not entail such

consequences, and it is therefore a better view. Brandom, as we saw, has created support for this

option by emphasizing the expressive power of representational locutions. Furthermore, Rorty in his

late years changed his mind in response to a re-reading of Davidson—in discussion with

Ramberg—and acknowledged the importance of the intentional vocabulary in virtue of its basic

normative structure.42

This idea of the basic connection between intentionality and the social norms of our

communicative practices connects with the idea of the normative basis of intentionality, as defended

by Sellars and Brandom (among others). Many of Rorty’s statements in his discussion with

Ramberg can be used to read him as endorsing this view, or a very similar one. However, whether

42
Even though this endorsement of light anti-representationalism did not last long. See note 41. So, there remains a
crucial open question: does the agreement with Price entail anti-intentionalism?
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pp. 115-134 : https://vernonpress.com/book/830

this is enough to make Rorty entirely a light anti-representationalist, I do not know. It certainly

helps us to see that a perspective that globally rules out representations also dismisses resources

which are central for our practices and vocabularies.

To avoid this impoverishment, pragmatists and anti-representationalists should recognize the

significant role and the expressive power of intentional vocabulary and of specific representational

locutions in our social practices, particularly in discursive practices, in which this dimension is

fundamental for the reckoning of the deontic scores of speakers. Cast in this role, the intentional

vocabulary avoids Rorty’s former fears: its significance is not due to the fact that the intentional

vocabulary corresponds to reality while others do not. Therefore, this moderate version of anti-

representationalism meets the main requirement of the radical version.

There is, finally, a moral to be drawn from this discussion that marks the superiority of light anti-

representationalism: thanks to this view we can be anti-representationalists without embracing anti-

intentionalism. This result is achieved by ruling representations out of our explanatory resources,

but also by recognizing a representational dimension of thought and talk—to be explained, of

course, in nonrepresentational terms.

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Brandom, Robert Boyce (2013) “Global anti-representationalism?”, in H. Price (Ed.)

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