To take further Brandom’s illustration of differential responses to a fire: the
distinctive feature of a thinking being is its responsiveness to reasons rather than to
causes. For example, when human beings shout „Fire!’ they understand something of
what follows from the event of a fire (their response involves reasons as well as
causes). They are aware of the dangers and of the actions that need to be taken, unlike
a fire alarm which is merely responding differentially to smoke and heat. In other
words, the human action consists not merely of registering alarm. If we were to apply
Gibson’s concept of affordances to such an event, the human cry, being a response to
a fire, would be more or less identical to that of a fire alarm. Brandom’s point is that
what distinguishes the human form of knowing from the type of „knowing’ we might
ascribe to a machine is the same as Sellars’ position that knowing for a human being,
consists not merely in expressing a response but in knowing what follows from it,
knowing the implications, or what Brandom calls the „giving and asking of reasons’
(Brandom 2000). As Brandom puts it „even non-inferential reports must be
inferentially articulated’. To put this point in another form, the child using words
having not yet acquired their precise meaning, may not know all of the reasons which
support the application of a particular word. Yet their use of the word is dependent
upon those reasons, even if the child is not in a position yet to operate with the word
in its full sense. Concept development continues throughout formal education. To
learn something is to be inducted into the space of reasons in which the concepts
constituting what is learnt function.
To the extent that this proposition is crucial to the understanding of human intellect,
so it must be equally vital for the understanding of learning:
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