 Philosophers associated with the University of Pittsburgh have also taken up and developed themes in hermeneutics. Robert Brandom, for his part, has argued that his inferentialist approach in semantics is able to support major tenets of Gadamerian hermeneutics, thereby suggesting that the traditions of inferentialism and hermeneutics can complement one another (see Brandom 2002 and 2004; see also Lafont 2007). John McDowell, in his Mind and World, also introduces a notion connected with hermeneutics. In this text, McDowell wishes to resolve the question of how the mind, ultimately, in the ‘spontaneity’ or freedom of reason, relates to the world. He argues that the question itself is a symptom of naturalism, the idea typical of modern science that immutable laws govern everything in nature. In this, the worry about the place of the spontaneity of reason in nature arises precisely from our reductive conception of nature in the first place. McDowell resolves the question of the relation of reason and nature, then, through the proposal of an alternative naturalism, one that treats reason as a ‘second nature,’ or, a process of the realization of potentials. McDowell draws on notions of tradition and formation (Bildung) in order to clarify this second nature. He writes, “human beings are intelligibly initiated into this stretch of the space of reasons by ethical upbringing, which instills the appropriate shape to their lives. The resulting habits of thought and action are second nature” (McDowell 1994, 84).