When Avicenna Summons Aristotle and Brandom

Overview & Synopsis

This paper defends the thesis that the Avicennian distinction between essential necessity (dhātī) and descriptive necessity (waṣfī), when reconstructed within a dialogical framework and articulated with the notion of anchoring derived from the Aristotelian analysis of the fallacy of accident developed by Gazziero and Rahman, provides a conceptual and formal framework more adequate than the standard de re -de dicto distinction for accounting for Brandom's analysis of belief ascription.Against dominant interpretations that construe the de re -de dicto distinction in terms of syntactic scope or domain variation, the decisive issue in Brandom concerns the interactive role of the commitments undertaken by the attributor in determining what is said about the object. The dialogical reconstruction of the waṣfī -dhātī distinction makes it possible to capture precisely this dimension in terms of anchoring commitments, by rendering explicit the normative contribution of the attributor in specifying the attributed content.