My main concern here is with a sort of meta-ethical discourse, and my critical remarks on topics like modern univocal causality should be taken in that context. Though I have deep appreciation for the cultural accomplishments of antiquity and even the middle ages, I am not any kind of Luddite. I am interested in science; admire higher mathematics; work with high technology; and use univocal causality in an instrumental way on a daily basis.
Efficient Cause
Each of Aristotle’s four “causes” or kinds of reasons why a thing is the way it is picks out a distinct kind of conceptual content. Actually, none of them — including the efficient cause — should be thought of in terms of anything like a mechanical impulse or force or the exertion of a force. An efficient cause is also not primarily a thing that exerts a force. Rather, an Aristotelian “efficient” cause exercises what in modern terms most closely resembles a sort of structural causality, associated with the form and materiality of the means by which a thing is realized as the sort of thing it is. It acts in an instrumental way that is more “logical” than physical.
In an example of the production of a statue, the efficient cause is not the sculptor, or the sculptor’s will, or the blows of the sculptor’s hammer and chisel. It is the art (objectively characterizable technique) by which the statue is produced. Many people have certainly made contrary assertions about this, but there is, e.g., a good discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that supports the above interpretation. (In this simple example, the end is the finished work of the statue. The form and matter are the form and matter of the finished work.)
While the efficient cause is perhaps a little closer to a “cause” in the usual modern sense, it is still far from the same, even though it has a much closer connection to the less common notion of structural causality. Aristotle himself put either form or end first, but influential late scholastics such as Suarez elevated the efficient cause above the other three, perhaps on the ground that God was considered to be pre-eminently an efficient cause (whereas for Aristotle, the “First” cause is primarily an end). I seem to recall some reference to late scholastics treating creation ex nihilo as an example of efficient causality. In any event, Suarez is regarded as treating all four Aristotelian causes on the model of the efficient cause. This helped pave the way for early modern mechanism’s reduction of all causality to a single, univocal form.
Aristotle’s semantically oriented science aims not so much at prediction of what we would call physical events as at a retrospective understanding of why things have turned out the way they have, in a humanly relevant, pragmatic way. Aristotelian “causes” are pluralistic and nonunivocal. They are just reasons why something came out the way it did.
Ends
The nature of ends is addressed in book 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.” (Sachs translation, p.1.) The Kantian primacy of practical reason and the primacy of normativity in Brandom express a similar insight.
“Good”, however, is meant in as many ways as “being” is, so there is no common good that is one and universal, no good-in-itself.
In the course of this discussion, Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes that one should not seek more precision in a given subject than is appropriate to it. One also should not try to derive conclusions that are more exact than what they are derived from. In areas like ethics and politics especially, one should be content to point out the truth roughly and in outline, and to say what is true for the most part.
Aristotle would object to the notion of “value free” science. Even his physics is a pragmatic, broadly semantic inquiry. His notion of cause (aitia) is much broader and more pluralistic than the modern one. An end is a kind of cause in Aristotle’s sense, but not in the modern sense. Aristotelian ends are orthogonal to modern causality. Not until Kant and Hegel did the modern world begin to recover a similar sophistication. (See also Univocity; Free Will and Determinism.)
There is nothing subjective about an Aristotelian end. Aristotelian teleology does not involve any mental intentions of spiritual beings (see God and the Soul). An end is just what Brandom would call the conceptual content of something sought or achieved. It is a pure form. (An aim on the other hand is an end that is taken up subjectively.)
An end may be sought on its own account, or for the sake of something else. The realization of an end may involve the realization of subordinate ends, which may involve the realization of further subordinate ends, and so on. Ends for the sake of which other ends are realized and ends sought on their own account are considered to be of greater value. An end may be a way of being at work, or a work produced. An end sought on its own account is typically a way of being at work. Aristotle suggests that the most comprehensive and therefore most valuable end for humans is politics as an activity, which is concerned with the good of all. In general, a good or end is better the more complete and self-sufficient it is.
