Tag: Brandom

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;.)

Immediacy

One of Brandom’s many contributions is a sharp critique of foundational uses of immediacy. He points out that this was a major theme in Hegel as well. Wilfrid Sellars called Hegel “that great foe of immediacy”.

In my youth, I believed in a sort of rational intuition in which complex content would be presented originally as a simultaneous whole, and only later (somewhat artificially) analyzed into steps. I now think this is completely wrong.

We certainly can encounter complex content in an immediate way, but I would now argue that this is like knowing how to ride a bicycle, which means that the immediacy is never primitive. Rather, all immediacy is what Hegel called mediated immediacy, which is something that has come to be immediate but did not start out that way.

We apprehend immediacy through something like Kantian intuition. Kant famously said there is no “intellectual” intuition, and that intuition without concepts is blind. He also suggested that the mental correlate of physical sensation was a kind of intuition. I want to say that intuition is not a kind of knowledge at all, but more like a kind of feeling. Feeling is not knowledge either, but it is very important in life overall.

Immediacy as noninferential input does not positively give us any truth. Brandom points out, however, that it does have a very important role in exposing problems with our current syntheses. Such problems drive learning and progress. (See also Error.)