Doing, Knowing, and Getting it Right

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Eudaimonia Institute at the University of Oulu. He is author of the award-winning Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (2015).

• 1. Introduction: ways to settle beliefs; Part I. Inferentialism: 2. Use theories of meaning and Wilfrid Sellars's inferentialism; 3. Language and the world in inferentialism; 4. Robert Brandom's social game of giving and asking for reasons; Part II. Rules and Rationality: 5. From representationalism to rescriptivism; 6. Practice all the way down; 7. Rationality as discursive practice; Part III. Reasoning: 8. How to legitimate material inferences; 9. Pluralism in reasoning; Part IV. Knowing: 10. Anti-intellectualism; 11. Knowing as knowing-how; 12. When justification comes to an end; Part V. Methodologism: 13. Methodologism as pragmatism; 14. Pragmatism and methodologism; Bibliography; Index.

Neopragmatism is booming, with excellent recent books from Amie Thomasson, Joshua Gert, Jose Zalabardo, and Matthieu Queloz, amongst others. Doing, Knowing and Getting it Right is a worthy addition to this welcome wave. Building on the inferentialism of Sellars and Brandom, Kuukkanen argues that knowledge and meaning are best understood via rule-bound practices. He calls this methodologism, and offers it as an attractive alternative to traditional representationalism. The book will be important reading for new-wave neopragmatists and their students. Huw Price, University of Cambridge