In accordance with the emphasis on completeness, the end of an individual is to live a whole life that is good, which can only be judged retrospectively. The work of a human being is “a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with reason, or not without reason… and actions that go along with reason… [done] well and beautifully” (p.11). (See also Reasonableness; Reasons; Commitment; Happiness.)
People are good at making distinctions about the things they are acquainted with. “This is why one who is going to listen adequately to things that are beautiful and just, and generally about things that pertain to political matters, needs to have been beautifully brought up by means of habits.” (p.4.)
I read Aristotle as suggesting that immanent ends of natural beings are ultimately the most influential of the “causes” or reasons why things turn out as they do. Yet they are a kind of soft “cause” that only attracts. All of Aristotle’s causes are soft in one way or another. Each of the four interacts with the others in quasi-reciprocal fashion, and none of them results in the sort of hard determination classically attributed to early modern mechanical impulse. (See also Efficient Cause; Form; Aristotelian Matter.)
Nothing in this is incompatible with also incorporating modern mathematics into the account, but Aristotle’s main concern is with a pragmatic semantics of experience.
It is relatively easy for us to imagine how nonrational, sentient beings that still have desire are moved by internal ends. Nonsentient things do not literally have desire, and we have been taught not to think as if they did. It is only a metaphor to say, e.g., that heavy objects “want” to fall, but there is no inherent category mistake or personification in talking about an apparent material tendency as exhibiting a kind of apparent end, below the level of sentient desire.
In quasi-Brandomian terms, Aristotelian ends are an expressive metaconcept useful in the interpretation of experience, not a hypothesis about something beyond experience. (See also Natural Ends; Kant’s Recovery of Ends.)
The same could be said of Aristotle’s view that the “first” principle of all things is actually related to all things as an ultimate end that attracts them.
Scorekeeping
Chapter 3 of Making It Explicit introduces Brandom’s important notion of “deontic scorekeeping”, which I would prefer to call accounting, to avoid connotations of some sort of competition.
Brandom uses his notion of such scorekeeping as the basis for a pragmatist linguistic account of intentionality in general. It also provides a very detailed low-level model of single acts of recognition within the much larger process of temporally extended, recursively expanded, networked mutual recognition by which normativity is constituted in A Spirit of Trust.
Intentionality will be addressed not in terms of mental acts or representations, but in terms of linguistic practices and discursive commitments. (It seems to me that Aristotle would like this idea very much. My old structuralist sensibilities also take it favorably.) Michael Dummet’s view that assertion is not the expression of an interior act of judgment, but rather that judgment is the interiorization of external assertion, is cited with approval, as is his attention to the inferential role of both conditions and consequences. Belief will be understood in terms of the inferentially articulated commitment involved in making an assertion. Brandom will eventually want to say that even the attribution of rudimentary forms of nonlinguistic intentionality to animals depends on the linguistic capability of an interpreter making the attribution.
Linguistic pragmatics will explain the significance of speech acts in terms of proprieties of tracking discursive commitments and entitlements — “what moves are appropriate given a certain score, and what difference those moves make to that score” (p.142). Discursive practice is all about Wilfrid Sellars’ “game of giving and asking for reasons” (p.159). It will be important to think in terms of material incompatibility rather than formal negation.
The philosophical relevance of natural-language semantics is in showing how conceptual contentfulness reciprocally interacts with proprieties of practice such as judging and inferring. Brandom notes that associating content by stipulation, as is usual in formal model-theoretic semantics, is useless for this. The inferential practices that give significance to assertions are said to be subject to a three-dimensional distinction of commitment versus entitlement; intrapersonal versus interpersonal inheritance of deontic statuses like commitment and entitlement; and authority versus responsibility.
He says the very act of asserting something is intelligible only “as part of a practice in which reasons can be asked for or required” (p.171). This is huge. In some sense, Kant already implied it (and Plato and Aristotle before him), but the world still has not caught up. I believe this would also apply a fortiori to any sort of demand or command, which necessarily presupposes an assertion that the thing demanded or commanded should be done. Similarly, Brandom says actions are not intelligible except in a context that includes the assertional giving of reasons. Similarly again, commitments without entitlement lack authority.
