Convention, Novelty, and Truth in Language

We have been exploring the earliest publicly available work of the great contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom, his doctoral dissertation from 1976. He has been concerned to develop the philosophy of language along pragmatist lines, while working hard to point out that a pragmatist approach need not be construed as globally rejecting talk about objectivity, truth, and reality. The pragmatist approach is appealing as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivist and objectivist excesses. This is the last chapter before his conclusion.

“[W]e saw how the notion of truth and the truth conditions of sentences could arise in a pragmatic investigation into the social practices which are the use of a language by a population. That is, we saw how an account of social practices (which are whatever the linguistic community takes them to be) can require us to consider the sentences uttered in those practices as making claims which are objectively true or false, regardless of what the community takes them to be” (Brandom, Practice and Object, p. 129).

He has argued earlier that understanding the meaning of compound sentences (in which one clause refers to and modifies another) implicitly does after all presuppose a technical concept of truth that goes beyond the warranted assertibility that Dewey recommends as a less pretentious replacement for truth-talk.

Both in ordinary life and in ordinary ethical discourse, warranted assertibility — justification in taking things to be such-and-such — is able to do the work commonly allotted to claims about truth that is what it is independent of us. But insofar as we engage in the meta-level discourse about discourse that is already implied by the understanding of compound sentences, it becomes necessary to introduce a distinction between how things are for us and how they are in themselves. This kind of situation can also be seen as motivation for Kant’s talk about “things in themselves”.

“[W]e will see how that sort of inquiry requires that a sophisticated grammar be attributed to the language being investigated, and in particular requires notions of syntactic deep-structure, meaning, and denotation or reference. We thus extend the method of the previous chapter to consider sub-sentential linguistic components, and see what it is about the practices associated with them in virtue of which it is appropriate to associate them with objective things or features” (pp. 129-130).

He will defend Chomsky’s notion of deep syntactic structure objectively existing in natural language against Quine’s instrumentalist critique.

Only by abstraction from things said do we come to consider individual words in isolation. In common with his later work and at odds with the standard compositional account of meaning in linguistics and analytic philosophy of language, in the understanding of meaning Brandom here gives explanatory priority to sentences over words, and to propositions over terms. This will be more explicitly thematized in his later work.

The compound sentences analyzed by Dummett that Brandom refers to as requiring an auxilary notion of truth beyond epistemic justifiability partake of the character of discourse about discourse, because some parts of them refer to and modify other parts.

He considers what it means to investigate the use of a natural language — what he will later call normative pragmatics. Investigating language use implicitly means investigating proprieties of use, along with their origin and legitimation. We may also collect ordinary empirical facts about the circumstances of concrete “takings” of propriety and legitimacy and their contraries, without prejudice as to whether or not those takings are ultimately to be endorsed by us.

Using the neutral language of “regularities”, he specifies a sort of minimalist, almost behaviorist framework for investigating language use that is designed to be acceptable to empiricists. In later work, he develops a detailed analogy between the deontic moral “necessity” of Kantian duty and a “subjunctively robust” modal necessity of events following events that is inspired by the work of analytic philosopher David Lewis on modality and possible worlds.

“We may divide these regularities of conduct into two basic kinds: Regularities concerning what noises are made, and regularities concerning the occasions on which they are made…. The phonetic descriptions are just supposed to be some rule which tells us what counts as an instance of what utterance-type…. Without attempting to say anything more specific about these regularities, we can express what a speaker, as we say, ‘knows’, when he knows how to use an utterance-type by associating with it a set of assertibility conditions” (p. 130).

“In terms of these notions, we can represent a language by a set of ordered pairs called sentences. The first element of each ordered pair is a phonetic description and the second element is a set of assertibility conditions…. A linguist who has such a representation of the sentences of some alien language ought to be able, subject to various practical constraints, to duplicate the competence of the natives, that is, to converse with them as they converse with each other” (p. 131).

Here he is applying a stipulative re-definition of the ordinary English word “sentence”. “Ordered” pair just means it is always possible, given a member of the pair, to say which member it is. The pair here consists of 1) the sequence of sounds by which a particular sentence is identified, and 2) the conditions under which it is appropriate to use that sentence.

“[A] theory of the use of a language just is some mechanism for generating a list of ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions which codifies the social practices which are speaking the language” (p. 132).

