Substance Also Subject

Hegel’s many references to Aristotle should help to clarify the Hegelian claim that “Substance is also Subject”. In particular, Aristotle’s own thesis of the identity of thought with the thing thought is relevant, as is his dialectical development of the different senses of ousia (“substance”) in the Metaphysics.

A thought for Aristotle is identical with its content. It just is a discursively articulable meaning, not a psychological event. What we care about in thought is shareable reasoning. Moreover, this shareable reasoning has a fundamentally ethical character.

Thought in this sense is essentially self-standing, and unlike the mental-act sense not dependent in the determination of its meaning on a “thinker” (who optionally instantiates it, and if so is responsible for the occurrence of a related event). This gives a nice double meaning to the autonomy of reason. (What such thoughts do depend on is other such thoughts with which they are inferentially connected.)

The primary locus of Aristotelian intellect is directly in shareable thoughts of this sort and their interconnection, rather than in a sentience that “has” them. Hegel adopts all of this.

Concepts in a unity of apperception are forms to be approached discursively, not mental representations or intentional acts. They are more like custom rules for material inference. The redoubling implied in apperception, like that of the Aristotelian “said of” relation, hints at the recursive structure of inferential articulation. The Hegelian Absolute, or “the” Concept, just nominalizes such an inferential coherence of concepts.

Thus, “Substance is also Subject” has nothing to do with attributing some kind of sentience to objects, or to the world. Rather, it is the claim that Substance properly understood (in the Aristotelian conceptual sense of “what it was to have been” a thing, rather than in the naive sense of a real-world object, or of a substrate of a real-world object, that Aristotle starts with but then discards) is already the right sort of thing to be able to play the functional role of a transcendental subject. A “Subject” for Hegel just is a concept or commitment, or a constellation of concepts and commitments. (See also Subject and Substance, Again; Substance and Subject.)

Consistent with this general approach, I consider the direct locus of the subject-function to be in things like Brandomian commitments and Kantian syntheses. The subject-function is also indirectly attributable to “self-conscious individuals” by metonymy or inheritance, and to empirical persons by a further metonymy or inheritance. (See also Subject; Substance; Aristotelian Dialectic; Brandom and Kant; Rational/Talking Animal; Second Nature.)

Sapience, Sentience

20 years ago, I worried a lot about Brandom’s sharp distinction of sapience or reason from mere sentience or bare organic awareness. It was not until the Woodbridge lectures reprinted in Reason and Philosophy (2009) that I began to develop a more favorable view of Kant that helped make this more comfortable. Thanks to Brandom and others I read later, I now have a very different way of understanding Kant’s dualistic-sounding moments. (See What Is “I”; Empirical-Transcendental Doublet.)

Sapience is an emergent second nature resulting from an accumulation of practical doings and dialogue that is not just arithmetical but somewhat tending toward coherence and improvement. We are thus reunited with Aristotle. (See also Rational/Talking Animal.) On such a basis, a very sharp distinction is fine.

(I am intrigued by the fact that the very first sentence of chapter 1 of Brandom’s Making It Explicit gives Aristotle a nod: “‘We’ is said in many ways.” Also, he clearly refers to an ancient point of view emphasizing discursive rationality as preceding Enlightenment representationalism. Discursive-rational inquiring and explaining is older than modern abstractly referential pointing. Discursive rationality, I want to say, is a decisive move away from unthinking traditionalism that long preceded modernity as usually understood. As soon as we begin to inquire about reasons, the door is open.)

Like most people probably do, I used to implicitly assume an empirical meaning for “I”. Wishing not to dwell on Subject or self, I therefore used to carefully avoid first-person references in serious writing. The Kantian notion of an explicitly empty I as mobile index of a unity of apperception — composed with Brandom’s notion of unity of apperception as an ethical task — has freed me from such scruples. The I that speaks can rise above circumstance.

Making It Explicit

I’m starting another pass through Brandom’s Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (1994). This post addresses the preface.

Apart from a brief dalliance with Wittgenstein and a bit of reading in logic, I was unaccustomed to analytic discourse when my late father commended this book to me two decades ago. My dad normally took a verging-on skeptical Socratic stance and was extremely reserved about endorsing anything, but he said this might just be the most overall satisfying account of things he had ever seen.