In making assertions, we authorize further assertions, and undertake responsibility to show that we are entitled to the corresponding commitments. To avoid worries about a regress of entitlements, he suggests a default-and-challenge model of entitlement, where a speaker is considered entitled to a commitment by default, but this entitlement is defeasible by a challenge that meets a standard of reasonableness. There is a good deal more technical detail. (See also Unity of Apperception.)
Objects, Anaphora
Chapter 7 of Making It Explicit is dedicated to anaphora, or “the structure of token repeatables”. Anaphora is a linguistic phenomenon involving a reference back to something previously mentioned, using a different term or terms from the original mention, such as a pronoun. (This is different from the rhetorical use of the term.) It thus tracks usage of different singular terms to refer to the same thing.
According to Brandom, anaphora is the key to understanding how claims come to refer to objects. Brandom notes that Frege in the Foundations of Arithmetic was concerned with the justification of singular representational purport. Judgments expressing our recognition of an object as the same again function as licenses for substitution for corresponding singular terms. Inferentially licensed substitutions for singular terms give conceptual content to identity. In this context, Brandom speaks of substitutional triangulation and substitutional holism.
Practical Judgment
Practical judgment or practical wisdom (phronesis) is the main topic of book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics. This involves a broadly rational assessment of particulars that is subject to error. It is closely associated with deliberation and choice. Its outcome is neither knowledge nor opinion, but action or a specific kind or manner of action. Practical judgment concerns what should be done, with the expectation that it will be done.
Good practical judgment is astute in a calculating way as well as compassionate, forgiving, and considerate of others (Sachs translation, p.114). It achieves an Aristotelian mean that avoids one-sidedness. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love.)
Choice, Deliberation
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics book 3 chapter 2 concerns choice. Choice is something willing, but not everything done willingly is done by choice. Things spontaneously done by children and animals and things done on the spur of the moment are done willingly and so are subject to praise or blame, but they are not done by choice.
Choice is not desire or spiritedness or wishing or opinion. It is involved with reason and thinking things through. It is the outcome of deliberation, the subject of chapter 3. It is the deliberate desire of things that are up to us (Sachs translation, p.43). It comes from desire combined with a rational understanding that is for the sake of something (p.103); it is “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being” (p.104). (The phrase “fused with” is actually an interpolation by the translator — the Greek actually just has “intellect and desire”, without specifying how they are related.)
We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action. Deliberation is neither knowledge nor opinion. Inquiry about exact sciences or general truths or ends is not deliberation, but deliberation is a kind of inquiry. Deliberation applies to means for achieving ends, when outcomes can be predicted with some confidence, but are still uncertain. On big issues, we consult others. When there is more than one means to an end, deliberation seeks the one that is easier and more beautiful.
Deliberation may also examine how a thing will come about through a particular means, what other means are required for that means, and so on. Aristotle says that the analysis of dependencies of means and ends in particular works just like a mathematician’s analysis of a geometrical diagram.
Deliberating well overall belongs to people with good practical judgment (p.112). “What is deliberated 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 therefore anything but arbitrary. It is a normative and rational determination, emerging from an open, fallible, and pluralistic process. (See also Brandomian Choice.)
Willing, Unwilling
Book 3 chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics deals with willing and unwilling actions. “Praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity…” (Sachs translation, p. 36.)
Unwilling acts are those that are forced by someone else, or come about through ignorance. Those that come about through ignorance include cases when people are talking and something slips out unintentionally, as well as all sorts of mistakes. Things done on account of spiritedness or desire, as well as those done on account of reasoned deliberation, are considered willing.
There are mixed cases in which the act would normally be done only if it were forced, but in particular circumstances it is done willingly to avoid a greater evil or to realize a greater good. Tradeoffs of this sort generally deserve praise or blame based on the goodness or badness of the tradeoff, but in extreme cases, mixed actions may just deserve forgiveness or pity.