Every sentence in every natural language has the two above aspects — a recognizable series of sounds that identifies it, and conditions for its appropriate use.

“Speaking only about the first element of the ordered pairs which we have taken to specify a language, Quine takes the task of a theory of syntax to be the generation of the infinite set of phonetic descriptions. He then argues that if the aim of a theory of syntax is determined by this target description of speaker competence, then many different axiomatizations will generate the same set of phonetic descriptions, and hence be descriptively adequate. Insofar as a theory of syntax is a part of the project of generating the right set of sentences, then, we may choose between alternative theories only on the basis of convenience of their representation (pp. 132-133).”

This is an example of Quine’s instrumentalism that was mentioned earlier. Syntactic constructs in a natural language like English are identifiable by their mapping to distinct series of sounds. I haven’t spent enough time on Quine directly to say much more at this point, but to identify syntax with the phonetics used to pick out syntactic distinctions seems reductionst. Before criticizing it, he elaborates on Quine’s view.

“Representing the conversational capacities as ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, we will see a good translation as associating with each phonetic description in one language a phonetic description in the other which is paired with the same assertibility conditions…. In this way a translation function would enable one to converse in a foreign language. If the goals of translation are regarded as determined in this way by pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, then convenience of representation and arbitrary choice will enter here as much as on the syntactic side” (p. 133).

“Denotational relations are presumably correlations between phonetically distinguishable elements … which appear in the phonetic descriptions of many sentences, and some element which regularly appears in the assertibility conditions of those sentences. A theory of denotation would consist of a relatively small list of such correlations, together with a set of structural rules which would permit the derivation of the full set of ordered pairs which are the sentences of the language, by combination of the various elements…. If one such axiomatization or recipe is possible, many are” (p. 134).

“More generally, given any scheme, we can substitute as the denotation of any phonetically specified expression anything systematically related to it, …and adjust the rest of the scheme to get the same assertibility conditions” (pp. 135-136).

“The point is that we may think of a language as being an abstract object consisting of a set of social practices…. If one now considers the various theoretical notions which have been thought to be crucial to the specification of a language by those who are not primarily concerned with social practices — the syntactic and semantic structure of its sentences, their meaning and the denotation of expressions occurring in them — one finds these notions playing drastically reduced roles” (p. 136).

“It is our purpose in this chapter to show how to circumvent … conventionalism while retaining the pragmatic point of view which renders language as comprised of social practices” (p. 137).

Classic 20th century analytic philosophy has a very thin notion of language use, effectively identifying it with empirically existing conventions. In contrast to this, Brandom sees in Noam Chomsky’s linguistics a crucial recognition of the ubiquity of linguistic novelty. He quotes Hilary Putnam’s critique of conventionalism:

“We see now why conventionalism is not usually recognized as essentialism. It is not usually recognized as essentialism because it is negative essentialism. Essentialism is usually criticized because the essentialist intuits too much. He claims to see that too many properties are part of a concept. The negative essentialist, the conventionalist, intuits not that a great many strong properties are part of a concept, but that only a few could be part of a concept” (ibid).

In contemporary usage, “essentialism” is a bad thing that consists in taking putatively unproblematic essences of things for granted. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle’s preoccupation with questions of what we translate as “essence” reflects a significant problematization.

Brandom now turns to a careful criticism of Quine.

“Quine’s arguments as we have reconstructed them seek to show that, for a particular specification …, the role of a translation function (or of syntactic deep structure, or of denotational scheme) can be played equally well by a number of different notions” (p. 138).

“Such sound conventionalist arguments cannot be refuted. They can be shown not to impugn the usefulness or objectivity of the notions they apply to. To do this one simply has to come up with some other project, with respect to which the various versions of, e.g., translation, do not play equally well the role that notion is invoked to play” (pp.138-139).

“The question I want to consider is, roughly, where the assertibility conditions and phonetic descriptions come from. In virtue of what does a sentence have the assertibility conditions and phonetic description that it does?” (p. 140).

Questions about conventional use are questions of empirical fact. Brandom’s “in virtue of what” question is on the other hand properly philosophical, in a sense that Plato and Aristotle would recognize.

We come to Brandom’s defense of Chomsky against Quine.

