Deontic

Having previously agreed there is no issue with deontically necessitating constraints analogous to the modal ones for material incompatibility and material consequence, I’m now starting to wonder if this might be as far as Brandom’s deontology really goes anyway.

When I hear “deontology”, I hear rigid rules for everything going all the way to the practical last instance, and feel compelled to defend the place of an always somewhat open Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis) in contrast to it. But I would rather not attribute such rigidity to Brandom or Kant, both of whom emphasize kinds of rules that are actually higher-order. A simultaneously logical and ethical necessitation of respect for abstract principles like material incompatibility and material consequence can be fully granted without reducing what we should do in concrete situations to a deterministic formula. I want to say that first-order rules belong in logic and mathematics, not ethics.

It feels a bit ironic that I am the one effectively appealing for a need for freedom here, but it really shouldn’t. It’s freedom of reason, not any appeal to will. (See also Varieties of Ethics; Evaluation of Actions; Necessity in Normativity; Binding; Robust Recognition; Mutual Recognition; Euthyphro.)

Binding

Brandom says Kant understands all empirical activity as consisting in subjects binding themselves by conceptual norms. All empirical activity is thus implicitly embedded in an outer frame that has a value-oriented character. Brandom immediately acknowledges that the nature of normative binding in Kant is obscure and deeply entwined with some of the most problematic aspects of Kant’s work, “such as the distinction between the activities of noumenal and phenomenal selves“.

Brandom thinks Hegel better explained this binding, and that Hegel would approve of John Haugeland’s slogan “transcendental constitution is social institution”. Crucially, though, the social dimension is here conceived not as a putatively immediate communitarian identity of “we” but in an extensively mediated way, through reciprocal determination of attitudes and statuses over time by constellations of mutually recognitive I-Thou dyads.

I prefer to speak of a responsibility to differences and gradients rather than a binding. “Binding” sounds a bit too univocal to my ear to be a preferred usage. Responsibility can be materially real without being subject to univocal determination. It has the character of a material tendency rather than a law.

I’m not proposing to ban talk about bindingness. I’m just recommending that it be reinterpreted in this less obvious material sense that still allows for a bit of play in the determination, rather than that it be understood in the more apparent formal and strict sense.

In my view, all the processes of reciprocal determination result in very real material tendencies sufficient to ground all needed talk about responsibility, but we need not and should not claim that these real material tendencies have the absolute force of formal law. That is the difference between law and what is right. Law is to what is right as Hegelian Understanding is to Hegelian Reason.

Some abstract, higher-order principles do have the force of formal law, but their interpretation and applicability in actual cases can never be self-evident (nothing contentful ever is).

So that which is genuinely normatively binding is either only a real material tendency of responsibility, and interpretive work is required to discern it; or it is an open-formula higher-order principle, and interpretive work is required to apply it. If we intend to be ethical, we need to focus on that interpretive work. I believe the reciprocity of authority and responsibility and the reciprocity of mutual recognition both also point to a similar openness and a similar need for work. (See also Necessity in Normativity; Mutual Recognition; Making It Explicit.)

Self-Referential Rules

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).”

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.