Habermas and Brandom on empiricism: An interesting contrast

Consider the following remarks by Brandom about the tradition of empiricism in the English-speaking world:

“Empiricism has been the fighting faith and organizing principle of philosophy in the English-speaking world since at least the time of Locke. Its distinctive twentieth-century form, developed by thinkers such as Russell, Carnap, and Quine, joins to the classical insistence on the origin of knowledge in experience an emphasis on the crucial cognitive role played by language and logic.” (Articulating reasons, p. 23).

Brandom describes his own project with reference to the above mentioned tradition of empiricism in the following way:

“A central goal of [my project] is to introduce a way of thinking about these latter topics [i.e. language and logic] – and so about meaning, mind, and knowledge-that swings free of the context of empiricist commitments that has shaped discussion within this tradition.” (ibid.).

Now consider the following description by Habermas:

“. . . there continues from Russel and Carnap onward an empiricist analysis of language with a merely methodological understanding of the linguistic turn, a strand that has gained worldwide acceptance through the work of Quine and Davidson.” (TJ: 69, italics added).

Interestingly Habermas includes Brandom in what he terms as ‘nonempiricist’ branch of Frege tradition and contrasts it with ‘empiricist branch’ which he terms as Carnap-Quine-Davidson tradition:

“. . . Wittgenstein serves as the inspiration for the nonempiricist branch of the Frege tradition all the way to Dummett and Brandom. In contrast to the Carnap-Quine-Davidson tradition, these authors start from normatively regulated practices in which we engage together and which give rise to an intersubjectively shared context of meaning.” (TJ: 121).

It can be said without the fear of contradiction that Habermas would agree with description of his own project as “a way of thinking about . . . meaning, mind, and knowledge-that swings free of the context of empiricist commitments that has shaped discussion within this tradition.”