“Chomsky has argued on statistical grounds that most sentences used by adult native speakers have never been heard or used by that speaker before, and indeed that the majority of these have never been uttered by anyone in the history of the language. This is a striking empirical observation of far-reaching theoretical significance. Let us consider the sentences of English which have never yet been used. Not just any phonetic description is the phonetic description of some sentence of this set…. But a native speaker can not only discriminate between the phonetic descriptions which are on this list and conform to them in his own utterances, he has exactly the same acquaintance with the assertibility conditions of such a sentence that he does with the assertibility conditions of some familiar sentence like ‘Please pass the salt’. That is, a native speaker can discriminate between occasions on which it might be appropriately used and those on which it would be inappropriate. Granting, as we must, that there is a community of dispositions concerning these novel sentences which is sufficient to determine a social practice regarding their use, a notion of correct or incorrect utterance, surely this fact is remarkable. Why should the community agree as much about how to use sentences no one has ever heard before as about how to use common ones?” (pp. 140-141).

“For human beings, training in the use of the relatively few sentences we have actually been exposed to determines how we will use (or would use) the vast majority of sentences which we have not been exposed to” (p. 142).

“The question ‘In virtue of what is there a correct usage for a sentence no one has ever used before’ is distinct from, but not independent of the question ‘How do individual members of the linguistic community come to acquire dispositions which conform to the standard of correct usage for novel sentences?’ The questions are distinct because no individual’s dispositions, however acquired, establish a standard of correct usage. The questions are not independent since using a sentence is a social practice…. The question of how such agreement is achieved, its source and circumstance, is clearly related to the question of how individuals come to behave in ultimately agreeable ways…. The explanation of projection by populations must ultimately rest on facts about individual projective capacities…, although that explanation need not resemble the explanation of any such individual capacity” (pp. 143-144).

He clarifies what he means by projection.

“I want to argue that a theory of grammar is properly a part of the attempt to explain and predict the projective capacities of language-using populations. A theory of syntactic structure, of meaning, and of denotation and truth are to provide a framework for accounting for the empirical fact that the practices of a population which are the use of [a] relatively small number of sentences of a natural language determines, for that population, the use of a potentially infinite remainder they have never been exposed to” (p. 144).

“The notion of ‘grammar’ which I am addressing here is that of an interpreted categorial-transformational grammar. Such a grammar is an account of the generation of surface sentences of a language … from an underlying set of deep structures” (p. 144).

This is grammar in a Chomskyan rationalist, antibehaviorist sense.

“The projective capacities which are to be explained are obviously not entailed by the practices and dispositions codified in a set of those phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions…. An account of projection is thus an explanation of how people, being the sorts or organisms that we are, can engage in the complex social practices we do engage in. It is just this sort of inquiry which we considered … as the sort of inquiry within which the objects involved in a practice become important” (p. 145).

This puts new light on how individual words and phrases come to mean what they do.

“Consideration of projective facts of this sort can lead us, further, to attribute structural classes of sub-sentential components to some speaker” (ibid).

“We are interested in seeing how, by looking at facts about the acquisition of vocabulary and compounding forms by a subject, we can in principle explain his open-ended competence to use novel utterances, by exhibiting that competence as the product of projective capacities associated with classes of sub-sentential components” (p. 147).

“Projective classes for an individual were pictured as attributed on the basis of two sorts of acquisition, roughly the acquisition of some projective form, and the acquisition of vocabulary” (pp. 147-148).

“Indeed, it is only in terms of such projective dispositions that we can explain the notion of correctness for novel utterances. We can only explain how there should be such an agreement in terms of shared structural classes induced by familiar expressions, which determine the projection to novel utterances” (p. 148).

Linguistic structure is a theoretical object of just the kind whose status is a matter of dispute between the realists and the instrumentalists.

“This picture of linguistic structure as postulated to account for a speaker’s ability to use novel utterances correctly, on the basis of facts about the acquisition of capacities to project sub-sentential expressions, leads immediately to a change in the criteria of adequacy we impose upon translation functions, and accordingly to a change in the notion of the ‘meaning’ of a sentence which is preserved by translation” (p. 150).

From an empiricist point of view, questions about norms are questions of fact about what is usually the case. Empirical norms are “norms” in a non-normative, statistical sense of “normal” that has nothing to do with what should be the case, except accidentally. The projection of grammar to novel cases on the other hand is possible because grammar has a properly normative sense of “right” usage that is independent of whatever we conclude are the facts about statistically “usual” usage.

