Brandom says that concepts are rules. However, I want to remark that they are in no way associated with the objectionable, naive kind of rules intended to just tell subrational beings what they must do. Brandomian concepts are a self-referential kind of “rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against).”
Tag: Brandom
Conceptual, Representational
In passing, Brandom glosses Hegel’s famous contrast of Reason and Understanding as conceptual versus representational thinking. This seems worthy of a pause.
As we have seen in previous posts, Brandom argues that Hegel sees conceptual content in terms close to Brandom’s own inferentialism, particularly stressing the dual role of material incompatibility and material consequence in the constitution of meaning on the one hand, and in the proprieties of normative judgment on the other.
Brandom relates material incompatibility to Aristotelian contrariety. I have also related it to Aristotelian difference, which functions as a sort of n-ary contrariety. (Aristotle talks much more about difference than about identity, and this is no accident. He happily lacks later identitarian obsessions.) Meaning comes primarily from distinctions of form, not referential pointing. Aristotelian form — at least in one very important sense — is constituted by distinctions. The kinds of distinctions that are particularly relevant are those that impact reasoning. If you follow out enough of the consequences of materially incompatible things, for both Aristotle and Hegel you will eventually get a logical contradiction. Brandom’s Hegel is more interested in understanding how we end up at a point of contradiction and do something about it, than in using contradiction to allegedly explain historical change.
I also think that with the conceptual, there is always at least implicitly something normative or value-oriented. Brandom call this “Kant’s second master idea”. By contrast, representation seems to be purportedly value-independent. (Brandom tells us that Kant’s alternative to the representationalist view of representation is to treat it in terms of claims to normative validity.) Representation also tends to privilege identity over difference.
Most of what Hegel explicitly says about Understanding treats it as an overly narrow style of reasoning typical of, say, Descartes or Locke. Descartes and Locke are in fact the arch-representationalists of early modernity, but an association of Understanding to representation or representationalism is not in the foreground in Hegel’s text, so Brandom’s gloss of Understanding as representational thinking represents a significant nonobvious insight.
Edifying Semantics
I like Brandom’s recent motto of “edifying semantics”. It strikes me that this is what Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel were after more than anything else in their particular ways of doing philosophy — inquiry into meaning, with an ethical intent. Aristotle even developed natural science in the form of an edifying semantics.
Behind the formidable technical development of Brandom’s other recent motif of “semantic descent” is, I believe, a profound ethical concern to show the relevance of philosophy to ordinary life. Semantic descent shows how lofty higher-order abstractions are effectively operative in the ordinary use of concepts in ordinary experience.
This is not reductionism, but quite the opposite. It is a vindication of the relevance of higher-order things in ordinary life.
Ferrarin’s Brandom
Alfredo Ferrarin’s Hegel and Aristotle was an interesting and provocative book, but his 2012 essay “What Must We Recognize? Brandom’s Kant and Hegel” is unfortunately nowhere near doing justice to its subject.
Ferrarin’s first word concerning Brandom’s approach is “reductionism.” But Brandom is clear that he is being highly selective for a particular purpose, and that other productive readings are possible. At one point Ferrarin seems to suggest Brandom would reduce Hegel’s whole enterprise to what Brandom calls propositionalism: the idea that concepts get their meaning from their use in judgments. Brandom does believe Hegel would be sympathetic to that primarily Fregean idea, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Then we learn that Brandom’s real “object of attack” is the notion of a prelinguistic given, and of intuition as evidence. Ferrarin turns out to be quite hostile to Brandom’s thesis of the priority of inference (Hegelian mediation) over immediacy.
The critique of immediacy is not some weird analytic fetish. If anything is a weird fetish, immediacy is. Influential continental thinkers would agree. And intuition is not knowledge. It may yield truth by the correspondence theory, but the defining characteristic of knowledge is its ability to explain itself. Knowledge is not just true belief.
