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The terms deconstruction and différence are central to both Jacques Derrida's work and to poststructuralism generally. These terms attempt to provide an alternative to metaphysical construals of linguistic meaning. I compare Derrida's discussion of linguistic meaning and reference with the contemporary pragmatist, Robert Brandom, arguing that Brandom has important similarities to Derrida. However, whereas Derrida remains committed to metaphysics even as he tries to contest it, Brandom, to his credit, more thoroughly rejects metaphysics.
1. Pragmatists and Poststructuralists
Jacques Derrida's more recent works, covering such topics as politics, friendship, and religion, presently generate more discussion and debate than his earlier works. This is not to say, however, that the early works are inconsequential. The later works presuppose the key terms that he introduced in the early texts, such as deconstruction and différance. These terms still exercise substantial influence in the academy, especially in social and cultural theory and textual criticism. In the early works, which are now among the definitive texts of the poststructuralist canon, Derrida articulates his position that "nothing is outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte), challenging every philosophical attempt to ground knowledge and linguistic meaning by appeal to some sort of foundation, principle, or entity independent of human history and culture.
Since the classical American pragmatists (Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey), their later twentieth-century heirs (especially Richard Rorty), and other philosophers who give a central place to social practices in their work (like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Wilfrid Sellars) all give an essential role to social activities such as interpreting, experimenting, and classifying in their discussions of knowledge and meaning, a number of studies have compared Derrida and other poststructuralists with pragmatists and other philosophers of the social practical (Stone 2000; Wheeler 2000; Rorty 1982, 1989, 1991, 1991, 1991, 1993, 1996; Mouffe 1996).
In this vein, the present essay puts the early work of Derrida in dialogue with the philosophy of Robert Brandom, a figure who has emerged as one of the foremost contemporary proponents of the pragmatist tradition, and surely its most ambitious systematizer. I am especially interested in these two philosophers' views on the relation between language and the world. Poststructuralism is an important type of social constructivism, the view that sees...