It’s been a while, but it feels like home ground now.

In contrast with the overtly Hegelian meta-ethical concerns of A Spirit of Trust, the focus here is more on advancing contemporary philosophy of language, and the other philosophers he discusses are mainly in the analytic tradition.

Already on page xii, Brandom says that authority is only intelligible against a background of correlative responsibility. This should have already prevented people from attributing to him any sort of one-sided appeal to existing norms.

He is extremely polite about representationalism, merely presenting inferentialism as an alternative. “The aim is not to replace that familiar idiom, but to enrich it.” The kind of inference at issue is in the first instance not formal but material. I think representation has an indispensable role as a kind of shorthand in ordinary communication, but want to emphasize (as Brandom does in the later Spirit of Trust) that it is always derivative, and therefore cannot play any sort of foundational role.

The book begins with normative pragmatics. Instead of starting from intentional states of individuals, this will ultimately address normative statuses as constituted through networks of open-ended mutual recognition. I always liked this interactive and reason-centered rather than subject-centered approach.

In place of the direct interpretation of intentional states, he puts the unattractively named but important notion of deontic scorekeeping, which provides a detailed, low-level model of the workings of recognition. The scorekeeping metaphor impeded my uptake, and I only learned the other day that linguistics has a well-established concept of deontic modality (literally mentioned in Making It Explicit, it turns out) that seems to be as committed to recognizing degrees of “should”, etc., as deontological ethics would seem to be to the unconditional application of ground-level rules. Deontic scorekeeping is keeping track of semantic, epistemic, and practical commitments, takings of responsibility, and entitlements, as well as attributions thereof.

In place of correctness of representation and consideration of truth conditions, he puts a consideration of inferential proprieties. Expression will explain the implicit structure of linguistic practices. Logical vocabulary is said to have an expressive role in this sense. Logic is not mainly about proving truth, but about explaining what we mean with our nonlogical vocabulary. It is “the organ of semantic self-consciousness”. An alternative approach via truth rather than inference would still treat truth as a normative matter rather than a factual one.

He will add a reasonable explanation of identity in terms of substitution in natural language, and an utterly fascinating discussion of anaphora, which is the technical linguistic term for chains of pronomial reference, also related to the constitution of identity. The whole aims at “a unified vision of language and mind”. (See also Sapience, Sentience; Material Inference; Determinate Negation; Material Consequence; Normative Pragmatics; Inferential Semantics; Objects, Anaphora; Scorekeeping.)

Modality

Modality is a way of formally, logically talking about what I would call the higher-order aspects of the ways of being of things. It is most commonly associated with necessity and possibility, but I think these are actually atypical examples that may give a misleading impression of what modality in general is, because necessity and possibility both have a kind of extreme all-or-nothing character that does not hold for modality in general.

I don’t believe quantification across all possible worlds could be interpretable by any process of interpretation, so I don’t consider it even intelligible in an acceptably strong sense, and I also don’t believe in unconditional necessity. Anything real or any truth about it, as well as anything I would accept as a legitimate formal construction, has conditions, even if they are only implicit. So, standard modal logic concerned with operators for these unconditional things — technical interest aside — does not seem very useful to me, because the resulting propositions would be too strong.

I am a bit surprised that Brandom is so charitable toward formal possible-worlds semantics, given his reservations about formalism in general. Technically innovative as it was, this approach seems like an extravagant extreme of infinitary classical representationalism.

Modality itself should be safe from these concerns. At a handwaving level, I imagine an indefinite number of modalities related to particular specifiable conditions, and expressing structural “degrees” or “flavors” of more specific necessity or possibility based on those conditions.

Wilfrid Sellars suggested that modalities should be understood as specific forms of normative bindingness. This seems very helpful as an alternative to extensionalist possible-worlds formalisms. (See also Why Modality?; Modality and Variation; New Approaches to Modality; Deontic Modality; Redding on Morals and Modality.)

Deontic Modality

I just realized that linguists have been using a concept of deontic modality to express various degrees of “ought”, “may”, “can”, and the like. This is interesting in a couple of ways.

