Paper « Fourth Pragmatism European Conference »

This is the paper I presented during the Fourth European Pragmatism Conference that took place in University College London from 3-5 August 2022.

Abstract

In this paper, I seek to come back on the 2000 debate between Brandom and Habermas in the light of Brandom’s later work and more acute interest in issues of social and political philosophy.

I focus on the sociality they depict as a means to characterize the democratic form of normativity they both endorse. As I argue, from a different understanding of practices is derived a different understanding of this properly democratic normativity. The question bears therefore on how to conceptualize the transition from the normativity of discursive practices to the normativity of the specifically democratic form of the social bond.

If Habermas endorses a formal pragmatics relying on ideal conditions that make any mutual agreement possible, Brandom tries to build the robustness of norms into a specifically modern and democratic characterization of the social bond. Against those who think that there is no social picture of mindedness that does not amount to a deflationary account of truth as communal agreement, Brandom displaces the issue. By studying what is binding in the social bond and how it can be so, he is capable of underwriting objectivity socially thus developing a new conception of our rights as rooted in the social bond.