Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies

One of the most important lessons we learn from Sellars's
masterwork, Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind (as from the
section on „Sense Certainty’ in Hegel's Phenomenology), is the
inferentialist one that even noninferential reports must be
inferentially articulated. Without that requirement we cannot
tell the difference between noninferential reporters and
automatic machinery such as thermostats and photocells, which
also have reliable dispositions to respond differentially to
stimuli.

(Brandom 2000, p.48)

For Brandom the fact that the response is made by a human, that is to say by creatures
who inhabit a world in which reasons are asked and given, the shout „Fire!’ is always
more than the blast of an alarm or the squawk of the parrot even when the person
shouting is responding to the urgency and does not have in mind all the reasons for
the exclamation. Reasons are always present for the response to have meaning in the
first place. This point needs to be stressed, that living in the space of reasons, as the
philosophers McDowell and Brandom have developed the idea, does not entail full
consciousness of reasons all of the time. The space of reasons is the environment in
which human beings live; it is the equivalent of Gibson’s ecology.

The difference between the understanding of knowledge from philosophers discussed
here and Gibson’s concept of affordance (as information) is apparent at once. To
determine that this is a hammer, we not only have to sense it in use but also in what

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