Brandom often talks about a pair consisting of deontic normative and alethic modal things, while sometimes suggesting that truth is actually subordinate to normativity. “Alethic modality” is the phrase used by the linguists to express modalities of truth. I’m not sure why Brandom chose not to similarly adopt the linguists’ exact phrase for the deontic one (perhaps to save “modal” for its standard, hyperstrong logical sense), but it is certainly interesting to note that the linguists see the deontic one as also modal.

It is also very interesting to see that the linguists apparently see deontic modality as expressed in terms of degrees, which seems eminently reasonable. I tend to see deontological ethics as promoting untenably unconditional ground-level requirements, so this is a welcome relief. (See also Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Evaluation of Actions; Modality.)

Propositions, Terms

Brandom puts significant emphasis on Kant and Frege’s focus on whole judgments — contrasted with simple first-order terms, corresponding to natural-language words or subsentential phrases — as the appropriate units of logical analysis. The important part of this is that a judgment is the minimal unit that can be given inferential meaning.

All this looks quite different from a higher-order perspective. Mid-20th century logical orthodoxy was severely biased toward first-order logic, due to foundationalist worries about completeness. In a first-order context, logical terms are expected to correspond to subsentential elements that cannot be given inferential meaning by themselves. But in a higher-order context, this is not the case. One of the most important ideas in contemporary computer science is the correspondence between propositions and types. Generalized terms are interpretable as types, and thus also as propositions. This means that (higher-order) terms can represent instances of arbitrarily complex propositions. Higher-order terms can be thus be given inferential meaning, just like sentential variables. This is all in a formal context rather than a natural-language one, but so was Frege’s work; and for what it’s worth, some linguists have also been using typed lambda calculus in the analysis of natural language semantics.

Suitably typed terms compose, just like functions or category-theoretic morphisms and functors. I understand the syllogistic principle on which Aristotle based a kind of simultaneously formal and material term inference (see Aristotelian Propositions) to be just a form of composition of things that can be thought of as functions or typed terms. Proof theory, category theory, and many other technical developments explicitly work with composition as a basic form of abstract inference. Aristotle developed the original compositional logic, and it was not Aristotle but mid-20th century logical orthodoxy that insisted on the centrality of the first-order case. Higher-order, compositionally oriented logics can interpret classic syllogistic inference, first-order logic, and much else, while supporting more inferentially oriented semantics on the formal side, with types potentially taking pieces of developed material-inferential content into the formal context. We can also use natural-language words to refer to higher-order terms and their inferential significance, just as we can capture a whole complex argument in an appropriately framed definition. Accordingly, there should be no stigma associated with reasoning about terms, or even just about words.

In computer-assisted theorem-proving, there is an important distinction between results that can be proved directly by something like algebraic substitution for individual variables, and those that require a more global rewriting of the context in terms of some previously proven equivalence(s). At a high enough level of simultaneous abstraction and detail, such rewriting could perhaps constructively model the revision of commitments and concepts from one well-defined context to another.

The potential issue would be that global rewriting still works in a higher-order context that is expected to itself be statically consistent, whereas revision of commitments and concepts taken simply implies a change of higher-level context. I think this just means a careful distinction of levels would be needed. After all, any new, revised genealogical recollection of our best thoughts will be in principle representable as a new static higher-order structure, and that structure will include something that can be read as an explanation of the transition. It may itself be subject to future revision, but in the static context that does not matter.

The limitation of such an approach is that it requires all the details of the transition to be set up statically, which can be a lot of work, and it would also be far more brittle than Brandom’s informal material inference. (See also Categorical “Evil”; Definition.)

I am fascinated by the fact that typed terms can begin to capture material as well as purely formal significance. How complete or adequate this is would depend on the implementation.

Meta-Ethics as First Philosophy

I want to say that philosophy can be divided into just ethics and meta-ethics, which would comprise everything else (semantics/hermeneutics, epistemology, logic, philosophical psychology, historiography, politics, aesthetics, what was traditionally called ontology, philosophy of science, and so on). Of course, this is nonstandard. The point is that all of these things have at least indirect meta-ethical relevance in one way or another, and meta-ethics can be regarded as what Aristotle would call first philosophy.

