Alessia Marabini (2015), Al-Mukhatabat (المخاطبات) (2015); reprinted in M. Hamdi (ed.), Lectures de Robert Brandom, Edilivre, 2018, pp. 51–90 — DOI-10.12816/0028065
Key takeaways
- Boghossian’s objection to substantive, entitlement-based theories of meaning (drawn from pejoratives like “Boche”) works against Dummett but not against Brandom. Brandom’s material inferences are non-monotonic and ceteris paribus, so one can grasp a concept while refusing to endorse the inferences it licenses.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
In Brandom’s conceptual-role semantics, grasping a concept means being committed to certain inferences. This follows from the inferentialist thesis that a term’s meaning is given by its justification through assertibility conditions, which Marabini, following Boghossian, calls the Meaning Entitlement Connection (MEC). The inferential commitments rest on a material notion of inference. Boghossian argued that Dummett’s and Brandom’s substantive conceptions of meaning cannot allow disagreement about pejorative concepts or extend knowledge in light of new evidence. Marabini replies that the argument overlooks a difference between Dummett’s monotonic and Brandom’s non-monotonic view of the norm underlying meaning.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 0 seconds of active reading over 0 sessions. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — t=0. This is a specialist exegetical paper, and the skim captures the reply.
What a deeper reading should check:
- It is a close reading in the Brandom–Boghossian–Dummett debate over pejoratives and inferentialist meaning, and it offers an inferentialist rival to the distributional account of meaning in LIT-208.
- Check whether “decline to endorse while using meaningfully” really answers Boghossian, or just relocates the disagreement to entitlement.
- The publication history is tangled: an Arabic-titled journal (2015), an edited volume (2018) and a PhilArchive posting (2016). Confirm which version the PDF is.
Access when seeded: philarchive.org is behind Cloudflare. Read the full PhilArchive PDF (MARBIT-2, 29 pp.) and the record page (keywords; citation to the 2018 Edilivre volume; added to PhilPapers 2016-06-10) through the Wayback Machine: the abstract, §1, the §§1–8 layout, §7 and §8. Crossref records the journal version in Al-Mukhatabat with year 2015 only, so published: is 2015-01-01 as a placeholder; month and day are unverified.