Ferrarin wants to maintain that recognition cannot do all the work Brandom wants it to, and justifies this by arguing for a much narrower and more impoverished concept of recognition. Mutual recognition is hardly mentioned, and the rich dialectical development of the mutual aspect by Brandom is completely ignored. It is precisely the open dialectic of mutual recognition that provides a nonsubjective grounding for normativity, creating a third “postmodern” alternative (in the new, Hegelian sense suggested by Brandom) to traditionalist rigidity and modern subjectivist alienation.
One of the things that initially attracted me in Brandom’s discussions of Hegel is the absence of a lot of nonsense about consciousness and self-consciousness. Brandom discusses consciousness mainly in terms of meaning and normativity. Consciousness and self-consciousness are ways of doing — nominalized adverbial descriptions conditioning and informing agency, not some kind of mental stuff or container, not direct exercisers of agency either. Kant and Hegel hinted at this, but Brandom explained it much more clearly. (See also What Is “I”?)
To me, the most important lesson about self-consciousness in Hegel is that it is anything but consciousness of an immediately given thing called “self”. (Hegel’s actual concept might be better called other-consciousness or normative awareness.) Ferrarin, however, calls Brandom’s approach theoretical and abstract, and even claims Brandom “misses so obviously the practical origin of self-consciousness” (emphasis in original).
Ferrarin correctly points out that judgment cannot be adequately conceived as merely applying rules. I agree, but despite my own reservations about Brandom’s preference for deontological modes of expression, I think Brandom’s concept of judgment is much richer than that.
Determinate Negation
Something actually means something to the extent that it actually rules out something else. Brandom calls this material incompatibility. I think he is right that this has more to do with contrariety in Aristotle than with so-called “contradiction”, about which a tremendous amount of nonsense has been written in purported reference to Hegel. Hegel’s wording was not always clear, to put it mildly, but I think it is clear that he never meant to talk logical nonsense.
Brandom’s examples (e.g., triangular vs. circular) make it clear that he has in mind a sort of n-ary contrariety, as distinct from the binary kind Aristotle talks about in the Physics (e.g., triangular vs. non-triangular). However, Aristotle’s own argument for distinction based on n-ary rather than binary division in Parts of Animals Book 1 supports Brandom’s extension of Aristotelian contrariety to an n-ary form.
Aristotle also in many places speaks of difference in ways that resemble Brandom’s n-ary contrariety. Aristotle and Hegel and Brandom all laudably direct our attention to conceptual difference. Brandom argues that for Hegel, this also explicitly includes differences in inferential consequence.
There is an important contrast between this “determinate” negation and “infinite” negation or simple polar opposition, in which each of a pair of terms is the simple negation of the other. This latter kind has been called “infinite”, because it does nothing to specify what the difference is between the two terms. (See also Conceptual, Representational; Material Inference; Material Consequence.)
Spirit of Trust
There seems to be a lot of new content in Brandom’s epic A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Belknap 2019), since the first version he posted on the web some years ago. It will take me quite a while to do it justice.
Simply put, this is a proper Great Book by a living great philosopher, which happens to take the form of a book about another great philosopher. It is not to be missed if you care about such things. The first version decisively overthrew my preconceptions about Hegel, acquired from too hasty a reading of Hegel himself and much time spent in earlier years with French anti-Hegelians. Simultaneously, Brandom’s book attracted me with its ethical message. (See many related articles under Hegel, and Brandom on Hegel; also under Brandom and Hegel on Modernity.)
Useful related resources include the works of Brandom’s co-thinkers Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard on Hegel, and the monumental line-by-line commentary on the argument of the Phenomenology by H.R. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder.
Immediacy, Presence
Broadly speaking, the Brandomian critique of claims of two-stage models of representation — where representings are sharply distinguished from representeds, as supposedly having immediate intelligibility that representeds lack — seems to me to have at least a partial analogue in early Derrida’s critique of presence and of what he called a transcendental signified, as well as to some of what Foucault wrote about representation in The Order of Things.