Aristotle says there are perhaps some things one should never do regardless of the tradeoff, but that these cases are difficult to distinguish. He notes that it is in general not easy to say whether or not the ends justify the means. (See also What We Really Want.)
Nicomachean
I am fond of repeating Hegel’s dictum that Plato and Aristotle are the great educators of the human race. Of all their works, if I had to pick one, it is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that stands out most for its combination of excellence and broad relevance to the human condition. This is the same one I would recommend to someone starting out reading Aristotle. It is exceptionally well balanced in considering many angles of the subject matter, and very accessible to the nonspecialist. All rational animals should read it.
That said, translations of Aristotle can also make a huge difference. I especially like the one by Joe Sachs, which goes straightforwardly from Greek to English without introducing traditional Latin-based terminology that often obscures Aristotle’s meaning for English readers. Sachs, who has done outstanding translations of many works by Aristotle and Plato, also preserves more of the original syntax, which yields additional insights into the way the philosophers thought. Like Sachs’ other translations, this one comes out very lively and engaging. It is supplemented with excellent notes, introduction, and glossary. (If you have enough Greek to use a lexicon, it is also good to consult the Loeb edition or the old W.D. Ross Oxford edition, both of which include the Greek text.)
Aristotle himself would caution that only people who are fortunate enough to have had upbringing and life experiences leading to the formation of a disposition to be emotionally reasonable will really benefit from this. (See also Reasonableness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Ends; Willing, Unwilling; Choice, Deliberation; Practical Judgment; Mean; Happiness. )
Constructive
Brandom’s inferentialist alternative to representationalism stresses material, meaning-oriented over formal, syntactic inference. Prior to the development of mathematical logic, philosophers typically used a mixture of reasoning about meanings with natural language analogues of simple formal reasoning. People in ordinary life still do this.
Where Brandom’s approach is distinctive is in its unprecedentedly thorough commitment to the reciprocal determination of meaning and inference. We don’t just do inference based on meanings grasped ready-to-hand as well as syntactic cues to argument structure, but simultaneously question and explicitate those very meanings, by bracketing what is ready-to-hand, and instead working out recursive material-inferential expansions of what would really be meant by application of the inferential proprieties in question.
For Brandom, the question of which logic to use in this explicitation does not really arise, because the astounding multiplication of logics — each with different expressive resources — is all in the formal domain. It is nonetheless important to note that formal logics vary profoundly in the degrees of support they offer for broad representationalist or inferentialist commitments.
Michael Dummet in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics argued strongly for the importance of constructive varieties of formal logic for philosophy. Constructive logics are inherently inference-centered, because construction basically just is a form of inference. (Dummet is concerned to reject varieties of realism that I would call naive, but seems to believe the taxonomy of realisms is exhausted at this point. This leads him to advocate a form of anti-realism. His book is part of a rather polarized debate in recent decades about realism and anti-realism. I see significant overlap between non-naive realisms and nonsubjective idealisms, so I would want to weaken his strong anti-realist conclusions, and I think Brandom helps us to do that.)
Without endorsing Dummet’s anti-realism in its strong form, I appreciate his argument for the philosophical preferability of constructive over classical logic. It seems to me that one cannot use modern “classical” formal logic without substantial representationalist assumptions, and a lot of assumed truth as well. If and when we do move into a formal domain, this becomes important.
As used in today’s computer science, constructive logic looks in some ways extremely different in its philosophical implications from Brouwer’s original presentation. Brouwer clouded the matter by mixing good mathematics with philosophical positions on intuition and subjectivity that were both questionable and not nearly as intrinsic to the mathematics as he seemed to believe. The formal parts of his argument now have a much wider audience and much greater interest than his philosophizing.
Constructive logic puts proof or evidence before truth, and eschews appeals to self-evidence. Expressive genealogy puts the material-inferential explicitation of meaning before truth, and eschews appeals to self-evidence. Both strongly emphasize justification, but one is concerned with proof, the other with well-founded interpretation. Each has its place, and they fit well together.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 