Normative “Force”

Frege’s notion of the “force” of an assertion plays a large role in the discussions of analytic philosophers about speech acts. In his usage, it has nothing to do with coercion or Newtonian physics. Rather, it concerns what I might call the “substance” of what is said, and what Brandom calls conceptual content, which for Brandom would be made explicit first of all through being interpreted as a kind of doing. The question of force seems to be, what are we doing in asserting this rather than that? This also brings in the larger real-world context of that doing.

Although Brandom subordinates reference to Fregean sense or intensional meaning, he also complements and interweaves his account of material-inferential sense with an account of real-world normative-pragmatic “force”, and suggests that this is the ultimate driver of meaning. How things come to have or lose normative-pragmatic force — i.e., how the appearance of such force is legitimized or de-legitimized — he very persuasively argues is best explained by the Hegelian theory of mutual recognition.

At a programmatic level, a deep and wide historical and critical genealogy of the specific forms emerging from mutual recognition is the more particular shape that something like Ricoeur’s “long detour” of mediating interpretation takes for Brandom. Brandom’s monumental work pulling all the pieces of his general account together has left him little time to dwell on details of interpretation for particular cases, but I see it as an open invitation. My own “historiography” and “history of philosophy” notes tentatively sketch some key details in the broad panorama of the history of values. (See also Normativity; Autonomy, Normativity; Space of Reasons; Ethics.)

One important result of Brandom’s comprehensive development is that cases where reality figuratively “pushes back” against us are subsumed under the figure of normative force. (See also Rethinking Responsibility; Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness.)