Tag: Brandom

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

Mutual Recognition

Hegelian mutual recognition puts ethical considerations of reciprocity with others to the fore. In part, it is a more sophisticated version of the idea behind the golden rule. It also suggests that anyone’s authority and responsibility for anything should always be evenly balanced. It is also a social, historical theory of the genesis of meaning, value, and identity. Hegel’s notion was partly anticipated by Fichte.

Brandom reads mutual recognition as central to Hegel’s ethics or practical philosophy, and Hegel’s practical philosophy as central to his philosophy as a whole. Prior to the publication of A Spirit of Trust (2019), what I take to be Brandom’s own deep ethical engagement was often not recognized. I hope the situation will soon improve.

Consistent with Brandom’s general approach, the ethics of A Spirit of Trust appears in a highly mediated form. Much of the work of ethics for Brandom comes down to the implementation and practice of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics, which he has been expounding at least since Making It Explicit (1994). So, I think he has been laying the groundwork for a long time.

One recent commentator (Lewis 2018) suggested that ethics proper was just missing from Brandom’s earlier accounts. His citations for this were to Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, whose readings of Hegel are often compared to Brandom’s. I cannot find the text of Pinkard’s 2007 article, but Pippin in the course of his searching but still very sympathetic review “Brandom’s Hegel” (2005) had suggested there was at that time an important gap in Brandom’s reading, related to Hegel’s lifelong concern with a critical treatment of positivity, i.e., received views and institutionalized claims.

Pippin cited an ambiguous argument from Making It Explicit that seemed to support the social legitimacy of a commitment to enlist in the Navy by a drunken sailor who was tricked into a contract by accepting a shilling for more beer. Brandom has since clarified in several places that he did not mean to himself endorse this argument, based as it is on a partial perspective (see, e.g., Hegel’s Ethical Innovation). In Spirit of Trust terms, Brandom’s point in such a context would be to emphasize that the freedom associated with agency does not entail mastery, and in particular that we do not have mastery over the content of our own commitments. The issue for Pippin in 2005 was that Brandom appeared to put sole responsibility and authority for determining the content of commitments on the audience. Pippin found with respect to positivity “not so much a problem as a gap, a lacuna that Brandom obviously feels comfortable leaving unfilled” in Making It Explicit. I suspect Brandom’s lack of discomfort was directly tied to a deferral of such considerations to his 40-year magnum opus project, A Spirit of Trust.

For years, something like Pippin’s positivity issue was a main topic of discussion between my late father and me. For both of us, it was the big hurdle to overcome in fully recognizing Brandom as the world-historic giant we both thought he would probably turn out to be. I thought the positivity issue already began to be addressed in the early web draft of A Spirit of Trust, and I suspect it was a significant focus while Brandom was working on the final text.

In any event, I think it is clear that in the published Spirit of Trust, the determination of the content of commitments is envisioned not as stopping with an immediate audience, but as involving an indefinitely recursive expansion of mutually determining I-Thou relationships. On my reading, normative statuses that are both fully determinate and unconditionally deontically binding would only emerge from the projection of this expansion into infinity. But in practical contexts, we never deal with actual infinity, only with indefinite recursive expansions that have been cut off at some relatively early point. (See also Hegelian Genealogy.)

We always work with defeasible approximations — finite truncations of a recursive expansion through many relationships of reciprocal determination. This means in particular that judgments of deontic bindingness are defeasible approximations.

Further, the kind of approximation at issue here is not a statistical one, but a more Aristotelian sort of “probability”. It therefore cannot be assumed to monotonically improve as the expansion progresses, so it is not guaranteed that further expansion will not suddenly require a significant revision of previous commitments or concepts, as Brandom explicitly points out (see Error).

This means that the legitimacy of the queen’s shilling and any other received truth is actually open to dispute and therefore open to any rational argument, including those the sobered-up sailor might make. In Brandom’s favorite example, new case law — though of course subject to higher-level canons of determinate negation in its own future interpretation and evaluation — may significantly revise existing case law in unforeseeable ways.

