Having just invented this term “normative monism” as an overly short tag for what Brandom is about, it now occurs to me that perhaps some day in the far distant future, the biographical dictionary entry for Brandom might refer to him as the one to whom we owe the possibility that there could be such a thing. Maybe Hegel already made it possible, but if so, it wasn’t very clear in the original. I think Plato and Aristotle already regarded normativity as the most important thing, but that is different from regarding it as a viable candidate to be the only thing, or a sufficient basis for explaining everything else. (See also Normative “Force”; Meta-Ethics As First Philosophy.)
Tag: Brandom
Brandomian Forgiveness
Forgiveness is the process by which immediacy is mediated, by which the stubborn recalcitrance of reality is given conceptual shape.
A Spirit of Trust, p. 612.
Confession, forgiveness, and trust are what we must do, recognitively, in order to find objective, determinately contentful conceptual norms being applied cognitively in judgment and practically in action.
p. 628
[F]orgiveness and trust embody an expansion strategy, by which self-conscious individuals identify with actual goings-on over which they exert some real, but always only partial authority, identify themselves as the seats of responsibilities that outrun their own capacity to fulfill.
p. 623
The final chapter and conclusion of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust include a strong ethical message about mutual forgiveness, interwoven with his reading of Hegel’s resolution of the subject-object dichotomy. Sophoclean tragic heroes encountered fate as an uncontrollable alien force that changed the meaning of their actions against their will, but still took responsibility for their actions anyway. Aristotle and important strands of the Christian tradition already anticipated what Brandom calls Kant’s contraction of responsibility to a responsibility for intentions only. Brandom sees in Hegel a novel suggestion that instead of thus contracting responsibility to commitments alone, we should expand it and make it mutual.
Instead of blaming the actor for the action’s unintended consequences or contractively saying no one is responsible in such cases, Brandom sees the “postmodern”, “expansive” Hegelian alternative as consisting in the actor taking responsibility for unintended consequences, while the recognitive community also takes responsibility by forgiving the actor. Aristotle and the aforementioned strands of Christian tradition both already explicitly recommended forgiveness of the actor for unintended consequences and unwilling actions generally, even if they grounded it in what Brandom calls a contractive model of responsibility. In terms of concrete ethics, the results are similar. (See also Willing, Unwilling; Blame and Blamelessness; Evaluation of Actions.)
The gain from Brandom’s expansive model of responsibility lies rather in its consequences for the project of treating meta-ethics as first philosophy. Brandom wants to nudge us to move from an implicit normative/factual dualism toward a purely normative monism, in which all facts are what they are by virtue of their place in the normative synthesis of reasonable explanations.
When we fail to come up with a charitable interpretation of someone’s action, commitments, or reasons, Brandom recommends we trust that someone else eventually will be able to do so. “Where our normative digestion and domestication of immediacy, contingency, and particularity shows its limitations, when (as in each case at some point they must) they outrun our recollective capacity to incorporate them into the mediated, normative conceptual form of governing universals, that failure of ours is properly acknowledged by confession and trust in the forgiveness of that failure to fulfill our responsibilities, by more capable future recollectors” (p. 756).
For Brandom, what I above called normative monism is the final step in the long process of resolving the subject-object dichotomy bequeathed to us by early modernity. Simultaneously, it offers a new concept of community, in which “each member identifies with all the others, at once expressing and sacrificing their own particular attitudes by taking coresponsibility for the practical attitudes of everyone” (p. 757). He cites Hegel’s invocation of the “‘I’ that is ‘We’, the ‘We’ that is ‘I'”. Though it has a historical dimension, this is the universal community of rational beings participating in the transcendental field, not an empirical community.
It is worth noting that forgiveness applies to individual people, who potentially could participate in concrete acts of mutual recognition. Insofar as we tend to hold actual people responsible for what we deem to be bad circumstances, institutions, or organizational behavior, we should be forgiving toward those people.
But there is still such a thing as injustice, and as long as we are forgiving of individual people and exercise appropriate interpretive charity with respect to their motives, in the formation of normative syntheses we are under no obligation to be similarly tender toward circumstances, institutions, or organizational behavior. On the contrary, if we have an obligation in this case, it is to right what is wrong. Circumstances, institutions, and organizational behavior are not people deserving sympathy, and not participants in any recognition process. Any or all of them may be deeply unjust in actual cases. Here, critical thought about what is good and the consideration of impacts on people should have full sway. (See also Justice in General; Honesty, Kindness; Memory, History, Forgetting.)
