Essay on Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit

I have recently completed the bracingBand long overdueBexperience of reading Making it Explicit, and trying to superimpose my own views on it to see where the disagreements stand out. Mainly, there is agreement. Claim after claim, page after page, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Brandom, and this is not just on matters about which philosophers in general agree. Brandom and I are on the same page about many issues that divide the profession. Moreover, on a few points where Brandom explicitly objects to positions I have maintained, I think he is, in the main, right, and I will acknowledge this in more detail below. What then is left to argue about? There is a fundamental difference of direction in our work. But I will try to show that our residual disagreementsBwhich at first make us appear poles apart on some very central thesesBmight quite easily be nudged into consonance if Brandom can take on what I view as a few friendly amendments. We both learned a lesson from Wilfrid Sellars that still hasn=t sunk in with many of our colleagues. I quote, not for the first time, what I consider to be the pithiest expression of it in Sellars: My solution is that A>.... = means--- @ is the core of a unique mode of discourse which i