I believe this gives us all the space we need for social criticism. We need have no fear that Brandom’s version of the mutual recognition principle will bind us to positivity. Nothing is out of bounds for the autonomy of reason. We only have to be honest about the conceptual content we encounter in the detail of the recursive expansion. I believe this is the answer to the lingering concerns I expressed in Robust Recognition and Genealogy. Even if Brandom himself were to turn out not to go quite this far, I think at worst this is a friendly amendment that does not disrupt the framework. (See also Edifying Semantics; Reasonableness.)

The recursive expansion of mutual recognition pushes it toward the kind of universality on which Kant based the categorical imperative. Practical outcomes from the two approaches ought to be similar. Hegel’s version is useful because it is grounded in social relationships rather than a pure metaphysics of morals, but still escapes empirical, “positive” constraints by indefinitely expanding the network toward the concrete universality of a universal community of rational beings. (See also Mutual Recognition Revisited; Pippin on Mutual Recognition; Hegel’s Ethical Innovation).

Archaeology of Knowledge

In the old days, my favorite text of Foucault was the beginning of the Archaeology of Knowledge (online here), revised from his “Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie”, published summer 1968 (o pregnant time!) in Cahiers pour L’Analyse, the original of which is separately translated in Essential Works vol. 1. There is a nice summary of the original and its historical context here.

At this time, Foucault and Althusser were both working toward what has been called a rationalist philosophy of the Concept related to the work of Jean Cavaillés and Georges Canguilhem, in contrast to then popular existential/phenomenological philosophies of the Subject. (See Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillés to Deleuze.)

The Epistemological Circle that Foucault was responding to was a group of Althusser’s students interested in the philosophy and history of science, as well as structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, who had asked Foucault a series of methodological questions. Althusser was something like the dean of France’s most prestigious university. He had actually written his dissertation (which I have still not seen) on the Concept in Hegel. By this time he was in high anti-Hegelian mode, as was Foucault.

Foucault himself acknowledged considerable debt to his Hegelian mentor Jean Hyppolite, who translated the Phenomenology to French. Hyppolite read Hegel as focused more on discourse than on subjectivity. His 1952 Language and Existence, referred to by Foucault as “one of the great books of our time”, argued strongly for the importance of language in Hegel. (It was also very favorably reviewed by the young Deleuze.) Foucault had written a thesis on “The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” under Hyppolite in 1949.

There is more good historical background in James Muldoon, “Foucault’s Forgotten Hegelianism”. While I don’t endorse, e.g., Muldoon’s remarks on Hegel and free will, his suggestion that an identification with certain specifics of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel — particularly the attribution of a strong “totalizing” impulse — contributed significantly to the anti-Hegelian turn of Foucault and others is quite interesting.

Though I don’t recall this from his translated works, Hyppolite apparently both saw a strong element of totalization in Hegel and strongly rejected it, while continuing to identify as a Hegelian. (Previously, in absence of more specific evidence I had surmised it was mainly a reaction against Alexandre Kojève’s reading that drove the French anti-Hegelian turn. Muldoon also says Hyppolite’s reading was initially welcomed as a contrast to Jean Wahl’s more phenomenologically oriented 1929 book on the unhappy consciousness, which apparently also contributed to French perceptions of Hegel as subject-centered.)

In any case, the Hegel whom Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and others famously rejected in the 1960s was identified as the proponent of a totalizing historical teleology of the Subject. Each of the three components of this was independently strongly rejected — the subject-centeredness, the historical teleology, and the totalization. I still agree today that these are all serious errors that should be rejected.

However, Hegel read in a broadly Brandomian way is utterly untouched by this criticism. There is no historical teleology at all in what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy (so a fortiori not a totalizing one), and there is no subject-centeredness in the analysis of conceptual content. Subjectivity is never invoked as an unexplained explainer. Brandom’s exposition of the Hegelian critique of Mastery offers us a Hegel utterly opposed to the kind of totalization attributed to him by Foucault, Althusser, and Deleuze.

Foucault presented a long list of forms of discontinuity that should be attended to in the history of ideas. Each of these could be analyzed in Brandomian/Hegelian terms as a determinate negation.

I agree with Foucault that it is very important not to take the simple continuity of a tradition for granted. In principle, such things need to be shown. However, I still think defeasible assertions about “traditions” and other such unities that should be questioned can play a useful role in historical discussion. (See also Ricoeur on Foucault; Structuralism; Structure, Potentiality; Difference; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Historiography; Genealogy.)