Beyond Subject-Object
Hegel famously wanted to move beyond the subject-object dichotomy he saw as typical of early modernity. In practical terms, Kant’s most famous concern to avoid “dogmatic” assumptions about direct possession of epistemic objects had seemed to accentuate the separation of subject and object, by focusing on the distinction between appearance and reality. But both Kant and Hegel wanted to assert the possibility of knowledge in a strong sense, while avoiding what Kant called dogmatism. They also had considerable common ground in a shared rejection of naive early modern notions of subjects and objects and their relations.
Kant had begun — seemingly unwittingly — to recover some neglected Aristotelian insights in these areas, and Hegel made this an explicit theme. Thus they both already questioned the dichotomous interpretation of subject-object relations. Kant had also already highlighted the inevitable involvement of concepts in experience. For Kant, there is no direct epistemic access to real-world objects, or things in themselves (or to our own subjectivity). All knowledge proceeds by way of concepts, but he retains the concept of objects (and subjects) as a sort of placeholders for new distinctions between appearance and reality that can always be wrapped around current concepts in a new iteration.
When dichotomous connotations have already been applied to a distinction in some communicative context, it can be tricky to simultaneously clarify the transcendence of the dichotomy and the preservation of the underlying distinction, but the general solution is not far to find — just ensure that the underlying distinction is expressed in terms of some finite relation, rather than A versus not-A. Then we have Hegelian determinate negation or Aristotelian difference between the terms, rather than classical negation. So in effect, the solution lies in recognizing that the previous understanding of the distinction in terms of dichotomy was wrong in the first place.
More positively, Hegel eliminates dichotomies by putting determinate relations, coherence, and mediation first in the order of explanation, before all particular terms. The Hegelian Absolute — or that which transcends the subject-object dichotomy — is just a handle for perspectives that put processes, relations, coherence, and mediation before any preconceived notion of the conceptual content of particular terms.
I think Hegel saw this sort of structure as common to Aristotelian substance or “what it was to have been” a thing on the one hand, and Kantian subjectivity or synthesis of apperception on the other.
Working in the Hegelian Absolute does not require epistemic super powers or specious Cartesian certainty, just a sustained honest effort that is still implicitly defeasible. Hegel intends the Absolute to be a kind of Aristotelian achievable perfection, not a kind of omniscience or theological perfection that could never be legitimately claimed by a rational animal. (See Substance Also Subject.)
In approaching these matters in A Spirit of Trust, Brandom characteristically focuses not directly on higher-order abstractions, but on their implications for what we do with ordinary concepts in ordinary experience. Like Aristotle and Hegel but following a distinct strategy of his own, Brandom avoids the impasse of a supposed transition from psychological to “metaphysical” terms, or from ordinary experience to something that would seemingly have to be like the mind of God, by clarifying what we implicitly mean by concepts in the first place.
With Aristotle, Hegel, and Frege and in contradistinction to the empiricist tradition, Brandom understands concepts and apperception in a nonpsychological, nonrepresentational, normative-pragmatic, inferential-semantic way. Through the discovery of counterfactually robust relations, concepts evolve toward increasing universality. Through the experience of error, synthesis of apperception comes to incorporate the recognition that not only its commitments but also its concepts are always in principle provisional, subject to reformulation when faced with a new case. Through both of these combined with the additional cross-checks provided by mutual recognition, synthesis moves toward increasing objectivity and what might be called contact with reality. Through Brandom’s “expansive” model of responsibility, the last remaining obstacle to a full resolution of subject-object separation — the lack of a normative interpretation of unintended consequences of actions — is removed.
Neither “subjects” nor “objects” as such are very prominent in an account of this sort. It is much more a story about processes, relations, coherence, and mediation. Aristotle, Hegel, and Brandom each develop their own ways of working that start in the middle, as it were, and do not need reified subjects and objects to begin with. This, again, is just what the Hegelian Absolute is — a name for the sort of perspective that emphasizes the in-principle provisional character of all finite concepts, as contrasted with the more directly practical sort of perspective that provisionally works with the current basis as a source of reasons for particular sayings and doings. (See also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Contradiction vs Polarity; Three Logical Moments.)