I also think that logic in particular has a directly normative character. Things like tautologies, logical rules, and modalities express strongly deontically binding higher-order norms relative to particular logics, not some strange kind of facts. This was apparently Frege’s view as well.

Epistemic Conscientiousness

I see something like epistemic conscientiousness as almost the highest value, only potentially surpassable by what I will broadly call concern for others. This principally involves a commitment to understanding, which means always seeking deeper and better and more nuanced understanding (see Objectivity of Objects). But equally, it involves taking strong personal responsibility for our acceptance of claims. (See also Assumptions; Error.)

If I have accepted a claim — especially if I have acted on the basis of that acceptance, or encouraged others to accept it — and then encounter reason to question that claim, I have a responsibility to resolve the matter in some appropriate and reasonable way. If I accept a claim, I have a responsibility to also accept its consequences. I have a responsibility not to accept materially incompatible claims.

An epistemically conscientious person will also naturally care about the acceptance of claims by others. Particular concern for particular others will naturally tend to accentuate this. We also want to treat those others with respect and kindness, and combining this with questioning claims they have accepted can be delicate. (See also Things Said; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love.)

Brandom on Truth

One of the essays reprinted in Brandom’s Reason in Philosophy (2009) was “Why Truth Is Not Important in Philosophy”. Epistemic conscientiousness and the honesty that I largely equate with it are still important; it is the explanatory and justifying role of truth that he wants to question. For Brandom, well rounded inferential goodness with regard to meaning explains and justifies claims of truth, rather than the other way around. Saying an assertion is true is a lot like just repeating the assertion; it adds no content. (See also Interpretation; Foundations?)

Brandom argues that Frege understood propositional contentfulness in terms of being able to play the functional role of a premise or conclusion in an inference, and suggests going beyond Frege to say that truth just is what is preserved by good material inference. Brandom wants to say that inference is constitutive and truth is constituted. We seek not just knowledge but understanding, and not just truth but reasonableness.

All this seems entirely right to me. Though unlike Brandom in Spirit of Trust I do still see a positive role for truth-as-goal, I take this in a Socratic ethical sense that belongs entirely on the side of epistemic conscientiousness, so the difference is not large. (See also Inferential Semantics; Normative Pragmatics.)

(Working with a notion of inference that was simultaneously formal and material, Aristotle made inferential goodness the main criterion of episteme, so I think he would also be sympathetic to the thrust here. See also Aristotelian Propositions; Aristotelian Demonstration.)

Normative Pragmatics

Brandom sees inferential semantics as tightly interwoven with normative pragmatics, and depending on it. Wittgenstein notwithstanding, pragmatics — concerned with linguistic usage — has historically often been neglected in favor of syntax and semantics, and most discussions of linguistic usage among analytic philosophers have focused on empirical usage rather than good usage (including good argument and good dialogue). Good usage for Brandom especially means good inferential usage, respecting material incompatibilities and material consequences. He holds that these have both an alethic modal role (having to do with truth and counterfactual robustness) on the semantic side and a deontic normative role on the pragmatic side (having to do with “oughts”). There is a natural close tie between meanings and proprieties of use. (See also Normative “Force”.)

Brandom’s interest in linguistic pragmatics also reflects his emphasis on practical doings and his broad identification with the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy. Saying something — even just meaning something — is unequivocally a kind of doing for Brandom.

I want to construe good natural language usage broadly as also involving a commitment to recognize all the ethical dimensions of communication as a social act, including both concern for others and concern for inferential proprieties.

In Spirit of Trust, Brandom actually goes further than I would in denying any real role for representational truth. He proposes that even concepts of truth-as-goal should be entirely replaced by concepts of truth-process. I think Truth as a Socratic ethical goal is an invaluable heuristic, provided we maintain Platonic/Aristotelian epistemic modesty and recognize that such a concept of Truth is materially incompatible with any claim to simple possession of it. The whole point of a goal is something to aim at. Aiming necessarily involves a defeasible element. Even if we think static Truth is unachievable, I’m sure he would agree that we should do the best we can at every moment in the larger process. After all, the natural workings of mere Understanding — if only they are taken far enough — lead beyond themselves to the recognition and resolution of error. (See also Honesty, Kindness; Definition.)