The purpose in looking at Brandom’s paper is that he helps with two things as well as presenting a distinct social reading of knowledge. The two things are:
First, he gives a more concrete characterisation of what one might mean by the phrase ‘the space of reasons’. It stands – he suggests – for an abstraction from the actual practice of giving and asking for reasons. That is a human practice with rules governing what the right ‘moves’ are. So if knowledge is a standing in the space of reasons, then knowledge is not so much a mental state as a social status. It is ascribed according to rules. Thus it is normative. (By contrast, happiness is a state of mind and is not a normative. Happiness is not correct or incorrect.)
Second, his account sheds light on Sellars’ discussion of perceptual knowledge. Brandom, like McDowell, wants to claim that he is in the same tradition as Sellars whilst ascribing views to Sellars which are rather like his own!
Brandom’s positive picture of knowledge.
Brandom’s idea is to give an account of knowledge based on how we ascribe knowledge to others. He does this using two explicitly normative (ie correctness involving) notions: commitments and entitlements. (The reason for picking these is that they do work in his broader account of language works. But they will help shed light on knowledge if we think they are clearer, more basic, simpler than ‘knowledge’ ‘justification’ etc.) Thus belief, being justified and being true work like this:
Construed as a standing or status, belief will correspond to some sort of commitment, while justification (being justified) will correspond to some sort of entitlement to that commitment. So taking someone to have a justified belief will be understood as attributing two sorts of standings: a commitment and an entitlement. What about the truth condition? To take someone to have the status of a knower one must take it that the justified belief in question is also true. What is it to do that? Taking the belief in question to be true is not a matter of attributing a commitment, but of undertaking one-endorsing the claim oneself. For taking-true is just believing, that is, committing oneself, adopting a standing or status. [903]
So ascribing knowledge involves adopting three different attitudes: attributing a commitment, attributing an entitlement, and undertaking a commitment.
Note, now, that thinking of knowledge by thinking of it from this perspective involves us, say, ascribing knowledge to him, say, by noting that he has taken on a commitment (he is committed to it being raining), by us ascribing an entitlement (we think he can see the rain from where he’s standing) and by us thinking his commitment is true. That is, we take on the same commitment.
So he does not need to have a view about his own entitlement. We need to ascribe it to him.
Back to Sellars.
Recall that Sellars thinks that perceptual reports need to meet two conditions. They need to be reliable. And the subject needs to know they are reliable. Brandom questions the second. Surely, all that is needed is that we know that his (eg.) perceptual report is reliable? That way, there’s no danger of any regress. But also, we can see how perceptual reports can have entitlements even if the subject himself is not is a position to explain or justify this. He can have non-inferential knowledge of the world via experience (and thus also, eg., escape the Agrippan trilemma).
A lingering worry.
But does this account really connect up with the world in a sufficiently objective way? After all, Brandom captures the truth aspect or condition of knowledge by asking how we ascribe truth (or knowledge) to another. We do that by sharing the commitment. But whilst that unpacks the social rules governing the space of asking for and giving reasons, might it not simply stay within the realm of what we - socially - take to be true, not what is true? It is not so much that he has attempted to reduce what is truth to what we take to be truth. Rather, he has not attempted to unpack the notion of truth at all. Still, might we not want some reassurance that truth will not just collapse into what we take to be true?