Sociality
I’m looking at yet another critique of Brandom’s reading of Hegel by yet another person who did not consult the draft of Brandom’s major book on Hegel that was publicly available well before the critique was published. (So far, disappointingly, this has been true in four out of four cases I have examined.)
Alper Turken in “Brandom vs. Hegel: The Relation of Normativity and Recognition to the True Infinite” (2015) wants to say that the “true infinite”, which he identifies as Hegel’s resolution of the naive separation of Subject and Object in Consciousness, is the most important thing in Hegel, and is simply missed by any reading of Hegel that emphasizes the sociality of reason. According to Turken, reason must come before sociality, and a sociality of reason is incompatible with autonomy. Turken also cites psychoanalytic arguments that an empirical subject does not have what would in effect be Mastery over its attitudes.
Brandom explicitly comments on the Hegelian “true infinite” at several points in A Spirit of Trust. He characterizes it as a holistic perspective characteristic of the Hegelian “Absolute”, in which all identity is constituted through difference, and there is no fixed point of reference.
The idea that reason must come “before” sociality suggests a kind of modern platonism that I don’t think Plato himself — let alone Hegel — would have countenanced. (I view Platonic reason as inherently dialogical, and inherently involved with ethical concerns.)
Brandom applies a Fregean force/content distinction to normativity. It may appear that he does so with a sort of reciprocal onesidedness.
However, when he speaks of the attitude-dependence of normative force, I understand this to mean dependence on a concrete and fallible but inherently rational and ethical synthesis of apperception, not just an arbitrary attitude of an empirical subject.
The relevant autonomy does not consist in a putative right of naively conceived Enlightenment individuals to form whatever attitudes they factually please, but in the normative autonomy of reason in any synthesis of apperception. Autonomy just means that Reason should take only reasons — what it judges to be good reasons — into account, not assumptions or special pleadings. “I” as index of a synthesis of apperception also recognize only reasons that fit into the concrete synthesis. (See also Error.)
When Brandom speaks of the dependence of determinations of normative content on others, I understand the “others” in question to be the virtual universal community of all rational beings, not some empirically existing society. In the realm of Reason, the status quo of an existing society could never be the final word.
If Brandom did not deal with Hegel’s resolution of the naive early modern separation of Subject and Object, that would indeed be a grievous shortcoming. But in fact, Hegel’s resolution of subject-object separation is developed extensively by Brandom in A Spirit of Trust. It emerges organically from a nonpsychological notion of conceptual content. (See Beyond Subject-Object; Brandomian Forgiveness.)
It seems to me that there is actually a sort of parallel between the transition from naive early modern subject-object separation to the standpoint of Hegel’s Logic and the end of the Phenomenology on the one hand, and the transition from naive early modern individualism to Hegelian mutual recognition on the other. I see a similar parallel between the epistemic limitations of early modern subjectivism and the ethical limitations of early modern individualism. Hegel’s solutions to both are deeply interrelated.
Turken seems to assume that all sociality of reason must take the form of what Hegel called positivity, or empirically existing determinations such as received views. If this were the case, it could not possibly do what Brandom wants. But it is not the case. Commitments only exist in the social space of reasons, and every commitment invites rational questioning. In principle, there is no end to this potential dialogue. We never arrive at final answers, just the best ones we can obtain for now.
Once again, it seems to me that the critics of “deflationary” readings of Hegel implicitly depend on “inflationary” medieval transformations of Plato and Aristotle. Part of what those inflationary, reifying readings lost was the primacy of open-ended normative reasoning.
Aristotle and Brandom?
For the second time, I think I discovered a significant new insight into a major Aristotelian concept by thinking it through in Brandomian terms. When I began this effort, Aristotle and Brandom were just the two philosophers with whom I was most engaged, who seemed to me to share my overarching concern with the ethical import of reasons and things said, but it is growing to be something more.
(To some, this might seem a strange pairing. However, in spite of his own lack of direct engagement with Aristotle, Brandom has commented that a number of his best interlocutors (unnamed) were what he called neo-Aristotelians. Certainly, Hegel — the historic philosopher with whom Brandom has been most engaged — makes major use of Aristotle, and Brandom’s co-thinkers on Hegel, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, have highlighted this.)