“[I]f translation is really to transform the capacity to speak one language into the capacity to speak another, it must transform an individual’s capacity to project novel sentences…. In order to learn to speak the new language, to form novel sentences and use them appropriately, an individual must have a translation-scheme which does more than match assertibility conditions. It must generate the matched assertibility conditions of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a familiarity with the elements out of which they are constructed, as exhibited in fairly small samples” (p. 150).

Speaking is not merely the utterance of sounds, and it is not just an imitation of other speaking. Concrete meanings presuppose learned notions of rightness or goodness of fit that are furthermore always in principle disputable. This also requires a non-behaviorist account of learning.

“Our account of this fact must show how what the subject learned to do before enables him to use this expression in just this way now, even though he has never been exposed to a correct use of it” (p. 151).

“Projection is not just a matter of using novel utterances, but also of using familiar ones under novel circumstances” (ibid).

“We can conclude that competence involved, not just in using … a free-standing utterance, but in projecting it as a genuine component of compound utterances, cannot be expressed merely by assertibility conditions, but requires some additional element” (p. 153).

“We should notice that the argument we have just considered is formally analogous to two arguments we have seen before. In the first place, it is just the same style of argument which we employed … in order to show that truth conditions were required to account for the contribution by component sentences to the assertibility conditions of compound sentences containing them…. All we have done here is to extend the earlier argument to sub-sentential compounding, an extension made possible by the more detailed consideration of why compounding is important. Second, this argument … is analogous to the ‘syntactic’ arguments of Chomsky…. In each case similar surface forms (phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions respectively) are assigned different deep structures on the basis of their different projective roles…. So it is clear that these expressions would have to be associated with something besides assertibility conditions in our theory of their projection anyway” (pp. 154-155).

“Our explanation of the fact that there are correct phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions for sentences no one has ever used before will be that the use of those sentences is determined by the grammar, … and that any individual’s learning to use the language is his learning to conform to the regularities of projection codified in that grammar” (p. 156).

“We have found that explaining the actual, empirical generation of the sentences of the language, shown by the sorts of projection of one corpus of utterances onto another which actually occur, requires that structural elements underlying phonetic structure be assigned to parallel structural elements underlying the assertibility conditions…. Just as the structure underlying the phonetic descriptions is plausibly identified as syntactic structure, so the corresponding structure underlying assertibility conditions is plausibly identified with semantic structure” (ibid).

“The same argument which gave us objective truth conditions … may thus be extended, within the context of our more detailed account of the empirical project which produces a grammar, to yield a parallel account of the function and origin of objective denotations” (p. 158).

“The case of the brown rabbit with a white foot shows that the denotations associated with the expressions ‘rabbit’ and ‘undetached rabbit-part’ must determine in some way the boundaries which white patches must exhibit in order to be grounds for reporting white rabbits or white undetached rabbit-parts” (ibid).

“But the boundaries which determine what objects or objective features are denoted by the expressions are not apparent boundaries…. Explaining the different patterns of projection of the elements of these pairs requires an objective difference in boundaries around white patches” (p. 159).

“It is important to realize that our grammar does not just seek to account for individual linguistic competence. It seeks to account for the shared projective practices in virtue of which there is a distinction between correct and incorrect uses of sentences no one has ever used before…. The grammar must account for the correct and incorrect potential uses of even quite complicated sentences which the ordinary man would never use” (ibid).

“[D]enotational schemes are part of an empirical explanation of certain social practices. Such explanations must cohere with the empirical explanations we are prepared to offer for other sorts of human conduct…. It is a prime virtue of the account we have offered of the question to which a grammar would be an answer that it shows us we can pick the objects in terms of which we explain projective practices in the same way we pick the objects in terms of which we explain color vision, indigestion, and quasars” (p. 162).

Here he is appealing to empirical explanation, and to something like the positivist notion of the unity of science. I am inclined to go to the opposite extreme, and to argue that genuine explanation is never merely empirical. There are empirical things, and we do want to explain them. There also is an empirical field of experience, but it too belongs to what is to be explained. In themselves empirical things do not explain anything. I think, though, that coherence does not apply only to explanation. There is also an implicit coherence on the level of what is to be explained. That is the sounder basis of the ideal of the unity of science.

