The Dialectics of Scare Quotes and Hyperlinks. Scare Quotes Hegel s Pragmatism An attempt to come to terms with Hegel s pragmatism that is based on his use of scare quotes seems to be doomed from the start, because Hegel isn t known as a pragmatist, nor does he ever use scare quotes. Nonetheless, I am going to argue that his dialectic as at work in the Phenomenology of Spirit is best presented as a process of scare-quoting transformed concepts.
Quotation marks have different uses.
Finally, they express the uneasiness that accompanies our use of words that for some reason don t properly fit our vocabulary. In order to make clear that I am aware of that, I put the term in scare quotes. I shall compare the two projects. Scare Quotes Brandom gives an account of propositional and conceptual content in terms of norms concerning how it is correct to use expressions. The pragmatic significance of an assertional speech act is rendered theoretically by specifying the commitments a speaker undertakes by performing it.