Brandom does not want to entirely subvert representation, as Derrida and Foucault sometimes seemed to. He just wants to insist that it is always derivative, and cannot be a starting point. Although Derrida was less anti-Hegelian than many of his contemporaries, I don’t recall that he recognized, as Brandom does, that there was a strong precedent for the critique of immediacy/presence in Kant and Hegel. Foucault’s very sharp overt rejection of Hegel needs to be balanced against the fact that his own historical account of what are in effect shapes of subjectivity covers many of the same moments as Hegel’s, and in effect strongly continues the Hegelian critique of Mastery.
Unfortunately, Brandom sees both Foucault and Derrida as meriting no more than one-line dismissals, where I see common ground in the critiques of mastery, immediacy, and representation. These days, Brandom’s more rationalist and ethical version of these critiques seems a good deal more useful to me, but I still prefer a more irenic attitude. (See also Genealogy.)
Brandom is bothered by Derrida’s thesis that signifiers technically refer to other signifiers that refer to other signifiers, and so on, without end. While I agree that an indefinite expansion of inferences is more perspicuous than an indefinite expansion of references, Brandom’s explanation of reference in terms of inference ought to make it possible to substitute the one for the other. Also, the notion of a signifier is very abstract; we should not equate signifiers with individual words, which Brandom also seems to do in this context. A signifier could be a complex expression. Thinking about substitution of complex expressions makes it easier to map expansions of references to expansions of inferences. I think the indefinite deferral of a “transcendental signified” should also be related to the Kantian indefinite deferral of claims about things in themselves, and to the Kantian thesis that transcendental concepts do not refer to objects.
Repraesentatio
Representation was not invented by Descartes, as Brandom tends to suggest. Concepts of representation had wide currency in the middle ages. The word used was literally repraesentatio. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice summary, which traces its philosophical use to the Latin translations of Avicenna.
John Duns Scotus (1266 -1308) wanted to rewrite Aristotle by insisting that there is a single meaning for “being” that underlies all the different meanings Aristotle had distinguished. The underlying minimal definition of being he proposed was precisely representability. Olivier Boulnois documents how Scotus believed he had invented a unified ontology that Aristotle thought was impossible, and did so on the basis of a doctrine of being as pure representability. Scotus thus appears as an arch-representationalist. Whatever else one may say about it, his notion of representation is clearly not the same as resemblance. Every medieval university had a Scotist on the faculty.
If memory serves, Aquinas had a doctrine of the possibility of perfect representation. Since it is perfect, this cannot be reducible to mere resemblance. Perfect representation is effectively equivalent to a kind of immediacy.
Some contemporary scholars also translate Greek Stoic phantasma as “representation”, based on the functional role it plays in the Stoic system. The Stoic theory in question dealt with sense perception, and was part physiological and part epistemological. It purported to provide a foundation for immediate certain knowledge of represented objects from their mental representations in perception. This sounds like representation before inference, and also like another variant of putatively perfect representation, which therefore would again not be reducible to resemblance, and would again be effectively equivalent to immediacy.
Heroism and Magnanimity
Robert Brandom is in my estimate the most important philosopher ever to write originally in English. His recently published lecture Heroism and Magnanimity recaps some of the argument of the monumental Spirit of Trust, which translates Hegel’s Phenomenology into analytic terms, partly via the development in his other monument, Making It Explicit.
Brandom is primarily a systematic thinker in his own right. He deliberately stands at arm’s length from historical texts, favoring high-level reconstructions in his own very illuminating idiom over fine-grained textual interpretation. To the limited extent that he engages in broader historical discussion, it is at an even much higher level of abstraction. Despite deep admiration for his systematic development and insights into particular figures, I find some of his historical schematizations to be problematic.
In the lecture, he presents a tripartite historical schema of a heroic age, a modern age, and Hegel’s own vision for the future, for which Brandom appropriates the term “postmodern”, thus giving that word a new meaning that inspired the “Postmodern” part of the title of this blog. To the extent that he develops this new concept of postmodernity — which has very little to do with fashionable “postmodernism” — in terms of Hegel’s vision for the future, I find it exemplary.