Earlier, I noted a kind of isomorphism between Aristotelian potentiality and Brandomian modally robust counterfactual inference, which then turned into a three-way correspondence with the structuralist concept of structure, and helped illuminate the old synchronic/diachronic issue associated with structuralism.
The other day, I noted a second isomorphism, between canonical Aristotelian proposition-forming combination and separation and Brandomian material consequence and material incompatibility. The result is that Aristotle’s canonical conception of logical truth seems very consistent with what Brandom recommends, in terms of using goodness of material inference to explain truth rather than using truth to explain inference.
Brandom has referred to this sort of interpretation as a recollective genealogy, grounded in Hegel’s way of retrospectively interpreting past philosophers in light of the present. Obviously there is a creative element to such an endeavor. The important and delicate point is that it not be an arbitrary imposition, but something that yields genuine insight that is both relevant to the present and honestly compatible with the best historiographic objectivity we can fallibly attain. In the two cases mentioned above, I think that has been achieved.
Going in the other direction, developing an Aristotelian interpretation of Brandom’s distinction between sentience and sapience has helped me to achieve full sympathy with this notion, and with several of Kant’s apparently dualistic moments as well.
Somewhat ambidextrously, it seems to me that Brandomian commitments, together with the sort of pattern of performance with respect to responsibility measured by Brandomian deontic scorekeeping, make up the ethical character or culture that Aristotle called ethos. (See also Ethos; Aristotelian Subjectivity; Brandomian Choice.)
Mutual Recognition and the Other
Part of what I like so much about both Aristotle and Brandom is that they each offer a sustained non-Subject-centered development of what I broadly think of as meta-ethical concerns, including subjectivity itself.
Since I first encountered him in the 1970s, Lacan’s broad perspective on subjectivity as decentered always seemed very sensible and right to me, and in accord with the epistemic modesty I have attributed to Plato and Aristotle. At this very broad level, there is an important consonance here.
A large emphasis on language is obviously another point Aristotle, Brandom, and Lacan all have in common, but while I have previously suggested a possibility of bidirectional translation specifically between relational structures and inferentialist modes of expression based on a common denominator of Hegelian determinate negation, the difference between metaphoric-metonymic and normative-inferential approaches to language is huge.
Lacan identified what he called the Other primarily with language analyzed in Jakobsonian terms, and with Levi-Straussian “Law”. Now I want to focus on the latter aspect. This seems to be just normativity, albeit in global synchronic relational form rather than the fine-grained interactive diachronic form developed by Brandom.
To say that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other in this sense results in an anonymous, social unconscious rather than a personal, biological one, which I find highly intriguing. It also puts the unconscious and normativity in the same “place”. At first that made me worry about explaining primary process from a Brandomian point of view, but I have decided there is no requirement to do that. I am inclining toward a view that primary process and normativity would each pick out aspects of what goes on in that hypothetical anonymous, role-based social subjective “place”, and that those aspects would be basically orthogonal.
The Other seems to be mainly considered as synchronic and global, viewed from a distance, whereas mutual recognition is a fine-grained, ongoing interactive process. The Other could be hypothetically considered as the global synchronic product of the whole mutual recognition process. Conversely, mutual recognition could be considered a detailed, internal, genetic explanation of the Other that Lacan never contemplated.
I have yet to find mutuality in Lacan. He talked a fair amount about Hegel, but through a Kojèvian lens. Kojève had stressed the struggle for one-sided recognition associated with Mastery. Lacan seems to have regarded love as primarily a narcissistic phenomenon, which I cannot agree with. (See also Imaginary, Symbolic, Real.)
Primary Process
Lacan saw both language and the primary process of the unconscious as mainly governed by Jakobsonian metaphor and metonymy. While especially well adapted to accounting for poetry, word salads, and dreams, the Jakobsonian approach seems insufficiently constrained to be able to account for proprieties of inference; but then, it was not developed for that purpose. (See also Imaginary, Symbolic, Real.)
Brandom sees any descriptive, formal view of language such as the Jakobsonian one as ultimately parasitic on a nonformal, normative, and material-inferential view. For rational, discursive purposes where we want deontic modal constraints, Brandom’s approach works very well. Brandom’s account focuses on the normative and inferential meaning of ordinary empirical concepts, and has nothing to say about free metaphor and metonymy, which also have a big place in the wider world; but then, it was not developed for the latter purpose.
