No Communal and First-Person Errors: A Critique of Brandom’s Objectivity Proof

Brandom recognizes one of the most serious conceptual challenges facing the pragmatic semantics advocated his Making It Explicit is the need to accommodate the objectivity conviction that our attitudes are answering to things that transcend our attitudes. And he meets the challenge head-on by processing a proof in his climactic chapter eight to demonstrate that his account does not force upon itself the undesirable consequence that (p)[(S) (S claims that p) → p], dubbed the No Communal Error Condition. In this paper, I shall argue that Brandom's proof fails, and, moreover, I prove that both the No Communal Error Condition and what Brandom calls No First-Person Error Condition, (p) [(I claim that p) → p]), with minor modifications, will result from his pragmatic account.