Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment

What would something unlike us - a computer, for example - have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language - the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures - that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit attempts to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use - in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices.