Convention, Novelty, and Truth in Language

We have been exploring the earliest publicly available work of the great contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom, his doctoral dissertation from 1976. He has been concerned to develop the philosophy of language along pragmatist lines, while working hard to point out that a pragmatist approach need not be construed as globally rejecting talk about objectivity, truth, and reality. The pragmatist approach is appealing as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivist and objectivist excesses. This is the last chapter before his conclusion.

“[W]e saw how the notion of truth and the truth conditions of sentences could arise in a pragmatic investigation into the social practices which are the use of a language by a population. That is, we saw how an account of social practices (which are whatever the linguistic community takes them to be) can require us to consider the sentences uttered in those practices as making claims which are objectively true or false, regardless of what the community takes them to be” (Brandom, Practice and Object, p. 129).

He has argued earlier that understanding the meaning of compound sentences (in which one clause refers to and modifies another) implicitly does after all presuppose a technical concept of truth that goes beyond the warranted assertibility that Dewey recommends as a less pretentious replacement for truth-talk.

Both in ordinary life and in ordinary ethical discourse, warranted assertibility — justification in taking things to be such-and-such — is able to do the work commonly allotted to claims about truth that is what it is independent of us. But insofar as we engage in the meta-level discourse about discourse that is already implied by the understanding of compound sentences, it becomes necessary to introduce a distinction between how things are for us and how they are in themselves. This kind of situation can also be seen as motivation for Kant’s talk about “things in themselves”.

“[W]e will see how that sort of inquiry requires that a sophisticated grammar be attributed to the language being investigated, and in particular requires notions of syntactic deep-structure, meaning, and denotation or reference. We thus extend the method of the previous chapter to consider sub-sentential linguistic components, and see what it is about the practices associated with them in virtue of which it is appropriate to associate them with objective things or features” (pp. 129-130).

He will defend Chomsky’s notion of deep syntactic structure objectively existing in natural language against Quine’s instrumentalist critique.

Only by abstraction from things said do we come to consider individual words in isolation. In common with his later work and at odds with the standard compositional account of meaning in linguistics and analytic philosophy of language, in the understanding of meaning Brandom here gives explanatory priority to sentences over words, and to propositions over terms. This will be more explicitly thematized in his later work.

The compound sentences analyzed by Dummett that Brandom refers to as requiring an auxilary notion of truth beyond epistemic justifiability partake of the character of discourse about discourse, because some parts of them refer to and modify other parts.

He considers what it means to investigate the use of a natural language — what he will later call normative pragmatics. Investigating language use implicitly means investigating proprieties of use, along with their origin and legitimation. We may also collect ordinary empirical facts about the circumstances of concrete “takings” of propriety and legitimacy and their contraries, without prejudice as to whether or not those takings are ultimately to be endorsed by us.

Using the neutral language of “regularities”, he specifies a sort of minimalist, almost behaviorist framework for investigating language use that is designed to be acceptable to empiricists. In later work, he develops a detailed analogy between the deontic moral “necessity” of Kantian duty and a “subjunctively robust” modal necessity of events following events that is inspired by the work of analytic philosopher David Lewis on modality and possible worlds.

“We may divide these regularities of conduct into two basic kinds: Regularities concerning what noises are made, and regularities concerning the occasions on which they are made…. The phonetic descriptions are just supposed to be some rule which tells us what counts as an instance of what utterance-type…. Without attempting to say anything more specific about these regularities, we can express what a speaker, as we say, ‘knows’, when he knows how to use an utterance-type by associating with it a set of assertibility conditions” (p. 130).

“In terms of these notions, we can represent a language by a set of ordered pairs called sentences. The first element of each ordered pair is a phonetic description and the second element is a set of assertibility conditions…. A linguist who has such a representation of the sentences of some alien language ought to be able, subject to various practical constraints, to duplicate the competence of the natives, that is, to converse with them as they converse with each other” (p. 131).

Here he is applying a stipulative re-definition of the ordinary English word “sentence”. “Ordered” pair just means it is always possible, given a member of the pair, to say which member it is. The pair here consists of 1) the sequence of sounds by which a particular sentence is identified, and 2) the conditions under which it is appropriate to use that sentence.

“[A] theory of the use of a language just is some mechanism for generating a list of ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions which codifies the social practices which are speaking the language” (p. 132).

Every sentence in every natural language has the two above aspects — a recognizable series of sounds that identifies it, and conditions for its appropriate use.

“Speaking only about the first element of the ordered pairs which we have taken to specify a language, Quine takes the task of a theory of syntax to be the generation of the infinite set of phonetic descriptions. He then argues that if the aim of a theory of syntax is determined by this target description of speaker competence, then many different axiomatizations will generate the same set of phonetic descriptions, and hence be descriptively adequate. Insofar as a theory of syntax is a part of the project of generating the right set of sentences, then, we may choose between alternative theories only on the basis of convenience of their representation (pp. 132-133).”

This is an example of Quine’s instrumentalism that was mentioned earlier. Syntactic constructs in a natural language like English are identifiable by their mapping to distinct series of sounds. I haven’t spent enough time on Quine directly to say much more at this point, but to identify syntax with the phonetics used to pick out syntactic distinctions seems reductionst. Before criticizing it, he elaborates on Quine’s view.

“Representing the conversational capacities as ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, we will see a good translation as associating with each phonetic description in one language a phonetic description in the other which is paired with the same assertibility conditions…. In this way a translation function would enable one to converse in a foreign language. If the goals of translation are regarded as determined in this way by pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, then convenience of representation and arbitrary choice will enter here as much as on the syntactic side” (p. 133).

“Denotational relations are presumably correlations between phonetically distinguishable elements … which appear in the phonetic descriptions of many sentences, and some element which regularly appears in the assertibility conditions of those sentences. A theory of denotation would consist of a relatively small list of such correlations, together with a set of structural rules which would permit the derivation of the full set of ordered pairs which are the sentences of the language, by combination of the various elements…. If one such axiomatization or recipe is possible, many are” (p. 134).

“More generally, given any scheme, we can substitute as the denotation of any phonetically specified expression anything systematically related to it, …and adjust the rest of the scheme to get the same assertibility conditions” (pp. 135-136).

“The point is that we may think of a language as being an abstract object consisting of a set of social practices…. If one now considers the various theoretical notions which have been thought to be crucial to the specification of a language by those who are not primarily concerned with social practices — the syntactic and semantic structure of its sentences, their meaning and the denotation of expressions occurring in them — one finds these notions playing drastically reduced roles” (p. 136).

“It is our purpose in this chapter to show how to circumvent … conventionalism while retaining the pragmatic point of view which renders language as comprised of social practices” (p. 137).

Classic 20th century analytic philosophy has a very thin notion of language use, effectively identifying it with empirically existing conventions. In contrast to this, Brandom sees in Noam Chomsky’s linguistics a crucial recognition of the ubiquity of linguistic novelty. He quotes Hilary Putnam’s critique of conventionalism:

“We see now why conventionalism is not usually recognized as essentialism. It is not usually recognized as essentialism because it is negative essentialism. Essentialism is usually criticized because the essentialist intuits too much. He claims to see that too many properties are part of a concept. The negative essentialist, the conventionalist, intuits not that a great many strong properties are part of a concept, but that only a few could be part of a concept” (ibid).

In contemporary usage, “essentialism” is a bad thing that consists in taking putatively unproblematic essences of things for granted. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle’s preoccupation with questions of what we translate as “essence” reflects a significant problematization.

Brandom now turns to a careful criticism of Quine.

“Quine’s arguments as we have reconstructed them seek to show that, for a particular specification …, the role of a translation function (or of syntactic deep structure, or of denotational scheme) can be played equally well by a number of different notions” (p. 138).

“Such sound conventionalist arguments cannot be refuted. They can be shown not to impugn the usefulness or objectivity of the notions they apply to. To do this one simply has to come up with some other project, with respect to which the various versions of, e.g., translation, do not play equally well the role that notion is invoked to play” (pp.138-139).

“The question I want to consider is, roughly, where the assertibility conditions and phonetic descriptions come from. In virtue of what does a sentence have the assertibility conditions and phonetic description that it does?” (p. 140).

Questions about conventional use are questions of empirical fact. Brandom’s “in virtue of what” question is on the other hand properly philosophical, in a sense that Plato and Aristotle would recognize.

We come to Brandom’s defense of Chomsky against Quine.

“Chomsky has argued on statistical grounds that most sentences used by adult native speakers have never been heard or used by that speaker before, and indeed that the majority of these have never been uttered by anyone in the history of the language. This is a striking empirical observation of far-reaching theoretical significance. Let us consider the sentences of English which have never yet been used. Not just any phonetic description is the phonetic description of some sentence of this set…. But a native speaker can not only discriminate between the phonetic descriptions which are on this list and conform to them in his own utterances, he has exactly the same acquaintance with the assertibility conditions of such a sentence that he does with the assertibility conditions of some familiar sentence like ‘Please pass the salt’. That is, a native speaker can discriminate between occasions on which it might be appropriately used and those on which it would be inappropriate. Granting, as we must, that there is a community of dispositions concerning these novel sentences which is sufficient to determine a social practice regarding their use, a notion of correct or incorrect utterance, surely this fact is remarkable. Why should the community agree as much about how to use sentences no one has ever heard before as about how to use common ones?” (pp. 140-141).

“For human beings, training in the use of the relatively few sentences we have actually been exposed to determines how we will use (or would use) the vast majority of sentences which we have not been exposed to” (p. 142).

“The question ‘In virtue of what is there a correct usage for a sentence no one has ever used before’ is distinct from, but not independent of the question ‘How do individual members of the linguistic community come to acquire dispositions which conform to the standard of correct usage for novel sentences?’ The questions are distinct because no individual’s dispositions, however acquired, establish a standard of correct usage. The questions are not independent since using a sentence is a social practice…. The question of how such agreement is achieved, its source and circumstance, is clearly related to the question of how individuals come to behave in ultimately agreeable ways…. The explanation of projection by populations must ultimately rest on facts about individual projective capacities…, although that explanation need not resemble the explanation of any such individual capacity” (pp. 143-144).

He clarifies what he means by projection.

“I want to argue that a theory of grammar is properly a part of the attempt to explain and predict the projective capacities of language-using populations. A theory of syntactic structure, of meaning, and of denotation and truth are to provide a framework for accounting for the empirical fact that the practices of a population which are the use of [a] relatively small number of sentences of a natural language determines, for that population, the use of a potentially infinite remainder they have never been exposed to” (p. 144).

“The notion of ‘grammar’ which I am addressing here is that of an interpreted categorial-transformational grammar. Such a grammar is an account of the generation of surface sentences of a language … from an underlying set of deep structures” (p. 144).

This is grammar in a Chomskyan rationalist, antibehaviorist sense.

“The projective capacities which are to be explained are obviously not entailed by the practices and dispositions codified in a set of those phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions…. An account of projection is thus an explanation of how people, being the sorts or organisms that we are, can engage in the complex social practices we do engage in. It is just this sort of inquiry which we considered … as the sort of inquiry within which the objects involved in a practice become important” (p. 145).

This puts new light on how individual words and phrases come to mean what they do.

“Consideration of projective facts of this sort can lead us, further, to attribute structural classes of sub-sentential components to some speaker” (ibid).

“We are interested in seeing how, by looking at facts about the acquisition of vocabulary and compounding forms by a subject, we can in principle explain his open-ended competence to use novel utterances, by exhibiting that competence as the product of projective capacities associated with classes of sub-sentential components” (p. 147).

“Projective classes for an individual were pictured as attributed on the basis of two sorts of acquisition, roughly the acquisition of some projective form, and the acquisition of vocabulary” (pp. 147-148).

“Indeed, it is only in terms of such projective dispositions that we can explain the notion of correctness for novel utterances. We can only explain how there should be such an agreement in terms of shared structural classes induced by familiar expressions, which determine the projection to novel utterances” (p. 148).

Linguistic structure is a theoretical object of just the kind whose status is a matter of dispute between the realists and the instrumentalists.

“This picture of linguistic structure as postulated to account for a speaker’s ability to use novel utterances correctly, on the basis of facts about the acquisition of capacities to project sub-sentential expressions, leads immediately to a change in the criteria of adequacy we impose upon translation functions, and accordingly to a change in the notion of the ‘meaning’ of a sentence which is preserved by translation” (p. 150).

From an empiricist point of view, questions about norms are questions of fact about what is usually the case. Empirical norms are “norms” in a non-normative, statistical sense of “normal” that has nothing to do with what should be the case, except accidentally. The projection of grammar to novel cases on the other hand is possible because grammar has a properly normative sense of “right” usage that is independent of whatever we conclude are the facts about statistically “usual” usage.

“[I]f translation is really to transform the capacity to speak one language into the capacity to speak another, it must transform an individual’s capacity to project novel sentences…. In order to learn to speak the new language, to form novel sentences and use them appropriately, an individual must have a translation-scheme which does more than match assertibility conditions. It must generate the matched assertibility conditions of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a familiarity with the elements out of which they are constructed, as exhibited in fairly small samples” (p. 150).

Speaking is not merely the utterance of sounds, and it is not just an imitation of other speaking. Concrete meanings presuppose learned notions of rightness or goodness of fit that are furthermore always in principle disputable. This also requires a non-behaviorist account of learning.

“Our account of this fact must show how what the subject learned to do before enables him to use this expression in just this way now, even though he has never been exposed to a correct use of it” (p. 151).

“Projection is not just a matter of using novel utterances, but also of using familiar ones under novel circumstances” (ibid).

“We can conclude that competence involved, not just in using … a free-standing utterance, but in projecting it as a genuine component of compound utterances, cannot be expressed merely by assertibility conditions, but requires some additional element” (p. 153).

“We should notice that the argument we have just considered is formally analogous to two arguments we have seen before. In the first place, it is just the same style of argument which we employed … in order to show that truth conditions were required to account for the contribution by component sentences to the assertibility conditions of compound sentences containing them…. All we have done here is to extend the earlier argument to sub-sentential compounding, an extension made possible by the more detailed consideration of why compounding is important. Second, this argument … is analogous to the ‘syntactic’ arguments of Chomsky…. In each case similar surface forms (phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions respectively) are assigned different deep structures on the basis of their different projective roles…. So it is clear that these expressions would have to be associated with something besides assertibility conditions in our theory of their projection anyway” (pp. 154-155).

“Our explanation of the fact that there are correct phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions for sentences no one has ever used before will be that the use of those sentences is determined by the grammar, … and that any individual’s learning to use the language is his learning to conform to the regularities of projection codified in that grammar” (p. 156).

“We have found that explaining the actual, empirical generation of the sentences of the language, shown by the sorts of projection of one corpus of utterances onto another which actually occur, requires that structural elements underlying phonetic structure be assigned to parallel structural elements underlying the assertibility conditions…. Just as the structure underlying the phonetic descriptions is plausibly identified as syntactic structure, so the corresponding structure underlying assertibility conditions is plausibly identified with semantic structure” (ibid).

“The same argument which gave us objective truth conditions … may thus be extended, within the context of our more detailed account of the empirical project which produces a grammar, to yield a parallel account of the function and origin of objective denotations” (p. 158).

“The case of the brown rabbit with a white foot shows that the denotations associated with the expressions ‘rabbit’ and ‘undetached rabbit-part’ must determine in some way the boundaries which white patches must exhibit in order to be grounds for reporting white rabbits or white undetached rabbit-parts” (ibid).

“But the boundaries which determine what objects or objective features are denoted by the expressions are not apparent boundaries…. Explaining the different patterns of projection of the elements of these pairs requires an objective difference in boundaries around white patches” (p. 159).

“It is important to realize that our grammar does not just seek to account for individual linguistic competence. It seeks to account for the shared projective practices in virtue of which there is a distinction between correct and incorrect uses of sentences no one has ever used before…. The grammar must account for the correct and incorrect potential uses of even quite complicated sentences which the ordinary man would never use” (ibid).

“[D]enotational schemes are part of an empirical explanation of certain social practices. Such explanations must cohere with the empirical explanations we are prepared to offer for other sorts of human conduct…. It is a prime virtue of the account we have offered of the question to which a grammar would be an answer that it shows us we can pick the objects in terms of which we explain projective practices in the same way we pick the objects in terms of which we explain color vision, indigestion, and quasars” (p. 162).

Here he is appealing to empirical explanation, and to something like the positivist notion of the unity of science. I am inclined to go to the opposite extreme, and to argue that genuine explanation is never merely empirical. There are empirical things, and we do want to explain them. There also is an empirical field of experience, but it too belongs to what is to be explained. In themselves empirical things do not explain anything. I think, though, that coherence does not apply only to explanation. There is also an implicit coherence on the level of what is to be explained. That is the sounder basis of the ideal of the unity of science.

In later work he explicitly criticizes empiricism in the philosophy of science, but he continues to be interested in empirical things, as evinced by many of his examples and by the theme of “semantic descent” in A Spirit of Trust.

Truth and Assertibility

Here we consider the second to last chapter of Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which has proven to be quite an interesting document. On the one hand, he contrasts Dewey’s pragmatist notion of “warranted assertibility” with standard representationalist theories of truth. On the other, he argues that a thorough account of assertibility conditions entails an account of truth conditions, and that a thorough account of truth conditions entails an account of assertibility conditions. This chapter uses some formal logical machinery and a running series of examples, both of which I will downplay.

The very idea of examining the conditions that make something true is already quite sophisticated. One could almost forget its representationalist and foundationalist origins, because here we seem to be dealing with something more like reasons why. Truth conditions border on the territory of subjunctive robustness that Brandom develops in his later work. Truth in this sense is not just a static property that sentences abstractly and in a binary way have or do not have.

“The dominant tradition in contemporary philosophy of language, influenced by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, Tarski, and Carnap, takes truth to be the basic concept in terms of which a theory of meaning, and hence a theory of language, is to be developed. According to this view, the essential feature of language is its capacity to represent the way things are. Understanding this function in detail is a matter of describing the conditions under which particular sentences truly represent the way things are. Formal semantics, the study of the truth conditions of sentences of various sorts of discourse, is the natural expression of this point of view.”

“On the other hand, there is a pragmatic approach to language shared by Dewey and the later Wittgenstein which attributes little or no importance to the notion of truth. According to this view, language, the medium of cognition, is best thought of as a set of social practices. In order to understand how language works, we must attend to the uses to which its sentences are put and the circumstances in which they are used. Dewey claimed that everything useful which could be said about language with the notion of truth could also be said with a more general and methodologically unproblematic notion of justified utterance or ‘warranted assertibility’ ” (p. 101).

The truth to which little or no importance is attributed is truth as representational correspondence. Even representational correspondence still has its uses though, as we will see from his remarks about Russell further below. But first he elaborates on Dewey’s concept.

“We want to associate with each sentence of the language the set of conditions under which it is appropriately uttered, or, as Dewey puts it, ‘warrantedly assertible’. We want, in other words, to associate with each sentence of the language some set, call it the assertibility conditions of the sentence such that our theory of the language gives us a uniform away of generating the regularities of usage a speaker must conform to for a given sentence, given only the ‘assertibility conditions’ assigned to that sentence” (p. 103).

“Now it is clear that no regularity of appropriate utterance which a speaker learns to conform to and which is reconstructed by a hypothetical theory of assertibility conditions for a language can amount to requiring that all utterances be true. To require that each speaker report the presence of a deer when and only when a deer is present would make infallibility a prerequisite for learning the language. The most that can be codified in the conditions of appropriate utterance of such reports is that one report deer when and only when there are what pass in the community as good reasons for believing a deer to be present” (p. 104).

The important thing here from an ethical point of view is not vacuous “certainty” about presumed facts, but the goodness of reasons for believing this or that.

“The suggestion I will develop as to the proper role of truth in explaining language-use is that of Michael Dummett….’Epistemic justifiability’ is a part of what we have called the ‘assertibility conditions’ of an utterance…. What we want to know is indeed how a notion of truth can be ‘born out of’ the less specific mode of commendation which is assertibility. And Dummett’s suggestion is that it is sentential compounding that enforces such a distinction.”

Dummett offers philosophical arguments for the superiority of constructive or “intuitionist” logic over classical logic. Constructive logic does not accept any assertion as primitive. It requires assertions to be justified by concrete evidence, rather than derived from axioms or assumed truths. It thus identifies what is true with what is provable, and at the same time it constrains what qualifies as proof.

The sentential compounding that Dummett emphasizes is a syntactic way of characterizing the idea of logical self-reference. One clause of a compound sentence modifies and refers to another clause or clauses in the same sentence. This is how richer meanings are built up. The suggestion is that truth arises out of this elemental process of refining meanings and increasing their “robustness” by tying them to other meanings.

“The primary sort of compound sentence Dummett has in mind seems to be the conditional” (p. 106).

The if-then form of conditionals is one way of expressing the fundamental notion of logical consequence, or how something follows from something else. Logic is less about distinguishing the true from the false than it is about discerning what follows from what.

“We may take the suggestion, then, to be that truth is ‘born out of’ assertibility as an auxiliary notion introduced to explain the assertibility conditions of some kinds of compound sentences” (p. 107).

“The ideal case would be one in which each compounding operator were assertibility-explicable…. Thus Dummett, giving him his premises, would have shown that English is not uniformly assertibility-explicable…. ” (pp. 110-111). “There are, of course, languages which are assertibility explicable. Intuitionistic mathematics is formulated in such a way that the assertibility conditions of compounds depends only upon the assertibility conditions of the components” (p.111n).

No natural language is purely constructive. Next we come to Brandom’s point about the interdependence of truth conditions and assertibility conditions.

“In the context of the machinery just developed, one thing which we might take Dummett to be saying is that truth is to be defined functionally, as the auxiliary … which explicates a certain class of compounding devices, among which is the conditional. In order to generate in a uniform way the assertibility conditions of compound sentences we need to look not only at the assertibility conditions of the embedded sentences, but also at the truth conditions of those embedded sentences. Put slightly differently, there is a class of compounding devices which are not uniformly assertibility-explicable, and such that they are truth-inducing, in that whatever does explicate them is a truth-concept…. I will try to show that there is a class of compounding devices which ought to be taken to be Truth Inducing Sentential Contexts…. I will try, in other word, to exhibit truth as an auxiliary notion introduced in order to account for the assertibility conditions of certain kinds of compound sentences” (p. 112).

“For if (speaker) meaning is, plausibly, whatever it is that the speaker must be said to ‘know’ when he can use that sentence properly, then that meaning includes on our account not just the assertibility conditions of the sentence, but also the contribution the sentence makes to the assertibility conditions of compound sentences containing it. Identity of assertibility conditions is thus a necessary but not sufficient condition for identity of meaning. Indeed, in any language containing [truth inducing sentential contexts], truth conditions, as well as assertibility conditions, are part of the meaning of each sentence which can appear embedded in a [truth inducing sentential context]” (p. 113).

“According to our formal analysis, then, … English is not assertibility-explicable. So some auxiliary notion must be introduced to generate the assertibility conditions of compound sentences. Dummett’s suggestion, as we have reformulated it, is that there is a class of compounding devices in English such that the auxiliary notion we need to introduce to explicate them (in our technical sense) is truth. What set of compounding devices ought we to take as [truth inducing sentential contexts] in English, then? Presumably the conditional is one” (p. 114).

Truth viewed in this way can be thought of as a kind of identity property that emerges out of the details of how things follow from other things.

In a note he quotes Quine, Roots of Reference (1970), “Two-valued logic is a theoretical development that is learned, like any other theory, in indirect ways upon which we can only speculate”, and adds, “The present chapter presents just such a detailed speculation” (ibid).

“The present suggestion is that we take truth as the auxiliary notion introduced … to explicate a certain class of compounds…. This is as yet only the form of a definition, for all we know so far of the class of compounds which would need to be specified is that it contains the devices used in our examples. Assuming that we had some independent characterization of the desired class of compounding devices, then, we could define the truth concept of any particular theory of a language to be that notion which in that theory explicates the hypothesized class. Some theories would be better than others in accounting for language-use, for all of the mundane reasons applicable anywhere else in science — ease of coupling with other theories, power, elegance, intuitive acceptability, exhibition of general principles, and so on. A fortiori, then, some truth-concepts would be better than others, for the language in question. We seek a definition of what it is to be a truth-concept (what role a notion must play in a theory of a language to be functioning as the truth-concept of the language according to that theory) which will allow us to be somewhat precise about the point of truth-theories before the entire details of the ‘best’ theory of any language are known. It is a striking fact that, as Dummett led us to see, we have pretty good intuitions concerning the role of truth in explicating the assertibility conditions of compounds even though we know nothing about such crucial details as what sort of thing the elements of sets of assertibility conditions are best taken to be, and even though we can exhibit no single concrete example of a sentence for which we can write down assertibility conditions” (pp. 116-117).

“Representationalists like Russel, arguing for a language-transcendent notion of truth, have claimed against truth-as-assertibility theorists like Dewey that the very notion of truth lies in the contrast it enables and enforces between how things are and how they are thought to be, believed to be, or desired to be by any person or group of people. If you have this distinction, you have a notion of truth; fail to make this distinction and you are simply talking about something else…. [W]e have seized on just that distinction which according to the representationalists generates the notion of truth. For on our account it is precisely the explication of compounds which systematically discriminate between the content of an utterance (how it says things are) and any state of the utterer (belief, desire, or what have you) which may be associated with it which requires the notion of truth as an auxiliary notion” (pp. 121-122).

My late father, who wrote his dissertation on Pierce, attributed to Pierce an aphorism to the effect that “the mark of reality is the sheriff’s hand on your shoulder”. In other words, reality can be distinguished as whatever constrains us in some way. In an earlier chapter, Brandom in passing situates Pierce as dealing with a recognizably Cartesian problem of how we can know an “external” reality that is what it is independent of us. My own distaste for Descartes notwithstanding, this does seem like an important point.

“In languages with sentential compounding devices, the speaker-meaning of a sentence (what the speaker must ‘know’ in order to be able to use the sentence) must be taken to consist not just of the assertibility conditions of that sentence, but also the contribution that a sentence makes to the assertibility conditions of sentences of which it is a component” (p. 122).

“Semantics as such never considers the final step of generating assertibility conditions given the truth conditions of components. For some sorts of compounding device — the conditional, negation, tensing, modal operators, and some others — it happens to be possible to generate the truth conditions of their components in relatively simple ways, as formal semantics has shown us. For other sorts of compounds, notoriously for analogues of ‘Waldo believes that…’ it appears that not only the truth conditions of components are needed, but also the assertibility conditions. If so, then the theory of truth conditions will not be able to insulate itself as a self-contained part ” (p. 123).

The point about belief here has to do with the need to distinguish something other than mere appearance. If I say I believe something, it has to be possible to ask whether I am justified or not in believing it, and that is different from simply asking what it was that I said I believed.

“In conclusion I would like to say something about the notion of truth that results from this way of looking at things. According to the usual understanding, the notion of truth is generated initially by the consideration of sentences in their categorical uses. According to this almost universally held view, a sentence like ‘Snow is white’, is either true or not true as a free-standing utterance. The employment of the notion of truth (in the form of truth conditions) in compounds of which the sentence is a part, e.g., conditionals, is a secondary, derivative matter. On the view which I have been urging in this chapter, however, it is the hypothetical use of sentences to which the notion of truth is primarily applicable, and its application to sentences in their categorical use is derivative. For according to our account, a free-standing utterance is truth-criticizable only in virtue of the possibility of taking it as the antecedent of a conditional” (pp. 125-126).

This is a fundamental point that in his later work Brandom attributes to Kant. Simple “categorical” judgments are always derivative. It is hypothetical judgments — that something follows from something else — that are more originary.

“Thus truth is primarily a predicate applicable to sentences used hypothetically, as antecedents of conditionals and similar constructions” (p. 126).

That is to say that rather than being an inexplicable property of categorical assertions, truth has do primarily with what is or is not a good inference.

“Thus the notion of truth is appropriately applied to free-standing, categorical utterances just insofar as they are involved in a social discourse in which conclusions may be based upon them according to inferential practices codified in conditionals with those sentences as antecedents” (p. 128).

“In order to see how the formal notion of truth invoked by the technical linguistic discipline we have considered is connected to the ordinary use of the truth predicate within the language, … one must consider the relations of the hypothetical use of a sentence as an antecedent of a conditional to the apparently categorical use of that sentence which is implicitly conditionalized by its utterance in the social context of argument, with inferential schemes parallel to conditionals” (ibid).

This is another important point. The fact that the surface grammar of an assertion is simple and categorical does not require that what is meant by it is categorical. When a superficially categorical assertion is cited in support of some other assertion, that pragmatic context makes it effectively a conditional.

Next in this series: Convention, Novelty, and Truth in Language

Pragmatics of Inquiry

The third chapter of Brandom’s 1976 dissertation addresses a dispute in 20th-century philosophy of science between “realism” and “instrumentalism”. He aims to overcome this dichotomy with the help of concepts developed by John Dewey (1859-1952). Besides its intrinsic interest, the discussion sheds additional light on several terms that are prominent in Brandom’s later work.

“Within the structure of classical (positivist) philosophy of science there was a genuine and easily formulable issue between realists and instrumentalists concerning the nature of scientific theories. Both parties agreed that statements reporting observations are either true or false, and that the terms used in true observational statements refer to actual objects and properties. The realist claimed that theoretical statements are also true or false, and that if true their terms refer to actual objects and properties. The instrumentalist regarded theoretical statements as convenient codifications of inferential practices concerning observational statements. Theoretical statements are rather to be read as expressing rules for complicated practices of material inference. The origin of this suggestion for reading putative propositions as rules for inferential practices lies in the fact that in a formal logical system one can in general replace any premise such as ‘n is an A‘ with material inferential rules of the form ‘From “All As are Bs” infer “n is a B” ‘ ” (Brandom, “Practice and Object”, p. 71).

Here Brandom already makes use of Sellars’ notion of material inference, which is the foundation of the “inferentialism” that will be propounded in his first big book Making It Explicit (1994). Within the current chapter, he approaches realism and instrumentalism in an even-handed manner, but his references to this discussion elsewhere in this work are slanted in the direction of criticizing instrumentalism. Given that his later inferentialism advocates something closely related to what he criticizes here, it is clear that his thinking on this matter has evolved.

In the current context, “realism” refers not to a direct or naive realism (the idea that we directly interact with objectively real things, which are more or less as we take them to be), but to a commitment to the reality of theoretical objects. Alongside this he implicitly portrays both parties to the dispute as holding to a kind of empiricism that he does not criticize here, but does criticize in his later works.

“Beginning with Pierce, the primary motivation for wanting to eliminate commitment to theoretical objects has been a desire to accommodate the sort of open-ended conceptual change which has characterized scientific inquiry from the beginning…. Appreciation of this sort of conceptual change has taken the form of a regulative principle to the effect that there are to be no claims taken as ‘fixed points’ settled once and for all…. This is referred to by Pierce and Popper as ‘fallibilism’, and by Quine as the ‘revisability in principle’ of our beliefs and the concepts they are couched in” (pp. 71-72).

I hold in addition that this “revisability in principle” applies not only to scientific concepts and theories, but also to the concepts and beliefs that we apply in ordinary life and in any kind of dialogue.

“The realists argue that theoretical statements do not simply license certain inferential moves concerning observation statements, they also explain the efficacy and account for the legitimacy of those practices…. Appreciation of the need for some explanation of the sort the realists seek takes the form of a regulative principle for theories of inquiry which Quine calls ‘naturalized epistemology’. It is just the requirement that we be able to exhibit scientific inquiries as natural processes susceptible of ordinary empirical investigation and explanation” (p. 73).

The terms “empirical” and “naturalized” can also have broader meanings than they generally do in modern science. For example, I’ve had a lifelong interest in why people believe the things that they do. In this context it is hard to see any kind of dichotomy between justification and explanation. I approach both in terms of “reasons why”. The explanation at issue here, though, is more narrowly causal in a modern sense. (I take both naturalism and “empirical” inquiry in broader, more relaxed senses — empirical as meaning grounded in ordinary experience, and naturalism simply as not appealing to the supernatural as an unexplained explainer.)

“The classical theory/observation distinction simply repeats the Kantian picture of knowledge as the product of a faculty of receptivity (intuition, observation, the passive appropriation of the ‘given’) and a faculty of spontaneity (understanding, theory, the interpretation of the ‘given’)” (pp. 74-75).

More to the point, the common theory/observation distinction in early 20th-century philosophy of science reflects a common dogmatic attachment to empiricism. But at this early point, Brandom still seems to follow Rorty’s negative view of Kant, and he avoids directly criticizing empiricism. But since Kant emphasizes the interdependence of intuition and understanding and says we never find one of these without the other in any real case, it hardly seems fair to treat this as a rigid dualism. In later works, Brandom treats Kant much more sympathetically, and does directly criticize empiricism.

“It is important to realize that the original dispute proceeded as a disagreement about the nature of theories in which the objects immediately given in observation were taken as the measure against which ‘theoretical objects’ were to be laid…. The notion of a theory-neutral, interpretation-free observation language was attacked by Wittgenstein in the Investigations and by Sellars among others, and had fallen into disrepute in the philosophy of science by the 1960s” (p. 75).

That is once again to say that a kind of dogmatic empiricism reigned almost undisputed in early 20th-century philosophy of science. Within analytic philosophy, this commitment to empiricism only began to be questioned in the 1950s, with the work of late Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine.

“[T]he current [1976] situation may be put as follows. In the light of many recent criticisms, philosophers of science have denied that there are sharp differences of kind between objects of observation and objects of theory. Contemporary instrumentalists ([such as] Quine, Feyerabend, and Kuhn) may be thought of as taking this work as … showing that [observation] is more like theory as classically conceived than we had previously thought. So observation is to join theory as a matter of holistically criticizable practices. Realists (such as Putnam, Field, and Boyd) have taken the demise of [the observation/theory distinction] as illuminating our notion of theory, letting us see that theoretical objects are as real, causally efficacious, and independent of our knowledge of them as the classical observable objects” (pp. 76-77).

Each of these latter views seems to make a good point.

“It is not clear, however, … that the new positions are incompatible…. I believe that this is precisely the virtue of Dewey’s theory of inquiry” (p. 78). “Dewey’s idiosyncratic and often obscure account of the mechanics of inquiry … exhibits the realist/instrumentalist dispute as a confusion based on insufficient appreciation of the consequences of abandoning the theory/observation distinction” (p. 70).

He goes on to discuss a number of passages from Dewey. Dewey’s “inquiry into inquiry” is grounded in a specialized notion of situation.

Dewey says “The situation as such is not and cannot be stated or made explicit… It is present throughout [inquiry] as that of which whatever is explicitly stated or propounded is a distinction” (p. 79).

Certainly we never have unqualified “mastery” of our practical or epistemic circumstances, but this doctrine of inherently ineffable “situations” goes further than is needed to make that point. What Dewey says here resembles existentialist claims that existence is ineffable in principle. I was unaware that there was such a dimension to his thought. To my knowledge, none of Brandom’s later works builds on this Deweyan theory of situations. But the way Brandom relates this dubious notion to the making of distinctions puts it in a maximally positive light.

Brandom comments “To ‘know’ something, rather than simply ‘having’ the situation is a matter of repeatables ‘instituted’ within an unrepeatable situation. It is this process which we must investigate to understand the nature of inquiry…. What is excluded by the unrepeatable, non-cognitive nature of situations is only that in a given inquiry I should come to know, rather than simply have, the situation which is the context of that very inquiry. I may investigate other inquiries and their contexts, and this is what one must do to produce a theory of inquiry” (p. 80).

The positive idea that universals arise out of our practices that institute “repeatables” is provocative. No human inquiry partakes of perfect reflexivity, but inquiry is possible nonethless.

“From this external point of view situations are sub-types of the natural occurrences which Dewey calls various ‘histories’ or ‘affairs’. These are the basic elements for which our collective name is ‘nature’ ” (ibid).

He quotes Dewey: “[N]ature is an affair of affairs” (ibid).

Then he goes on: “Situations are a class of affairs which contain sentient organisms. These are the most complicated and interesting affairs in nature, for it is within them that cognition occurs. The model of this sort of affair is the transaction between an organism and its environment in which ‘integration is more fundamental than is the distinction designated by interaction of organism and environment’. The environment here is not just that bit of the physical world which happens to surround the organism. It is that part of the surrounding world with which the organism interacts to live. So from the outside, situations are just congeries of objects ‘falling within boundaries’ determined in some way by the inquirer, and considered as unique, datable occurrences.”

I guess this predates the sentience/sapience distinction that Brandom dwells on in Making It Explicit.

“But if situations are thus unrepeatable constellations of objects, how are the repeatables crucial to cognitive inquiry, as Dewey says, ‘instituted’ within them?” (p. 81).

That is indeed the question.

He quotes Dewey again: “A starting point for further discussion is found in the fact that verbal expressions which designate activities are not marked by the distinction between ‘singular’ (proper) names and ‘common’ names which is required in the case of nouns. For what is designated by a verb is a way of changing and/or acting. A way, manner, mode of change and activity is constant or uniform. It persists through the singular deed done or the change taking place is unique” (ibid).

Adverbial ways of being and ways of acting are far more interesting than mere attributions of undifferentiated existence or action. The association of these adverbial “ways” with a formal characteristic of verbs that is agnostic to the distinction between particulars and universals is unfamiliar and intriguing.

Brandom notes, “Practices, modes of activity involving the objects making up the situation, are to be the basis for repeatability in inquiry” (p. 82)

Now he says it more categorically. Universals become instituted through commonalities in practice, rather than through putative resemblances in perceptual experience. No universal is simply passively acquired.

He quotes Dewey again: “We are brought to the conclusion that it is modes of response which are the ground of generality of logical form, not existential immediate qualities of what is responded to…. ‘Similarity’ is the product of assimilating different things with respect to their functional value in inference and reasoning” (p. 82).

This resembles Brandom’s later critique of assumptions about resemblance.

Brandom comments, “Dewey wants to be able to present a ‘naturalized epistemology’, a theory of inquiry which will account for the practices of an inquirer in the ordinary empirical way, in terms of a set of objects existing antecedent to any activity of the inquirer, and which causally condition his behavior in explicable ways. One of the terms by means of which Dewey formulates the results of his ‘inquiry into inquiry’ is thus the situation. The situation of any particular inquiry we choose to investigate may well contain objects unknown to the inquirer who ‘has’ the situation…. With this introduction to the notion of a situation, we are prepared to approach Dewey’s notion of inquiry” (pp. 83-84).

The way he uses “empirical” here seems to straddle the boundary between empirical science on the one hand, and ordinary experience and natural language use on the other.

“[Dewey’s] official definition of inquiry is: ‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.’ Dewey later decided that this was ill-put, and his considered view is that ‘the original indeterminate situation and the eventual resolved one are precisely initial and terminal stages of one and the same existential situation’. We will see that the ‘transformation’ which is inquiry according to Dewey is a transformation of practices of reporting, inferring, eating, etc. Dewey’s talk of ‘existentially transforming’ situations by inquiring will seem less paradoxical if we recall that the paradigm of a situation from the external point of view is an organism in its environment” (pp. 84-85).

Inquiry is something existentially transforming that occurs within a broadly natural context.

“By insisting on the role of pre-cognitive situations in inquiry, Dewey enforces the constraint of practices and changes of practice by causal relations of pre-existing objects which make those practices possible” (p. 85).

Here Brandom aims to show that Dewey addresses the concerns of the realists.

An interesting sentence in one of his quotations from Dewey is that “The attitude, when made explicit, is an idea or conceptual meaning” (p. 87). The phrase “making explicit” appears here at several important junctures in this discussion of Dewey. The title of Making It Explicit may reflect a Deweyan inspiration. This also sheds light on Brandom’s later talk about the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The attitudes in question are not purely or shallowly subjective. They are practical stances in situations, subject to concrete give-and-take in the situations, and therefore to objective constraints that go into making the situation what it is.

Young Brandom explains, “A situation is indeterminate insofar as it is uncertain what to do in it, what past situation to assimilate it to…. An inquirer enters any situation with a repertoire of practices differentially elicitable by features of that situation…. The situation is determinate or resolved insofar as a concordant set of practices is unambiguously elicited by the situation. Inquiry is the process of producing such settled situations by applying high-order practices of criticism and refinement of initially conflicting claims made in accord with established practices whether inferential or non-inferential” (ibid).

The notion of a differentiating elicitation does occur in his later work.

“For Dewey, as for Pierce, inquiry is a matter of refining one’s practices toward an ideal in which no situation would elicit discordant or ambiguous activity in accord with those practices. Every time a problematic situation does arise, a re-assessment of the practices involved is required, an adjustment and refinement of that set of practices until concord is reached in the concrete situation” (p. 89).

Brandom’s later works express this repeated re-assessment in terms of the ongoing re-constitution of Kantian unities of apperception. Pierce and Dewey apparently put too much stock in a sort of universal movement toward consensus.

“It is important to this picture of inquiry that the inquirer and the habits which determine his practices are part of the situation. This means that altering one’s practices is a way of transforming one situation into another” (pp. 89-90).

“The essential feature of language is that ‘it compels one individual to take the standpoint of other individuals and to see and inquire from a standpoint that is not strictly personal but is common to them as participants or “parties” in some conjoint undertaking’ ” (p. 90).

Language in part presupposes and in part constitutes intersubjectivity. (Intersubjectivity is not something added onto individual subjectivity, but rather a precondition for its possibility. We could not be talking animals at all without others to talk with.)

“Common sense inquiries and scientific inquiries are alike, in that the same general description as ‘controlled transformation of problematic situations into resolved ones’ applies to both. They are different in that the practices of scientific inquiry are developed, inculcated, and criticized in social institutions unparalleled in the extra-scientific community” (p. 91).

I would say that any serious inquiry is an instance of what Habermas calls communicative action, and involves many considerations that do not apply to action in general.

“By looking thus from the outside at an inquirer and his situation in terms of the best scientific theory we have of them, we can also in principle describe conceptual change in an ordinary empirical way” (p. 93). “By describing their practices with respect to the objects which our best theories tell us make up their situations, we provide the framework for an ordinary empirical investigation of inquiry and conceptual change in terms of the physiological and sociological basis of their practices…. According to Dewey, the activity of the physiologist and sociologist investigating the basis in relation of objects for the practices of various groups of inquirers is itself to be thought of as a set of practices which occur within some non-cognitive situation (had but not known) and transformed as inquiry progresses. Inquiry into inquiry shares with all other inquiries the utilization and adaptation of practices forged in previous inquiries, and hence the revisability-in-principle of all these practices and the claims made in accordance with them” (p. 94).

This seems to treat natural-scientific explanation rather than discursive inquiry into meaning as the paradigm for explanation in general. As evinced by the work of Habermas, revisability in principle is an attribute of discursive or dialogical inquiry in general.

“It should be clear at this point that the realist’s claims and the instrumentalist’s claims as they appear in Dewey’s view of inquiry are completely compatible. Objects and practices occupy correlative functional roles in describing inquiry. Conceptual change is indeed viewed as a change of practice, but neither the practices nor the change is viewed as inexplicable” (pp. 95-96).

This is the main point that young Brandom wants to make here. Issues with classical pragmatist sources notwithstanding, I think he is basically successful.

“On the contrary, any practice or change of practice may in principle be explained by appealing to the objects reported, inferred about, or manipulated in any of the practices which are not then in question. This does not mean that there is any practice which cannot be explained or changed, and which is somehow a basis for the rest. We simply cannot change or explain all of our practices at once” (p. 96).

Any particular belief or concept we may have is subject to revision. But we doubt one thing in light of other things that are provisionally held constant. In real life no one doubts everything at any given time.

“There is a certain sort of circularity here, but it is the familiar non-vicious circularity of any self-regulating enterprise, a formal characteristic acknowledged by contemporary philosophy of science as applying to empirical inquiries, capsulized most vividly in Neurath’s famous figure of a ship making repairs at sea” (ibid).

This idea of practical mutual dependence among the elements of inquiry makes foundationalism untenable.

“The difficulty with the instrumentalists is that, having noticed the problems resulting from an ontology of objects, they sought to put epistemology on a firm footing by substituting an ontology of practices, claiming that objects were derivative entities, ultimately reducible to practices which, as we say, involve them…. Dewey teaches us that the problem is with the notion of ontology itself. Once we have become naturalistic, accepting a thoroughgoing fallibilism means eschewing the notion of a categorization of the kinds of things there are which is outside of and prior to any empirical investigation. Objects and practices are mutually dependent functional notions. We cannot account for the changing roles objects play in our conceptual economy without appealing to practices as well, and we cannot individuate practices without reference to objects” (p. 96n).

Objects are derivative entities, and there is a problem with ontology itself, whether it be taken merely as an a priori enumeration of kinds of things, or as something supposedly more fundamental.

“The problem which faced the realists, as we have argued, is allowing for fallibilism in their account of scientific activity. On the face of it, the explanation which the realist wants to be able to offer of the success of current practices, in terms of the actual existence and causal efficacy of the objects purportedly referred to in the theory will not explain why previous views which we have good empirical reason to believe false worked as well as they did. Nor is it obvious how believing in all those unreal objects enabled us to reach our present privileged position of believing in real ones (i.e., the ones which ‘really’ enable us to engage in the practices we do). Finally, fallibilism dictates that we be willing to accept the possibility of revisions in our current view as radical as those which have occurred in the past” (p. 97).

Here there is a clear parallel to the entry conditions for dialogue developed by Gadamer and Habermas. These apply not only to scientific discourse, but to discourse in general.

“According to Dewey’s view, each time our scientific view of things changes sufficiently, we will have to rewrite our account of the history of inquiry in terms of the sorts of objects which we have new practices of making claims about. But this fact no more impugns the project of explaining how previous practices worked as well as they did, than it impugns any other empirical project which may have to be rethought in view of the results of subsequent inquiry” (p. 98).

Naive views of the history of scientific progress as a linear accumulation toward presumed present truth cannot be sustained. When one view supersedes another in any context, it is not a simple matter of truth versus error. For example, geocentric astronomy had an important practical use in navigation that was not negated by the greater “truth” of heliocentric astronomy.

“As long as knowledge is thought of on the Kantian model, as the product of the collaboration of a faculty of receptivity and a faculty of spontaneity (and the observation/theory distinction is a straightforward version of this model, it will seem that there is a philosophical task of explaining the relations of these faculties. (Even Quine falls into this view in the very midst of a recommendation of a Deweyan naturalism about knowledge.) On this picture, philosophers are to tell us how theory relates to evidence, concept to intuition, in every possible cognition. This project stands outside of and prior to any empirical investigation. Dewey, having wrestled free of the picture generating the classical epistemological project, is able to present inquiry into inquiry as an ordinary empirical matter…. Thus Dewey’s naturalized account of inquiry can retain a distinction between inferential and noninferential practices, and between repeatable and non-repeatable elements. These categories are now meant to have only the same force that any empirical classification has, however. They can be discarded when an empirically better idea comes along. Once we give up the receptivity/spontaneity distinction, and with it the project of a philosophical discipline called ‘epistemology’ which is to relate the operations of the two faculties, we lose also the means to formulate a dispute between realism and instrumentalism concerning which faculty is to be given pride of place” (pp. 98-100).

As I noted earlier, in later works Brandom never blames Kant for the bad idea that there is such a thing as pure observation without any interpretation. That is an empiricist prejudice that ought in fact to be regarded as decisively refuted by Kant. Broadly construed, “naturalism about knowledge” is a good thing, provided it does not lead us back to empiricism.

Next in this series: Truth and Assertibility

Seeming, Trying

In pursuing a pragmatist account of what meaning is, the young Brandom already anticipates a theme that will be very important in A Spirit of Trust: a thoroughgoing critique of claims to “mastery” in knowledge and action, illustrated here by the example of Descartes.

The main object of his 1976 dissertation is to show that from a starting point in what he calls social practices, pragmatism can go on to affirm that some things are nonetheless objectively real. This is in part an implicit criticism of his teacher and colleague Richard Rorty, who notoriously made ethical arguments against the very idea of objective reality. My last post treats the first chapter, which enlists Wittgenstein as a source of powerful arguments supporting the basic pragmatist emphasis on social practices as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivism and objectivism. This post treats the second chapter.

Brandom distinguishes between two different legacies of Descartes, one concerning the special privileged status of the mental, which he strongly rejects, and one consisting of a very broadly specified epistemological project the core of which Brandom wants to uphold, while transposing it to different ground. From a highly abstracted perspective, he generously attributes philosophical worth to the very idea of a medium of thought and knowledge, and treats this as a Cartesian innovation. But for Descartes, this medium is something like consciousness that is supposed to be immediately and fully self-aware. The medium Brandom wants to uphold on the other hand is substantive language use and the inherently social practices that govern it.

“The challenge which [the second Cartesian] legacy presents to the pragmatist is this: if the use of a language, the application of expressions, consists of social practices which are whatever some community takes them to be, as Wittgenstein has argued, how is it that those practices enable the community to talk about objective things, which are independent of the community?…. According to the Cartesian tradition, all of our cognitive interaction with the objective world is by means of that medium with which alone we have direct, immediate commerce, namely the mind” (p. 42).

Compared to Brandom’s later much more fine-grained emphasis on the constitutive role of Hegelian mutual recognition, his undifferentiated Wittgensteinian appeal to the “takings” of empirical communities here is a blunt instrument. Community stands in contrast to the common modern notion of the individual as a sort of atom, but no community is a monolith, and no empirical community fully incarnates the ideal universal community of all rational animals. The “takings” of empirical communities are as much subject to error as the takings of individuals.

“This [second legacy] is a project with which the Cartesian tradition had only limited success. When the project failed, the result was a phenomenalism which concluded that because all cognition is by means of mental particulars, only mental particulars are knowable, that all knowledge is of mental particulars. There is a parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition. It is the danger that one might conclude from the fact that all cognition is by means of the social practices which make up our languages, that these practices are all that is knowable…. The prime project of this thesis is to show how knowledge which consists of social practices can be knowledge of objective states of affairs” (p. 43).

Brandom says the parallel danger for the pragmatist tradition is instrumentalism, which he characterizes as the view that social practices are all that is knowable. I have endorsed a kind of “instrumentalism” myself, but see it as applying more narrowly to practices of empirical science, not to all that is knowable.

Brandom treats the putative certainties of Descartes in light of Rorty’s account of “incorrigibility”. Like “certainty” in Hegel’s deflationary view of it, incorrigibility in this sense is a mere fact and not at all a foundation for knowledge. Things are about to become very interesting.

“There is an account of the social practices we use to talk about mental things … which may be extracted from Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Rorty’s “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental”…. Thoughts and sensations became mental only when the noninferential reports of these entities which it turned out that people could make came to be taken to be incorrigible…. Rorty calls an utterance-type ‘incorrigible’ if within the community within which it is used there are no procedures for overruling it” (pp. 44-45).

Whether or not incorrigibility is the criterion for calling things “mental”, the implications of incorrigibility that Brandom is unfolding here offer a very important lesson.

“It will be useful … to consider an elaboration of this account of how practices of issuing reports on one’s inner states can become incorrigible. The elaboration is suggested by Sellars’ account of the ‘looks’ and ‘seems’ idiom…. [T]he practice of making seems-reports arises out of a situation in which there are sufficient regularities perceivable in the mistakes that users of the language make in their ordinary reports of their surroundings…. In such a case one makes the weaker claim ‘it seems to me that I see X’ which is understood to be noncommittal as to whether X in fact holds…. The ‘seems’ statements are so used that whenever a report is incorrect, the corresponding ‘seems’ statement is correct” (pp. 46-47).

I have always thought of “seems” phrasing as an acknowledgement that other perspectives may be possible. It honestly never occurred to me to think of it as a way of always being right. But the logic here is impeccable.

“Thus ‘seems’ is a non-iterable sentential operator — one cannot say ‘It seems to me that it seems to me that X’. Because of this feature of the ‘seems’ idiom, there are things, namely ‘seemings’… about which we cannot be overruled, and we are hence incorrigible. The social practices of using the expression are such that there is no way to overrule the statement ” (pp. 47-48).

With this argument about non-iterability, we have a case of linguistic analysis yielding an interesting and important conclusion that most likely could not have arisen by other means. It has long “seemed” to me that consciousness as such is a syntactic variant on appearance, rather than a kind of knowledge as Descartes and many others have taken it to be. But this link between non-iterability and incorrigibility is entirely new to me.

One thing that stands out about incorrigibility is that it is the very opposite of a condition for ethical dialogue abundantly illustrated by Plato, and more recently made explicit by Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom. Real polar opposites are rare, but this is one of them. Incorrigibility has absolutely no place in what Habermas would call an ideal speech situation. All participants in genuine dialogue are corrigible. But Descartes and other bad authorities have tried to make incorrigibility a condition of knowledge. We ought to respect other people’s first-person reports. But that is a social grace, not a key to truth.

“Mental events are those which we report with expressions which fit into the same linguistic niche that seemings do. The notion of a linguistic niche is here to be taken as parallel to that of an environmental niche which an evolving organism can occupy. The particular property which I have in mind as specifying the linguistic niche which ‘seemings’ define for other mental events is the inappropriateness of embedding such things inside ‘seems’ operators. Thus ‘It seems to me that I am thinking of a red bear’ is a peculiar utterance in that ‘I am thinking of a red bear’ is already an incorrigible utterance. I am suggesting that the mark of incorrigibility is not being appropriately qualified by a ‘seems’ statement…. Thoughts and sensations are kinds of entities which are reported by expressions which cannot appear embedded in ‘seems’ statements” (pp. 48-49).

Next he explicitly draws the conclusion that incorrigibility has no place in inquiry about the nature of knowledge.

“[T]here is nothing epistemologically useful about incorrigibility in the account we have given of it. The ‘seems’ operator which creates the linguistic niche within which mental events and processes thrive must be added to a language which already has more basic sentences which can be embedded in ‘seems’ contexts. And we have seen that those more basic sentences cannot have the incorrigibility characteristic of ‘seems’ statements. The ‘seems’ idiom can be added only to a language that already has other sentences in use which are not incorrigible. Given ordinary, corrigible reports, the ‘seems’ idiom offers a way of producing trivially incorrigible reports from them. Sellars and Rorty have developed this line of thought in considerable detail, to show the error of traditional epistemological programs which seek to ground the authority of ordinary claims in the incorrigibility of these ‘seeming’ analogues. When once the priority of ordinary, corrigible utterances has been understood, there will be little desire to ‘justify’ them in terms of the incorrigible utterances that are derivative from them” (pp. 49-50, emphasis added).

“Seems” talk in effect syntactically adds a wrapper around simple assertion that must therefore already be understandable on its own if the “seems” talk that modifies it is to be understandable.

“Further, the line of thought we have just considered completes the pragmatist’s refutation of the Cartesian view of the mental as the medium of cognition, by showing that the specially criterioned realm of things which was Descartes’ first legacy will not support the sort of epistemological justification demanded by his second legacy. The incorrigibility of the mental is no ground on which to base claims about the correctness of ordinary corrigible claims” (p. 50, emphasis added).

The correctness of ordinary corrigible claims is what we ought to be concerned with. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom talks about “semantic descent” from the lofty abstraction of philosophical metaconcepts back to ordinary life. The idea is that their real meaning lies in their consequences for how we live our life. Klaus Vieweg’s outstanding new biography of Hegel suggests to me that Hegel himself would have appreciated this.

Brandom has already characterized “seems” talk as presupposing ordinary simple assertion. Earlier, he suggested that the whole project of modern epistemology — including pragmatist approaches to it — is historically shaped by what are essentially Cartesian questions. More specifically, he has suggested an analogy between the Cartesian problem of relating the mind to reality and the task he has set for himself of relating a pragmatist account of social practices to what we mean by “real” and “reality”.

Initially I wanted to resist this analogy. But Brandom suggests that the project of epistemology is itself specifically post-Cartesian, and there is a level of specificity at which this is undoubtedly true. I must acknowledge that Pierce’s account discussed further below, which I find attractive, does address recognizably Cartesian kinds of questions, even if his answers stand in opposition to those of Descartes.

Nonetheless the implicit contrast presupposed by seems-talk has been approached in other ways. The notion of appearance and something standing in contrast to it goes back at least to Plato, if not into the hazy prehistory of philosophy. In Plato we do not find hypostasized concepts of “the mind” and “the external world” confronting one another as they do in Descartes, but something more like a contrast between appearance and deeper truth. My own way of approaching such questions is broadly Platonic in this sense, and doesn’t owe much to modern notions of subject and object. Plato and Aristotle ask about “our” knowledge — meaning, for Aristotle at least, the knowledge available to rational animals — not about “the mind’s” knowledge. In medieval terms, knowledge belongs to the whole human being.

“In the rest of this section I will seek to show that the classical notion of the real serves the function of constraint of our fancy. This function requires an aspect of the Cartesian notion of the mind which we have not yet considered, that of the will. We will present a pragmatic reconstruction of that characteristic, parallel to the pragmatic reconstruction of incorrigibility we have derived from Rorty and Sellars” (p. 54).

This development of a parallelism between incorrigibility and Descartes’s voluntaristic notion of will is of great interest. The connection between the real and Cartesian will is initially not clear at all (especially to an anti-voluntarist such as myself), but Pierce’s remarks quoted by Brandom below implicitly suggest a relation through a double negative.

“So far, the notion of the real has been exhibited by means of a distinction between things which can be changed merely by the activity of ‘Thinking about X’ and those which cannot. What is it about thinking which makes a classification based on its capacity to alter things more significant than any other classification in terms of some human activity which differentiates the thing classified? Thus we can consider those things which I can alter merely by digging a hole with a spade, and those which I cannot so alter. In the former category would be holes, tunnels, graves, and so on, and in the latter would be the square root of seventeen, Plato’s Republic, and the interior of distant black holes. For what problem is the classification induced by thinking illuminating (and that induced by digging not)?” (p. 55).

The orientation through asking what problem is at issue is commendable. The comparison with digging a hole has a nice pragmatist flavor, but also would not be out of place in Plato or Aristotle. Now we get to Pierce’s point.

“I think the key may be found in some other passages of Pierce, echoed by Russell. Pierce says: ‘… the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation’. [Brandom continues] That the real is other than the mind’s creation is implied by the previous definition…. That this otherness is ‘forced’ upon us is an element we have not encountered, however” (ibid).

He quotes Pierce again, “…reality is insistency. That is what we mean by reality. It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience” (ibid).

He continues, “What is important here is … the constraint on our thinking which the real, external world exerts on our thoughts. Russell characterizes the realm of fact in terms of the same two elements: that facts don’t depend on what we think about them and that what we think is constrained by the facts…. This element of constraint of the mind, stubbornness to volitions, seems to me to be the key to understanding the role reality played in the classical philosophical tradition. The fact of being forced to think one thing rather than another suggests an answer to our question” (p. 56).

The conclusion to A Spirit of Trust memorably mentions the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency” (Spirit of Trust, p. 689). The “stubbornness to volitions” above is central to Pierce’s notion of reality, and the reference to volitions ties it back to Descartes.

“I think the picture which is being appealed to involves a distinction of two sorts of activities with respect to our control or dominion over them. On the side of fancy are things like imagining a red bear, or thinking of Vienna. These are activities in which we cannot be thwarted. We can simply do them. No effort is required, because there is no gap between trying and succeeding. Contrasted with this, we find activities like digging, which require the special circumstances (the presence of a shovel, sufficiently soft materials, etc.) for their performance, and over which we do not have total control. The point of defining as real a class of things which are in the relevant sense independent of what we think of them is that we do not have dominion over these things in the same sense in which we do over the creations of fancy. Reality is that in virtue of which there are activities like digging, in which we are constrained by circumstances beyond our immediate control. The role which the real is to play in our understanding of things is captured in the explanation it is to provide of why we cannot do whatever we want to do simply by wanting to do it” (pp. 56-57).

In the terminology Brandom will shortly introduce here, the real is that which constrains and resists our “trying”. He illustrates this by returning to the example of digging a hole.

In the terminology of A Spirit of Trust, we could say here that Descartes is overly impressed with our “mastery” over our fancy. The error of many is to treat this relation to our fancy as paradigmatic or programmatic for our relations in the world, when it is our relations in the world that come first. (I do not say “to” the world, because that does implicitly invoke a Cartesian parsing of everything into hypostasized categories of mind and world.)

“Once again, moving the arms and back in this way is something people can be trained to just do, but once again it can be asked ‘How do you move your arms and back in this fashion?’ At this point it is so far from being the case that one must know the answer to such a question in order to engage in the specified activity that we do not know what an answer should look like” (p. 57).

“Our inability thus to describe further what counts as trying to move a ‘voluntary’ muscle marks the end of possible explanations of such movement…. The fact that such explanations of activity… must stop at the attempt to produce ‘voluntary’ muscular activity is the basis for the classical doctrine of volitions. This is the doctrine that there are mental activities called volitions which are the first source of all human activity” (p. 58).

In this tradition, volition serves as the unexplained explainer of “voluntary” actions. By contrast, we have recently seen how Aristotle explains the difference between willing and unwilling actions without hypostasizing a separate faculty of will.

“We now seek a story about indefeasible dominion which will describe the function which the mind plays in Cartesian stories about acting. The mind has an active role here as the medium of activity. This means that anything which is not itself a mental activity is accomplished by means of the immediate mental activity of willing” (p. 59).

The Cartesian hypostases of mind and will have sovereignty and mastery over a hypostasized private domain of fancy. And just as we are incorrigible in our reports of “seeming”, we are the sovereign masters of our pure willing and “trying” . But as Brandom points out, in both cases this is true only in a trivial way. It is rather to ordinary activities that we should look as a paradigm.

“I want to claim that indefeasible domain over inner, mental activities is of the same trivial, stipulative nature and origin as we have seen the property of incorrigibility which characterizes our knowledge of inner, mental events to be…. Our approach is to account for dominion over the realm of fancy in terms of the ‘tries’ idiom in a way formally analogous to that in which we accounted for incorrigibility in terms of the ‘seems’ idiom” (p. 62).

“The basic point of the analogy is that just as the ‘seems’ operator forms a report such that there is nothing in the language which counts as sufficient evidence to contradict it, so the ‘trying’ operator forms a description of an action for which nothing counts as significant evidence that the action was not performed. The important formal point is that just as ‘seems’ operators cannot be iterated…, neither can ‘trying’ operators (‘I am trying to try to do X’)” (ibid).

“The second ‘trying’ is redundant…. We use the ‘trying’ operator in such a way that one can always succeed at trying to do X, whatever troubles one may have actually doing X” (p. 63).

“For ordinary activities like digging, one can actually say what the trying consisted of — e.g., certain movements of the back and arms — and why it failed, just as one can often say why it is that things seemed a certain way. The extension of these operators to cases in which no activity was successfully engaged in which can be described by the language without the operators of the mental expressions they epitomize is linguistically straightforward. So we can explain how we could come to talk about reports which are incorrigible and activities over which we have indefeasible dominion by starting off only talking about ordinary corrigible reports and activities in which we may be frustrated” (pp. 63-64).

“The reason for that non-iterability is the way the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am trying to do X’ relate to the conditions under which it is appropriate to say ‘I am doing X’. And this relation is to be understood by analogy to ‘seems’ ” (p. 64).

“For any activity which we can try to engage in and fail, such as signaling a bus, there must be some conditions of success which are not dependent merely on our tryings (else we could not try and fail” (p. 65).

“Now the important thing for Pierce, as for the empiricists and the Cartesian tradition in general, is that what we believe is constrained in this fashion. Within our framework, this is just to say that believing is not one of the things one can do simply by trying to” (ibid).

We do not “choose” to believe X. Others may have conflicting beliefs about the same thing, but that does not mean that belief is arbitrary. We believe things for reasons that are not simply plucked out of thin air.

“[T]he ‘trying’ operator must be introduced into a language which already talks about things which we can try to engage in and fail (such as signaling a bus). The primary and essential role of the ‘trying’ operator is to make this distinction between ‘doing X’ and ‘trying to do X’. It is a relatively trivial consequence of the performance of this role that the ‘trying’ operator is non-iterable” (p. 66).

“In sum, activities which can be done just by trying to do them are a by-product of activities which one can try to do and fail, not the other way around” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Once we have seen how ‘tries’ works, we can no longer maintain the Cartesian stance in which we take activities over which we have indefeasible dominion for granted and find others problematic, requiring a further notion of ‘the real’ to explain them…. Insofar as the notion of the real involves merely the idea that we are constrained, of course, it is as unobjectionable as it is unilluminating” (p. 67, emphasis added).

“It is interesting to note that in showing that the notion of a realm of unconstrained fancy over which the subject exercises an indefeasible dominion presupposes the existence of constrained activities (with respect to which alone the ‘trying’ operator can be sensibly introduced) we have provided a pragmatic version of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason…. For Kant may be understood as trying to show that the notion that we have of a faculty of spontaneity (the realm of our dominion) must be extracted from a notion of its function in concert with a faculty of receptivity (the source of constraint), and cannot be coherently described out of all connection with that receptive faculty” (ibid).

Next in this series: Pragmatics of Inquiry

Wittgenstein and Social Practices

I was fascinated to discover Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which overall is an original reconstruction of the key themes of the classic American pragmatists’ approach to the theory of knowledge. A number of Brandom’s own characteristic themes are already in evidence here; others have yet to be developed.

The first chapter elaborates the basis for Brandom’s later oft-repeated but rather telegraphic references to the great analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) as a pragmatist, an identification that Wittgenstein does not make himself. Brandom argues that the main theme of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work Philosophical Investigations (1953) is a pragmatist account of knowledge, which aims to be a third way that is neither objectivist in the manner of Wittgenstein’s other main work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German ed.1921; English tr. 1922), nor subjectivist in the manner of the Cartesian and phenomenalist traditions.

Brandom sees late Wittgenstein as offering a more incisive argument for the centrality of social practices in an adequate account of knowledge than any of the “official” (self-described) pragmatists Pierce, James, Dewey, and Mead. He aims to provide the clear account of what is meant by social practices that the canonical American pragmatists and even Wittgenstein did not. Brandom himself here will still rely on a broad notion of community to ground the justification of claims, which is less sophisticated and less adequate than his later account based on Hegelian mutual recognition.

“But what is a social practice? I think that most of the misunderstanding and undervaluation of the pragmatists (Wittgenstein included) stems from their failure to give a clear and unambiguous answer to this question” (pp. 8-9).

“Social practices are best understood in terms of a criterial classification of things…. There are three basic criterial categories. First of all, there are things whose criteria involve only the attitudes and behavior of an individual person. Sensations are things of this kind…. Following Rorty, I call things for which we accord this sort of criterial authority mental. Second, there are things whose criteria are the attitudes and behavior of groups and communities of people. A particular motion is a greeting gesture for a tribe just in case they take it to be one…. I will call this kind of thing social practices…. Finally, there are things whose criteria of identity are independent of the attitudes or behavior of any individual or group…. I call this kind of thing objective” (pp. 10-11).

The second chapter of the dissertation builds on Rorty’s distinctive and original account of the role of “incorrigibility” in Descartes. I’ll address this in an upcoming post.

In later works, Brandom has often rather summarily dismissed definition and classification, as made obsolete by Hegelian recollective genealogy. I think his dismissals go too far, because they suggest that definition and classification are only ever applied in an objectivist manner, as if they simply fell from the sky. Such a suggestion does not adequately recognize the profound dialecticization that identity, definition, and classification already undergo in the hands of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For them, definition and classification are anything but taken for granted. It is precisely open inquiry into criteria of identity, definition, and classification that they commend to us.

“The criterial division is simply into things that are whatever some one person takes them to be, things that are whatever some community takes them to be, and things which are what they are no matter what individuals or groups take them to be…. Put another way, meanings, the things that we grasp when we understand something, are taken to consist of social practices by the pragmatist, of mental particulars by the subjectivist, and objective facts by the Tractarian [early Wittgensteinian] objectivist…. In the rest of this chapter we will examine perhaps the clearest sustained argument for the pragmatic rendering of meaning and understanding in terms of social practices, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” (pp. 11-12).

In later works, Brandom has usually discussed “taking” things to be thus-and-such in Kantian terms. Here it takes on a pragmatist coloring, and Kant is not mentioned. But the founder of pragmatism, Charles Pierce (1839-1914), was deeply influenced by Kant (and expressed an affinity for Hegel as well).

“The pragmatist must be able to explain how, by engaging in various social practices (which are things of the second kind, over which the community has complete dominion), we can come to express, make claims, and have views about objective matters of fact (which are things of the third kind, independent of the attitudes of any community)…. Pragmatism as a view of human functioning stands or falls with the project of giving some such account. No pragmatist, including Wittgenstein, has explained what it is about our linguistic social practices in virtue of which they are appropriately taken to involve claims about objective things” (pp. 12-13).

This concern with the constitution of objectivity — indeed the treatment of objectivity as something constituted rather than as something given, never-you-mind how, is a very Kantian sort of problem. Kant does not really address the social aspect that is in the foreground here though.

Next he gives an overview of the argument he will be attributing to Wittgenstein.

“There are three basic lines of argument running through the Investigations, corresponding to three ways which one might think of to eliminate the reference to social practices in talking about meaning and understanding in favor of things of the other two kinds, objective and mental…. In the argument we consider first, Wittgenstein examines the Tractarian notion that meanings are objective things, which objectively determine the correct applications of expressions. The second argument we will consider examines the Cartesian notion that meanings are mental things (such as images), which objectively determine the correct usage of expressions…. Third, we will consider the so-called ‘private language argument’, which I take to be an examination of the view that meanings, whether mental or objective things, determine correct occasions of use of expressions by a mental process. The argument in each case will try and establish the same claim, namely that whatever sort of thing one imagines as intervening between an expression and its use or application in concrete circumstances, that use or application must be taken to be a social practice” (p. 14).

“What kind of thing Xs are (meanings, uses, understandings in this sense) is a matter of the criteria which determine whether something is an X or not…. Wittgenstein will develop an answer to the question of whether something counts as meaning or understanding something (or learning, remembering, thinking, reading it) by creating a series of analogies (‘family resemblances’) to other familiar activities which share the criterial properties of social practices” (p. 16).

“The objectivist takes meanings to be, not uses or social practices, but objective things like words…. [S]ocial practices admit of a sort of indefiniteness or vagueness which objective things do not. Thus Wittgenstein begins his attack on the view that meanings are objective things and determine the application of expressions objectively (‘according to definite rules’) by asking whether the use of a sentence or a word must be everywhere determined by rules in order for the expression to have a meaning, or for someone to understand it” (p. 17).

In passing, I would point out that Plato and Aristotle too treat rules with a healthy skepticism. That is why Plato insists that good government requires philosophers, and Aristotle builds his ethics on deliberation and practical judgment.

“For some performance to count as an instance of a social practice is for it to be accepted as such by the relevant community. And this means that there can be a social practice without its being the case that for every imaginable performance the community has decided in advance whether it would be acceptable or not. There is a social practice as long as there is sufficient agreement about the cases which actually come up…. In just this respect social practices differ from things of the third kind, which are independent of the attitudes of particular communities” (p. 18).

The very notion of “practice” has an inherent open-endedness.

In Brandom’s later terminology, the constitution of normativity has an inherent dependency on attitudes. While it acquires a kind of (always qualified) objectivity, it does not originate as something objective.

“There is no vagueness about whether, for instance, a given word appears in the rule or not. Insofar as this sort of thing is left vague, one has not specified a rule or expression at all. The question is whether for an expression to have a meaning (or be understood) its application has to be similarly objective and definite, whether the syntactic objectivity must be matched by semantic objectivity. Wittgenstein attacks this sort of objectivism by pointing to the vagueness we tolerate in the application of expressions, arguing that the use of an objective rule or expression is a social practice, that is, that the criterion of successful application is its actual functioning in the community” (p. 19).

“The attempt to eliminate social practices generates a regress, for no rule generates its correct application to concrete circumstances by an objective process” (p. 23).

This point about rules is fundamental. While we can always try to express things as objectively as possible by formulating rules for the application of rules (and more rules for the application of those rules, and so on), this is at best an infinite regress, and there is always a remainder.

“An object, such as a rule, can determine a practice only if there are other practices, e.g., of responding to the object, in the community…. Wittgenstein explicitly draws the lesson that social practices, as things of a different kind from objective things, are ineliminable in accounts of this sort” (p. 24).

In a nutshell, this is what justifies Brandom’s characterization of Wittgenstein as a pragmatist.

“The social practices which are being contrasted with objective things in these passages are not strange or spooky things, and they are certainly not subjective” (p. 25).

At a popular level and even in some philosophical discourse, “pragmatism” is often treated as a kind of subjectivism. The full basis for rejecting this has not yet been elaborated, but it will involve a contrast with Rorty’s notion of incorrigibility.

“Mastering the practice is not a matter of following any set of rules, but rather of behaving in a way acceptable to the rest of the community. Rules may play a role in this, but need not. This line of thought can be brought to bear against the notion that cognitive functioning consists of manipulation of things of the first kind, mental events or processes” (p. 26).

“Mental things do not have an essentially different relation to such applications than linguistic rules did…. [U]nderstanding the meaning of an expression does not consist in some sort of mental grasp” (p. 27).

Again, part of his argument depends on Rorty’s innovative re-characterization of what it is to be “mental”, about which we will see more in a future post.

“The discussion of objective rules goes over to mental events and processes quite unchanged…. The connection between being in a certain mental state and understanding an expression is empirical. The criterion for being in the mental state is, roughly, that one sincerely think that one is, while the criterion for understanding an expression is that one be able to apply it in ways that the community accepts as correct…. The understanding one has of the meaning of an expression is so far from identical to a mental state that the state only becomes sufficient evidence for the understanding in virtue of a social practice of taking it to be so…. The mental functions here only as the invisible inward sign of a visible outward (i.e., social) grace” (pp. 28-29).

“Thus it is clear that the meaning of an expression may not be taken to be a kind of mental state which is elicited by the expression in the members of some population when they understand the expression, and which then objectively determines the use they make of that expression. There must be a social practice of applying the expression…. Wittgenstein is not claiming that mental states have no role to play in this process. He is claiming that they cannot replace the social practices of applying linguistic expressions…. [W]hat makes the performance correct is its consonance with the practices of the rest of the community, and this cannot be a matter of mental or objective processes” (p.30).

