‘What shall I say now?’ A normative-inferentialist account of open texture

The goal of this paper is to develop a normative inferentialist account of open texture, inspired mainly by Robert Brandom (1994; 2000). At the level of metasemantics, open texture is explained by the fact that meaning is grounded in social normative practices that are themselves situated, plural, and contingent. While they are sufficiently stable to enable and sustain coordination, practice-based norms become unsettled in the face of disruptive or unexpected circumstances. At the level of semantics, open texture is explained by the fact that inferential norms are always incomplete and potentially incoherent. On the resulting view, open texture appears not just as a genuine phenomenon, but as a ubiquitous feature of concepts that pertains to the very nature of linguistic norms: there is a continuous spectrum between determinacy and indeterminacy, settled norms and unsettled norms. Open texture is visible only when norms become unsettled in the face of novelty and a creative resolution is needed in order to decide how to “go on”. In providing this account, I also reconstruct the historical and theoretical lineage connecting Waismann’s notion of open texture, Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, and Brandom’s normative inferentialism, showing that Brandom not only systematizes Wittgenstein’s view of meaning but also develops Waismann’s distinctive insights, such as the non-monotonicity of non-deductive rules of inference.