In tension with this, however, is his longstanding characterization of Hegel as a very strong advocate of the modernity embodied specifically by Descartes and the Enlightenment. This collapses the new distinction between Cartesian/Enlightenment modernity and Hegelian postmodernity. If we take into account the rich detail of actual history, it is impossible to periodize very meaningfully at this gross a level. But even if we do squint and cheat, what emerges from Hegel’s text is a different division.
While I have issues with Hegel’s treatment of Christianity, Hegel’s own broad summary of historical development in the Philosophy of History lectures suggest a different tripartite periodization, between the pre-Christian ancient world, historical Christianity, and his own vision for the future. In his explicit text, he actually seems more concerned to apologize or propagandize for Christianity as he reinterprets it than for his positive appropriation of Descartes and the Enlightenment. (That there is such a positive appropriation is clear, but Hegel positively appropriates every significant development of thought, even those he severely criticizes.) Hegel is dismissive of the middle ages and abhors Catholicism, but gives high praise to the Christianity of the gospels as a precursor to German idealism and his own vision. He retrospectively associates the decisive emergence of themes of subjectivity and freedom on a social scale all the way back to primitive Christianity, not to modernity as such.
Modernity did further develop these themes, and for Hegel as for Aristotle, results are of greater value than beginnings. But still, Hegel devotes a much more extensive apologetic to Christianity (and his own radical reinterpretation of it) than to Enlightenment modernity. His explicit discussions of Enlightenment in the Phenomenology mainly criticize what are presented as overly severe, uncharitable assessments of religion. (In the Encyclopedia Logic, he does make an important defense of the essential role of Understanding, which we can associate with Cartesian/Enlightenment styles of reasoning, as a moment in a larger process. But Understanding is standardly presented by Hegel as grossly deficient compared to what he calls Reason. According to Hegel, Plato and Aristotle reached the level of Reason, whereas the Enlightenment only reached the level of Understanding.)
I find Hegel’s treatment of Descartes in the History of Philosophy surprisingly charitable, given the profoundly non-Cartesian character of Hegel’s (and Kant’s) own thought. But it is Plato and Aristotle that Hegel says above all others deserve to be called educators of the human race.
I read Hegel as a highly original, genuinely Kantian recoverer of Aristotelian insights. I think both that Plato and Aristotle anticipate Kant more than is generally recognized, and that Kant has far more in common with Aristotle than Kant himself seems to have recognized. Aside from Hegel’s explicit praise for and recurring implicit use of the two, Aristotle and Kant are the two thinkers who get the longest treatment in the History of Philosophy.
Brandom characterizes the heroic or tragic age as one in which normative statuses were regarded as objective facts, and people were held responsible for objective outcomes, regardless of their intentions. This repeats Hegel’s own oversimplification, which is hard to reconcile with Hegel’s praise of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Brandom contrasts this with the modern age, in which people are responsible only because they have already at least implicitly taken responsibility. But taking responsibility is a Kantian concept, and even one that was little recognized until recently. (Brandom himself has been a contributor to this recognition.) It was hardly characteristic of the Enlightenment in general.
There is a much better case for attitude-dependence of normative statuses (which Brandom also cites) as typical of the Enlightenment, but the typical Enlightenment version of this was ultimately subjectivist. All of Hegel’s criticisms of subjectivism ought to have full force here (and to be applied to typical Enlightenment modernity).
While there is arguably something heroic about accepting one’s fate, in contrast to both Hegel and Brandom’s usage I would rather save the word heroism for something exceptional. I would say a hero in the ancient sense can be understood in a contemporary sense as someone who genuinely takes responsibility for more than what is in her power, as when I stay behind and fight against hopeless odds to save my friends when I could have turned and run.
“Magnanimity” is a word Brandom uses for an attitude of confession, forgiveness, and interpretive charity (a spirit of trust) that he associates with Hegel’s vision for the future. This is different in emphasis from the magnanimity discussed by Aristotle, but in line with Hegel’s positive treatment of Christian themes.