“The famous private language argument seeks to show that by the very act of making the language mine own, I must make it a poor thing…. The argument Wittgenstein makes is that ‘ “obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it’ ” (p. 32).

This is a decisive point: a “private rule” — one in which the one acting is identical with the one authorized to evaluate that one’s compliance with the rule — is no constraint at all. It is indistinguishable from sheer arbitrariness.

“For one’s authority over the character of his mental states and processes is complete. One is incorrigible about such matters, that is what it is for them to be mental according to our stipulated usage. What is wrong with such mental rules? What is wrong is that they cannot, in principle, be transgressed. Accordingly, they do not establish any boundaries between correct and incorrect usage, not even the vague boundaries induced by social practices” (p. 33).

In a footnote, he says “I am not taking into account the strand in [Wittgenstein’s] thought which would deny any cognitive status to incorrigible first-person avowals” (p. 33n). Apparently Brandom does not (or at least, at this time did not) consider this to be part of Wittgenstein’s “better wisdom” that he wants to emphasize.

This matter is a bit delicate. I suspect Brandom wanted to save the appearances by not throwing out a common-sense acceptance of first-person insights, but I am inclined to think that this reported denial by Wittgenstein is a necessary consequence of the argument. Whatever is in principle immune to criticism ought to have no standing in serious discourse. As Habermas says about the entry conditions for ideal speech situations, each participant must willingly submit to questioning and criticism. The delicate part is that the concern to save the appearances of common sense is also a legitimate one. But I think the legitimate concern to “save” a common-sense validity for first-person avowals and reports does not require giving common sense a strictly cognitive status.

This comes back to the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion. At odds with the mainstream tradition that “knowledge = justified true belief”, I maintain that there are many things that are legitimately considered to be objects of well-founded belief, but that still do not strictly qualify as knowledge in a strong sense.

He quotes Wittgenstein, “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And this only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’ ” (p. 34). This is a passage Brandom frequently cites in his later works. I think it similarly means that here we can’t talk about “knowledge” in the strong Platonic sense that I uphold.

Brandom adds more support for my argument in the following.

“In a social language, the community which determines whether a given utterance is a correct use of an expression is different from the individual who utters the expression. There is accordingly room for a judgment of incorrectness. But in the case we are imagining, the individual who produces the utterance and the one who judges its correctness with respect to the original rule or definition are identical. There can be no check of whether a given performance is in accord with the rule which is independent of the performance itself. Indeed, there can be no evaluation which is not identical to the performance” (ibid).

“One may wish to call an activity with no rules whatsoever a game, but one may not then go on to claim that there is a difference between playing it and not playing it” (p. 35).

Next in this series: Seeming, Trying

Magnanimity and Its Opposite

When I hear “magnanimity” (literally “big-souledness”, in the ethical complimentary sense of “that’s big of you”), I think of its prominent place in Aristotle’s ethics, as the most comprehensive virtue of character. It is an expansive way of being, an uplifting and morally elevating attitude.

In the final few words of the introduction to A Spirit of Trust (2019), Brandom speaks of “a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32). Much later, his chapter on Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit concludes, “When recognition takes the form of recollection, it is magnanimous, edelmütig forgiveness. The result is the final form of Geist [Hegelian “spirit”, or ethical culture], in which normativity has the form of trust” (p. 582).

Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are Hegel’s words in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology for what Brandom calls two contrasting metanormative attitudes. One possible translation of Edelmütigkeit is indeed “magnanimity”. An overly literal, etymological rendering of the two would be “noble courage” and “down-heaviness” (perhaps “putting down”, or “down-dragging”, or “dragging through the mud”). We could call them benevolent generosity and mean-spiritedness, or magnanimity and pettiness. The draft of A Spirit of Trust that Brandom first put on his web page around 2012 initially caught my interest largely based on this part of the book.

Hegel’s discussion revolves around the allegory of a valet or Kammerdiener (“room-servant”) to a great moral hero. In Hegel’s time, there was apparently a common saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”. The Kammerdiener‘s job is essentially to service someone’s petty personal needs. Even a great moral hero has petty personal foibles, which will be most visible to one whose job it is to service them.

Hegel portrays the Kammerdiener character as showing a mean-spirited disbelief in the genuineness of the hero’s virtue. In this it seems to me that Hegel anticipates Nietzsche’s later analysis of ressentiment. In Nietzschean terms, Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are respectively an affirmative stance and a stance of what he calls ressentiment (French for “resentment”). A person with ressentiment tries to feel good by taking a diminishing attitude toward others. Nietzsche famously criticizes common notions of morality as really more grounded in ressentiment than in any positive value or virtue. He particularly interprets religious and metaphysical otherworldliness as grounded in a generalized ressentiment toward life and the world. But in Hegelian terms, Nietzsche himself takes a one-sidedly negative view of religion and most philosophy.

Writing before Nietzsche, Hegel in the Phenomenology sharply criticizes the otherworldliness of what he calls the unhappy consciousness (or better, an unhappiness and bad faith at the root of otherworldliness), for which everything in the world is as nothing compared to the infinity of God. But he also sees one-sidedness and a kind of bad faith in the Enlightenment dismissal of religion as mere superstition and priestly manipulation.

In Kantian terms, the Kammerdiener reduces the hero’s ethical stance entirely to her personal petty inclinations that have nothing to do with the greater good. The hero of the allegory we can see as a Kantian moral hero who is posited to act entirely out of high moral principle. In this way she is not unlike the ideal sage in Stoicism, who similarly is said to leave the equivalent of Kantian inclination behind.

It is important to recognize that for the point Hegel aims to make here, it does not matter in the least whether or not we believe that as a matter of fact a perfect sage or moral hero exists. The question is rather whether we acknowledge that there are some genuinely ethical or genuinely magnanimous actions.

The Kammerdiener takes the attitude that there are no genuinely ethical actions, that all human actions are really grounded in some kind of self-interested motive or other. The most generous and other-oriented acts imaginable can unfortunately be diminished in this way.

Brandom stirs things up by associating the ethical naturalism discussed in analytic philosophy (a reduction of ethical stances and normative attitudes to psychology or biology or sociology or other non-normative empirical terms), with the Niederträchtigkeit embodied by the Kammerdiener in Hegel’s allegory.

“Because objective conceptual norms are (reciprocallly) sense-dependent on the normative statuses of subjects, the niederträchtig reductive naturalist is wrong to think that he can deny the intelligibility (his reason for denying the existence) of normative statuses and still be entitled to treat the objective world as a determinate object of potential knowledge. ‘No cognition without recognition’ is the slogan here. Because normative attitudes and normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent, the attempt to entitle oneself to talk about determinately contentful normative attitudes while denying the intelligibility and (so) existence of normative statuses is bound to fail” (pp. 580-581).

Or “no objectivity without normativity”, one might say. Cognitive norms that ground knowledge are ultimately a kind of ethical norms.

“Understanding the stances and the choice between them as a matter of adopting a practical commitment, as producing the unity it discerns, hence ultimately as a recognitive matter of community- and self-constitution, corresponds to the response Hegel makes to Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of the community of trust, on Faith’s behalf…. Understanding the edelmütig attitude as a practical-recognitive commitment that has always already implicitly been undertaken as a pragmatic condition of semantically contentful cognition and agency of determinate subjective attitudes), then, corresponds to breaking through the confines of alienated modernity into the form of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’ ” (p. 581).

Kant asks about the conditions for the possibility of knowledge and thought. Hegel asks about the conditions of the possibility of meaningfulness and agency, and finds that they require a particular kind of ethical stance. His “absolute knowing” is an ethical stance grounded in reciprocity, not at all the arrogant claim of an epistemological super power.

“At the first stage, in which necessity is construed as objective necessity, the norms are found. For normative statuses (duty, propriety, what one is committed to do, what one is responsible for doing) reflect and are determined by objective (attitude- and practice-independent) norms. In the middle, modern stage, in which necessity is construed as subjective necessity, normativity and reason must be made by our attitudes and practices, rather than being found. At the projected postmodern stage, finding and making show up as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one process, whose two phases — experience and its recollection, lived forward and comprehended backward, the inhalation and exhalation that sustain the life of Spirit — are each both makings and findings. In the first phases of an episode of experience, error is found and a new phenomenon is made. In the recollective phase a rational selection and reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory of phenomena in experience is made, and an implicit noumenon is found. Explicitating senses are made, and the implicit referents they express are found. The unity, the identity of content, that consciousness and action involve must be made, and the complementary disparity is found. Absolute knowing is comprehending, in vernünftig [expansively rational] form, the way in which these aspects mutually presuppose, support, complement, and complete one another” (pp. 581-582).

This reciprocity of finding and making that conditions thought and knowledge has the same shape as the reciprocity in ethical mutual recognition, and is grounded in it. “Absolute” knowing in Hegel is the actually modest recognition of reciprocity in the constitution of things, of meaning, and of value.

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

From Tragedy to Dialogue

The historical development of philosophy follows a different trajectory from that of human ethical culture as a whole. Philosophical development tends to have what Nietzsche called an untimely character. In their ethics and meta-ethics, Plato and Aristotle for example are far ahead of the nostalgia for heroic values that was still typical of classical Greek culture as a whole. In the culture as a whole, the highest expression of traditional values was tragedy, expressed both intimately in the poetic word and publicly as a performative spectacle. At the same time, traditional values were already challenged by the corrosive and alienating effects of proto-modernity in the ethical individualism and subjectivism of the Sophists. This impasse between tradition and individualism is still typical of modern culture as a whole today, even though Plato and Aristotle already showed the way out of it, through rational discourse in a context of mutual regard.

Brandom in A Spirit of Trust (2019) provocatively suggests that to limit our ethical responsibility to what we do intentionally is to perpetuate the alienation brought about by individualism and subjectivism. The solution to this dilemma, he says, is not to return to the traditional views that treated right and wrong simply as objective social facts or as commands given to us by society or by the gods, but rather to view what Aristotle would call unwilling actions and the unintentional consequences of the actions of each as the joint responsibility of everyone in the universal community of rational beings.

The broadly traditional view, according to Brandom, is that we are individually responsible for the totality of our objectively ascribable deeds, regardless of circumstances and regardless of what we intended. Oedipus in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles must accept guilt and punishment for unwittingly having killed one who turned out to be his father, and for having married one who turned out to be his mother, after his parents had left him in the wilderness at birth because of a prophecy that he would bring them ruin. Oedipus is exiled from the city — a punishment regarded as worse than death — and deliberately blinds himself out of remorse, showing that he too accepts the verdict. From this point of view, even great humans are but pawns of fate, but we are nonetheless objectively responsible for the objective status of our objective deeds, whatever it may be.

The modern view is that responsibility is “subjective” rather than objective. We are individually responsible only for what we deliberately choose and intend, and no one at all is responsible for what happens by accident or unintentionally. But a great deal of what happens overall is accidental or unintentional.

Brandom reads Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology as providing the first real alternative to both the traditional view and this modern view. Hegel’s view is what Brandom calls “postmodern”, not in the pop culture sense of so-called postmodernism, but in the sense of providing a serious alternative to both traditional and modern views, which is what motivates the “Postmodern” in the masthead under which I write here.

For Brandom, Hegel’s achievement as expressed in the theory of mutual recognition is unprecedented. I think that mutual recognition is already implicit in the form of Platonic dialogue — rational discourse in a context of mutual regard — and begins to be made explicit when Aristotle treats forms of friendship and love that emphasize mutuality and recognition of the other as one of the two pinnacles of ethical development, along with wisdom.

Willingness, Deliberation, Choice

In Nicomachean Ethics book III, Aristotle with marvelous clarity, simplicity, and well-rounded good sense discusses what things we are and are not morally responsible for, without ever referring to or needing anything like the “free arbitration” (liberum arbitrium) that came to be widely assumed in the Latin tradition. I will continue to use Joe Sachs’s admirable translation.

“Now since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, and praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity, it is no doubt a necessary thing for those who inquire about virtue to distinguish what is a willing act and what is an unwilling act, and it is a useful thing for lawmakers as well, with a view to honors and punishments. Now it seems that unwilling acts are the ones that happen by force or through ignorance, a forced act being one of which the source is external, and an act is of this sort in which the person acting, or acted upon, contributes nothing, for instance if a wind carries one off somewhere, or people do who are in control. But with respect to those things that are done through fear of greater evils, or for the sake of something beautiful — for instance if a tyrant who was in control of one’s parents and children were to order one to do a shameful thing, and in the case of one’s doing it they would be saved but as a result of one’s not doing it they would be killed — there is some dispute whether they are willing or unwilling” (p. 36).

