his massive Making It Explicit.

284 the fundamental philosophical lessons of EPM. Brandom’s study guide and deVries and Triplett’s commentary are complementary rather than competing accounts of Sellars’s essay. Here we have Brandom’s prolegomenon to any future attempt to make it through his massive Making It Explicit. There is nothing in [the six chapters that make up the body of Articulating Reasons] that will come as a surprise to anyone who has mastered [Making It Explicit]. … I had in mind audiences that had perhaps not so much as dipped into the big book but were curious about its themes and philosophical consequences. (35–36) Though most of the technical bits remain on the cutting room floor, Articulating Reasons is not much more introductory than Making It Explicit in its philosophical sophistication. Indeed, a not insignificant amount of difficult material appears verbatim. It is rather ” An Introduction to Inferentialism ” primarily in the lesser demands it makes of its readers’ philosophical stamina and thus, for instance, of their ability to keep a sense of the whole while assimilating its parts. (For the record, it contains roughly one-fifth as many words.) Both readers seeking a view of Brandom’s ambitious synoptic vision and those working on the specific topics discussed will be richly rewarded. But, understandably, they will also be left with quite a few unanswered questions. Many will be sufficiently intrigued to turn to the ” big book ” for some further answers. In addition to its six more or less self-contained, but mutually reinforcing chapters, Articulating Reasons contains a substantial introduction that locates Brandom’s project philosophically and historically: Brandom holds inter alia that the use of concepts is explanatorily prior to their contents; that concept use is essentially linguistic; that the sentential is theoretically more basic than the sub-sentential; that concept use is best viewed as a species of expression, rather than representation; and that the point of logical vocabulary, in particular , is not to enable epistemic access to a special kind of truth, but rather to express explicitly the inferential relations constitutive of conceptual content. Chapter 1 lays out both this inferential conception of conceptual content and the expressive conception of logical vocabulary. Chapter 2 applies this conception to normative vocabulary, which (it’s argued) enables the explicit expression of commitment to practical inferences. Chapter 3 takes on perceptual reports, defending a form of reliabilism that retains a central role for reason-giving: to take …