On philosophical approaches to non philosophical questions | Prof Robert Brandom

"One thing that seems to tie Dewey and Wittgenstein together is that they are quite sceptical of a certain kind of philosophical question, and I don't want to describe them as anti-philosophical but they seem to think there are some questions where there's a misapplication of philosophical energies to answer these questions philosophically. And so, I have a question about the three questions you raised too, the demarcation, emergence and leverage question. Looking at those it seems that two and a half of them at least could very will be answered by appealing to science or partly by appealing science, you'd want to know what the social scientists would have to say, the linguists, the developmental psychologists and so on down the line. I'm curious to what your response would be to that these aren't necessarily philosophical questions and if we treat them as philosophical questions we run the risk of going down a blind alley of which we may never emerge"
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'From German Idealism to American Pragmatism - and back': Keynote lecture of 2015 Summer Institute in American Philosophy delivered by Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh). June 12, 2015.
Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for.
The classical pragmatist versions of naturalism and empiricism fit together much better than the traditional and logical empiricist versions that preceded and succeeded them. Far from being in tension, they complement and mutually support one another. Both the world and our knowledge of it are construed on a single model: as mutable, contingent products of statistical selectional-adaptational processes that allow order to pop to the surface and float in a sea of random variability. Both nature and experience are to be understood in terms of the processes by which relatively stable constellations of habits arise and sustain themselves through their interactions with an environment that includes a population of competing habits.
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