Aristotle’s positive regard for feeling and his early mention of it in this context are noteworthy, as is his explicit early mention of forgiveness. Equally important is the fact that from the very beginning, he focuses on the difficult cases in which we experience conflict or ambiguity between different values that we recognize. Characteristically, he does not aim to authoritatively lay down rules for every situation, but rather to encourage us to be thoughtful and understanding in our appraisals both of situations and of others’ responses to them.

“Something of this sort happens also in connection with things thrown overboard in a storm, for no one simply throws them away willingly, but all those who have any sense do so for their own safety and that of the rest of the people aboard. Such actions then are mixed, but they are more like willing acts, since at the time when they are done they are preferred, and the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with the occasion. So one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts that are instrumental in such actions is oneself, and anything of which the source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not. So things of this sort are willing acts, though in an unqualified sense they would perhaps be unwilling acts, since no one would choose any such thing for itself” (pp. 36-37).

Even more than Plato, Aristotle addresses “mixed” cases and highlights their importance. Again characteristically, he qualifies what he says about the unqualified sense with a modest “perhaps”.

“Sometimes people are even praised for actions of this sort, when they endure something shameful or painful in return for things that are great and beautiful, and conversely they might be blamed, since enduring things that are exceedingly shameful for no beautiful object, or for one only moderately beautiful, belongs to a person of low moral stature. For some things, while no praise is forthcoming, there is forgiveness, when one does what one ought not to do on account of motives of this sort, when they strain human nature too far, and no one could endure them. Yet some things perhaps it is not possible to be forced to do, but one ought instead to die suffering the most terrible things, for the things that force the Alcmaeon of Euripides to kill his mother seem ridiculous. But it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what sort of thing should be chosen in return for what, and what should be endured for what, and still more difficult for those who have discerned it to abide by what they have chosen, since for the most part the things one anticipates are painful and the things they force one to do are shameful, which is why praise and blame come about according as people are or are not forced” (p. 37).

Again he mentions forgiveness. Again an otherwise more categorical-sounding statement is qualified by a “perhaps”. Again the focus is on difficult cases. A more general and abstract evaluation is called “difficult”. He notes that it is “still more difficult” to abide by what we have chosen.

Sachs’s glossary says for choice (proairesis): “Desire informed by deliberation, or thinking infused with desire, and hence an act of the whole human being, in which neither the rational nor the irrational part is superior. If desire predominates, one merely takes one thing in preference to others, as an animal or small child might, but deliberation allows one to take a course in the light of alternatives not immediately present and of long-term consequences not obvious at the moment…. [T]he only ‘rule’ that can make choice be right is the judgment of a person of good character, whose desires are neither excessive nor corrupted” (pp. 202-203).

This is very clearly not an arbitrary “choice”. It is the Latin tradition’s interpolation of a notion of arbitrary choice into the Aristotelian text that Boulnois rightly objects to.

Back to Aristotle, “So what sort of thing ought one to say is forced? In an unqualified sense, is it not what is done whenever the cause is in external things and the one acting contributes nothing? But with those things that are in themselves unwilling acts, but are chosen in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends, and their source is in the one acting, while they are unwilling acts in themselves, in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends they are willing acts. But they are more like willing acts, since actions are in the particulars, and with respect to these they are willing acts. But it is not easy to give an account of what sort of things one ought to choose in return for what sort of ends, since there are many differences among the particular circumstances” (p. 37).

Up to now, Aristotle has focused on examples that are somewhat extreme. Here he returns to the broader scope of all action.

“Actions are in the particulars”, which is why, once again, “it is not easy to give an account” of the more general case. In general, we cannot adequately say what the sense of an action is — or indeed what action it is — until we take its context appropriately into account.

In the very same way, there is no way we can adequately say, for example, what Kant’s categorical imperative would have us do in an unspecified particular situation x, based on the categorical imperative alone. Applying it only begins to have meaning as the situation begins to be specified.

Boulnois would have us avoid translating proairesis as “choice”, on the ground of the very real concern that the Latin tradition strongly identifies talk about choice with so-called free arbitration. But in the Aristotelian text we see a repeating pattern already, in which Aristotle focuses on difficult situations that require us to make tradeoffs between values that we genuinely accept, and which seem to require us to be unfaithful to one of them. These could hardly be construed as arbitrary choices. It is the sense given to the words rather than the bare words themselves that matters most.

Though Boulnois’s preferred translation of proairesis as “resolution” definitely has points in its favor, as at least possibly capturing the sense of its dependence on deliberation (which “choice” tends to obscure rather than highlight), the case is less compelling here, where the syntax doesn’t line up and it would be necessary to speak instead of a resolution of the tradeoff. We could still say we “resolved upon” one of the alternatives, but that still doesn’t capture the specific sense of making a judgment based on a comparative evaluation of definite alternatives.

As long as we are speaking of a comparison of definite alternatives rather than a decision that is allegedly made ex nihilo, the comparison basically defines the context, and we are clearly speaking of a normative judgment rather than an arbitrary choice.

It is arbitrary choice that has no applicability to the discernment of what would be a right action. Normative judgment (or for that matter, any kind of comparison between definite things), insofar as it has validity, is precisely not arbitrary, but rather — to a degree we can also assess — “right” for the situation.

Aristotle continues, “But if someone claims that things that are pleasant or beautiful are sources of compulsion (for they exert force even while being external), everything would be forced according to that person, since everyone does everything for the sake of these ends. Also, those who act by force and are unwilling act with pain, while those who act on account of what is pleasant and beautiful do so with pleasure. And it is ridiculous to blame external things but not oneself, for being easily caught by such things, and to take credit oneself for beautiful deeds but blame the pleasant things for one’s shameful deeds. So it appears that what is forced is that of which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (pp. 37-38).

For now I will skip to the summary of the immediately following part, which concerns unwillingness that is due to ignorance.

“So since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances in which the action takes place, the person who was ignorant of them seems to have acted unwillingly, and especially in the case of the most controlling circumstances; and the most controlling ones seem to be the things in which the action consists and for the sake of which it was done. And if an action is to be called unwilling as a result of this sort of ignorance, it is also necessary that it be painful to the one who does it and held in regret” (p. 39).

Then he summarizes the whole discussion of willingness and unwillingness. We are responsible for our “willing” acts, and are not responsible for unwilling acts.

“Since an unwilling act is one done by force or on account of ignorance, a willing act would seem to be one of which the source is in oneself, when one knows the particular circumstances in which the action takes place. For things done on account of spiritedness or desire are probably not rightly called unwilling acts. In the first place, none of the other animals would any longer do anything willingly, nor would children. And then, of the things that result from desire and spiritedness, do we do none of them willingly, or do we do the beautiful ones willingly and the shameful ones unwillingly? Or is this ridiculous when one thing is responsible for them? And perhaps it is absurd to call things toward which one ought to extend oneself unwilling, and one ought to get angry at some things and to desire some things, such as health and knowledge. And while unwilling acts seem to be painful, those that result from desire seem to be pleasant. Also, what difference does it make to whether things that are wrong are unwilling acts, that they result from reasoning or from spiritedness? Both kinds of error are to be avoided, and irrational feelings seem to be no less human than reasoning is, so that actions that come from spiritedness and desire belong to the human being too. So it is absurd to set those down as unwilling acts” (pp. 39-40, emphasis added).

Feeling and reason are equally human. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not regard all feeling as an impediment, or as necessarily a source of unfreedom.

Next he turns to an explicit discussion of “choice”.

[Chapter 2.] “Now that willing and unwilling acts have been distinguished, it follows next to go through what concerns choice, for this seems to be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s actions do. A choice is obviously something willing, but they are not the same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and the other animals share in willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice. Those who say that choice is desire, or spiritedness, or wishing, or some sort of opinion do not speak rightly. For choice is not shared by irrational beings, while desire and spiritedness are. And a person lacking self-control acts while desiring something but not choosing it, while a person with self-control conversely acts while choosing something but not desiring it. And while desire sets itself against choice, desire does not set itself against desire. And desire is for what is pleasant and painful, while choice is of something neither painful nor pleasant.”

“Still less is it spiritedness, for things done out of spiritedness seem to be the ones least in accord with choice. But surely it is not wishing either, even though that appears a close approximation to it, since there can be no choice of impossible things, and if anyone were to claim to choose something impossible, that person would seem to be foolish; but there is wishing even for impossible things, such as deathlessness. And there is also wishing for things that can in no way be done by oneself, such as for a certain actor to win an award, or for an athlete to win a contest, but no one chooses such things, but only those things one believes could come about by one’s own act. Also, wishing is rather for an end, while choice is of things that are related to the end; for example, we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up to us” (pp. 40-41).

Here he is saying not that choice is the efficient cause of action, as the Latin tradition would have it, but rather that it evaluates and compares possible efficient causes, with respect to how well they would serve as means to realize the ends we wish for.

“So it could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good, while choice is divided into the latter two kinds. Now no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions. And we choose to take or avoid something from among those alternatives, but we have an opinion about what it is or whom it benefits or in what way, while taking or avoiding is not at all what we have as an opinion. And choice is praised for being a choice of what it ought to be, more than for being rightly made, while opinion is praised for being as something truly is. And we choose what we most of all know to be good, but have opinions about things we do not know very well, and it seems not to be the same people who choose best who also have the best opinions, but rather some people seem to have better opinions but to choose what they ought not, on account of vice. And if an opinion comes before a choice or comes along with it, that makes no difference, for we are not considering this, but whether it is the same as any sort of opinion” (pp. 40-41).

Even though Aristotle does not follow Plato’s categorical devaluation of opinion, we can still hear echoes of Plato’s radical contrast between opinion and knowledge.

“What then is choice, or what sort of thing is it, since it is none of the things mentioned? It is obviously something willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen. But might it just be the one that has been deliberated about first? For choice is involved with reason and thinking things through. And even its name [pro-airesis] seems to give a hint that it is something taken before [pro] other things”

In saying here that choice is involved with reason and thinking things through, and in suggesting that it “might just be” the outcome of deliberation, Aristotle anticipates what will be his eventual conclusion. Quite the opposite of being exercised in a vacuum, Aristotelian choice is the rational outcome of deliberation.

[Chapter 3.] “But do people deliberate about all things, and is everything a thing to be deliberated about, or about some things is deliberation not possible? Perhaps one ought to mean by a thing to be deliberated about, not what some fool or insane person might deliberate about, but those things that people with sense would deliberate about. Now no one deliberates about everlasting things, such as the cosmos, or about the diagonal and side of a square, that they are incommensurable; but neither does one deliberate about things that are in motion but always happen according to the same pattern, whether by necessity or else by nature or by means of some other cause, such as solstices and the risings of stars; nor about things that are sometimes one way and sometimes another such as drought and rain; nor about things that are by chance, such as finding a treasure; but not about all human things either, as no Spartan deliberates about how the Scythians should best be governed, for none of these things could happen through us. We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action, and these are the ones that are left. For the causes responsible for things seem to be in nature, necessity, and chance, and also intelligence and everything that is due to a human being. And among human beings, each sort deliberates about the things to be done by its own acts.”

“And there is no deliberation about the precise and self-contained kinds of knowledge, such as about letters (for we are not in doubt about how something ought to be spelled), but as many things as come about by our act, but not always in the same way, about these we do deliberate, for example about the things done by medical skill or skill in business, and more so about piloting a ship than about gymnastic training, to the extent that the former is less precisely formulated, and similarly also about the rest of the skills but more about those that are arts than those that are kinds of knowledge, since we are more in doubt in connection with the former. Deliberating is present in things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but are unclear as to how they will turn out, and in which this is undetermined. And we take others as fellow deliberators for large issues, not trusting that we ourselves are adequate to decide them. We deliberate not about ends but about the things that are related to the ends, for a doctor does not deliberate about whether he will cure someone, nor a rhetorician about whether he will persuade, nor someone holding political office about whether he will produce good order, nor does anyone else deliberate about ends, but having set down the end, they consider in what way and by what means it would be the case.”

“When it appears that the end would come about by more than one means, people examine through which of them it will come about most easily and beautifully, but if the end will be accomplished by only one means, they examine how it will come to be through this means, and this in turn through some other, until they come to the first thing that will be responsible for the end, which is the last thing in the process of discovery” (pp. 40-42, emphasis added).

“What is deliberated about and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation” (p. 43).

Aristotelian choice is the rational and feeling evaluative outcome of a well-rounded and multi-dimensional deliberation, not a power of arbitration or an arbitrary power that would allegedly be superior to reason and human feeling.

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).