Magnanimity (literally “great-souledness”) in Aristotle is almost proto-Nietzschean rather than Christian (but scholarship has shown that Nietzsche was a good deal kinder and gentler than the crude stereotype). Aristotle’s great-souled man is proud and assertive, but his pride is entirely well-founded and never false. This is the kind of pride that leads to a generosity of spirit that is the opposite of arrogance. (I find it appalling and totally unhistorical that some people act as if generosity of spirit had never been recognized as a value before Christianity. Even less is there a special connection between generosity of spirit and the Enlightenment.)
Despite my reservations about the historical schema, I think the ethical message in Brandom’s work is deeply important. He is among the foremost exponents of recently developed concepts of normativity and its genesis in mutual recognition. His general reading of Kant and Hegel and his creative use of analytic philosophy to understand them have been groundbreaking. My friendly amendment is to find better historical antecedents for the new understanding of normativity in Plato and Aristotle than in the Enlightenment.
I see that in the introduction to the published version of Spirit of Trust, Brandom says “The transformation began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace.” This does give at least a nod to the point I am trying to make, but I still have an issue with the part about an accelerating pace.
I think that when we are recollectively reconstructing a historical teleological story, while it is expected that we will exercise some poetic license and will ignore many details we think are less significant, we should still try to do justice to the real nonlinear ebb and flow of things, and not just come out with a Whiggish monotonic ascent of man. While there is real progressive development, there is also real regress. Hegel thought that in various ways, Roman culture was a step back from Greek culture, and he thought the middle ages were an even bigger step back. (I actually think Hegel did not do justice to the middle ages, but he did not have access to many texts available today.)
In general, a new form of Geist will be more adequate in some ways than its predecessor, but may be less so in others. It is not guaranteed that the improvements will outweigh a decline in other respects every time. I think Hegel’s contention was that for the known data, each decline has eventually been or will be made up, so there is or will be an overall positive accumulation in spite of inevitable local declines. (See also The Ancients and the Moderns; Hegel on the Ancients; Enlightenment; Modernity Clarified; Alienation, Modernity; Modernity, Again.)
Plato and Aristotle Were Inferentialists
In the context of modern philosophy, Brandom has developed an important contrast between representationalism and inferentialism. Representationalism says that representation comes before inference in the order of explanation, and inferentialism says that inference comes first.
Plato was very pessimistic about the potential of representation, as witnessed by the dialogues’ discussions of “imitation”, and the treatment of writing in Phaedrus. By contrast, inference or reasoning is presented as the main way to truth in the dialogues. Inference — and not representation — is what is primarily appealed to in the validation or invalidation of assertions. (See also Dialogue; Platonic Truth.)
Aristotle was less pessimistic about representation, but even more concerned with inference. He was the great originator of the world’s first developed logic, which was in fact centered on inference rather than truth values. While taking pioneering steps toward formalization, he also devoted much attention to definition, meanings of terms, and their distinctions and ambiguities in concrete usage (see Aristotelian Semantics; Aristotelian Demonstration). Aristotle distinguishes between inference based on the fact, which is a kind of formal inference, and inference based on the meaning, which is the material inference of Sellars and Brandom, also known to medieval logicians. Further, Aristotle’s elementary criteria for truth and falsity depend on material inference (see Aristotelian Propositions).
The kind of representation Brandom is particularly concerned with, which he attributes to Descartes, is based on isomorphism rather than resemblance. As an aside, I tend to think there was a notion of isomorphism in the ancient world, though it is a little hard to separate from resemblance. Euclid talked about similar triangles, which are technically an example of both. Aristotle would certainly say that resemblance is “said in many ways”, one of which could be isomorphism. I think given the opportunity he would say, for instance, that individual concretely uttered words are at some level isomorphic to whatever meanings those words turn out to have in some context. The words do not resemble their meanings. (See also Historiography, Inferentialism; Inferentialism vs Mentalism;.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 