I don’t mean to suggest any facile symmetry here, just the bare possibility of some reconciliation in view of the fact that the main concerns of the two approaches are mutually exclusive. Saying that a view is parasitic on another view is very different from saying it is wrong. The question is whether it is fair to expect that Brandom’s claim of parasitism at a general level of formal on “material” and of descriptive on normative approaches imposes on Brandom an obligation to be able to explain any possible formal account in his terms, including one mainly designed for a case well outside his focus. I think it does impose on him an obligation to be able to explain any formal account addressing the scope of determination of empirical concepts, but does not impose an obligation to be able to explain something like metaphor and metonymy. So, at least in this measure I do think the perspectives can coexist.
In my youth when I was a linguistically experimental poet among other things, I put more stress on metaphor and metonymy myself. At that point, I still believed in rational intuition, did not really think of reasoning in terms of language, and was even a bit disdainful of breaking things down into steps. Now I think all intuition is secondary to some prior development. As soon as I encountered Brandom’s argument about the priority of inference over representation, it seemed very right, and I began to engage with other aspects of his work from there. We could squint and say metaphor and metonymy are forms of representation, but if so it is certainly not empirical conceptual representation, so I’m inclined to think in that case we’re dealing with an Aristotelian homonym.
Empiricism
Already in the 1950s, analytic philosophers began to seriously question empiricism. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1954), and Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956) all contributed to this.
Brandom explicates Sellars’ pivotal critique of the empiricist “Myth of the Given” as belief in a kind of awareness that counts as a kind of knowledge but does not involve any concepts. (If knowledge is distinguished by the ability to explain, as Aristotle suggested, then any claim to knowledge without concepts is incoherent out of the starting gate.) Building on Sellars’ work, Brandom’s Making It Explicit (1994) finally offered a full-fledged inferentialist alternative. He has rounded this out with a magisterial new reading of Hegel.
The terms “empiricism” and “rationalism” originally referred to schools of Greek medicine, not philosophy. The original empirical school denied the relevance of theory altogether, arguing that medical practice should be based exclusively on observation and experience.
Locke famously began his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) with an argument that there are no innate ideas. I take him to have successfully established this. Unfortunately, he goes on to argue that what are in effect already contentful “ideas” become immediately present to us in sensible intuition. This founding move of British empiricism seems naive compared to what I take Aristotle to have meant. At any rate, I take it to have been decisively refuted by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 2nd ed. 1787). Experience in Kant is highly mediated. “Intuitions without concepts are blind.” (See also Ricoeur on Locke on Personal Identity; Psyche, Subjectivity.)
In the early 20th century, however, there was a great flourishing of phenomenalism, or the view that all knowledge is strictly reducible to sensation understood as immediate awareness. Kant himself was often read as an inconsistent phenomenalist who should be corrected in the direction of consistent phenomenalism. Logical empiricism was a diverse movement with many interesting developments, but sense data theories were widely accepted. Broadly speaking, sense data were supposed to be mind-dependent things of which we are directly aware in perception, and that have the properties they appear to have in perception. They were a recognizable descendent of Cartesian incorrigible appearances and Lockean sensible intuition. (Brandom points out that sense data theory is only one of many varieties of the Myth of the Given; it seems to me that Husserlian phenomenology and its derivatives form another family of examples.)
Quine, Wittgenstein, and Sellars each pointed out serious issues with this sort of empiricism or phenomenalism. Brandom’s colleague John McDowell in Mind and World (1994) defended a very different sort of empiricism that seems to be a kind of conceptually articulated realism. In fact, there is nothing about the practice of empirical science that demands a thin, phenomenalist theory of knowledge. A thicker, more genuinely Kantian notion of experience as always-already conceptual and thus inseparable from thought actually works better anyway.
Thought and intuition are as hylomorphically inseparable in real instances of Kantian experience as form and matter are in Aristotle. A positive role for Kantian intuition as providing neither knowledge nor understanding, but crucial instances for the recognition of error leading to the improvement of understanding, is preserved in Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust. (See also Radical Empiricism?; Primacy of Perception?; Aristotle, Empiricist?)
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.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 