Articulating Animals: Animals and Implicit Inferences in

Bramdom’s Work Brandom denies animals implicit reasoning by emphasizing their in-ability to make inferences explicit, and in so doing, denigrates animals by likening their behavior to that of machines and artifacts. With dis-turbing regularity and ease, Brandom equates pigeons and parrots to machines and thermostats in their inability to express implicit/explicit inferences: neither the pigeon nor the machine can “provid[e] reasons for making other moves in the language game. ” I contest, however, that animals are paradigmatically more than any similarity or analogy to mechanical processing, just as humans are paradigmatically more than any reductive analogy to animals. The human/animal distinction need not come at the cost of ignoring the difference between animals and artifacts, and I believe we can largely subscribe to Brandom’s dif-ferentiation of the human in terms of expressionism if we allow that animals can make implicit inferences without making them explicit