NDPR Ulf Hlobil and Robert Brandom Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Conceptual Roles

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Jan 27, 2026, 5:09:30 PM (8 days ago) Jan 27

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.01.2 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Ulf Hlobil and Robert Brandom, Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Conceptual Roles, Routledge, 2025, 354 pp., $45.59 (pbk) ISBN 9781032360775.

Reviewed by John Horty, University of Maryland

Robert Brandom has long advocated an approach to language and logic based on a unique combination of inferentialism and expressivism. While inferentialism is often explored within proof-theoretic semantics, typically leading to a constructivist view of mathematics, Brandom’s version centers around empirical language and incorporates a distinctive normative component. Sentences are supposed to get their meanings by being embedded in a social practice of giving and asking for reasons. A speaker making a claim can be challenged by an opponent with reasons to the contrary; the proponent of the original claim, as a condition for maintaining that claim, is required to...