Pink Elephants

Alex Oliver

• Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism by Robert Brandom
  Harvard, 230 pp, £21.95, June 2000, ISBN 0 674 00158 3

I have to confess that before starting on this review I hadn’t read Robert Brandom’s massive Making It Explicit (1994). Although it’s famous, very few of my colleagues have read it either (I mean read it, not just bought it or dipped their toes in it). Writing such a walrus of a book is a risky business. Life is short and it’s publish or perish; so a lot is written and little is read. Michael Dummett, one of the very few contemporary philosophers who, like Brandom, have dared to write books of more than seven hundred pages, has even declared that the merit of a publication ‘must be great enough to outweigh the disservice done by its being published at all’. So the present book, billed as ‘an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out’, promises great relief.