In later work he explicitly criticizes empiricism in the philosophy of science, but he continues to be interested in empirical things, as evinced by many of his examples and by the theme of “semantic descent” in A Spirit of Trust.

Pragmatics of Inquiry

The third chapter of Brandom’s 1976 dissertation addresses a dispute in 20th-century philosophy of science between “realism” and “instrumentalism”. He aims to overcome this dichotomy with the help of concepts developed by John Dewey (1859-1952). Besides its intrinsic interest, the discussion sheds additional light on several terms that are prominent in Brandom’s later work.

“Within the structure of classical (positivist) philosophy of science there was a genuine and easily formulable issue between realists and instrumentalists concerning the nature of scientific theories. Both parties agreed that statements reporting observations are either true or false, and that the terms used in true observational statements refer to actual objects and properties. The realist claimed that theoretical statements are also true or false, and that if true their terms refer to actual objects and properties. The instrumentalist regarded theoretical statements as convenient codifications of inferential practices concerning observational statements. Theoretical statements are rather to be read as expressing rules for complicated practices of material inference. The origin of this suggestion for reading putative propositions as rules for inferential practices lies in the fact that in a formal logical system one can in general replace any premise such as ‘n is an A‘ with material inferential rules of the form ‘From “All As are Bs” infer “n is a B” ‘ ” (Brandom, “Practice and Object”, p. 71).

Here Brandom already makes use of Sellars’ notion of material inference, which is the foundation of the “inferentialism” that will be propounded in his first big book Making It Explicit (1994). Within the current chapter, he approaches realism and instrumentalism in an even-handed manner, but his references to this discussion elsewhere in this work are slanted in the direction of criticizing instrumentalism. Given that his later inferentialism advocates something closely related to what he criticizes here, it is clear that his thinking on this matter has evolved.

In the current context, “realism” refers not to a direct or naive realism (the idea that we directly interact with objectively real things, which are more or less as we take them to be), but to a commitment to the reality of theoretical objects. Alongside this he implicitly portrays both parties to the dispute as holding to a kind of empiricism that he does not criticize here, but does criticize in his later works.

“Beginning with Pierce, the primary motivation for wanting to eliminate commitment to theoretical objects has been a desire to accommodate the sort of open-ended conceptual change which has characterized scientific inquiry from the beginning…. Appreciation of this sort of conceptual change has taken the form of a regulative principle to the effect that there are to be no claims taken as ‘fixed points’ settled once and for all…. This is referred to by Pierce and Popper as ‘fallibilism’, and by Quine as the ‘revisability in principle’ of our beliefs and the concepts they are couched in” (pp. 71-72).

I hold in addition that this “revisability in principle” applies not only to scientific concepts and theories, but also to the concepts and beliefs that we apply in ordinary life and in any kind of dialogue.

“The realists argue that theoretical statements do not simply license certain inferential moves concerning observation statements, they also explain the efficacy and account for the legitimacy of those practices…. Appreciation of the need for some explanation of the sort the realists seek takes the form of a regulative principle for theories of inquiry which Quine calls ‘naturalized epistemology’. It is just the requirement that we be able to exhibit scientific inquiries as natural processes susceptible of ordinary empirical investigation and explanation” (p. 73).

The terms “empirical” and “naturalized” can also have broader meanings than they generally do in modern science. For example, I’ve had a lifelong interest in why people believe the things that they do. In this context it is hard to see any kind of dichotomy between justification and explanation. I approach both in terms of “reasons why”. The explanation at issue here, though, is more narrowly causal in a modern sense. (I take both naturalism and “empirical” inquiry in broader, more relaxed senses — empirical as meaning grounded in ordinary experience, and naturalism simply as not appealing to the supernatural as an unexplained explainer.)

“The classical theory/observation distinction simply repeats the Kantian picture of knowledge as the product of a faculty of receptivity (intuition, observation, the passive appropriation of the ‘given’) and a faculty of spontaneity (understanding, theory, the interpretation of the ‘given’)” (pp. 74-75).

More to the point, the common theory/observation distinction in early 20th-century philosophy of science reflects a common dogmatic attachment to empiricism. But at this early point, Brandom still seems to follow Rorty’s negative view of Kant, and he avoids directly criticizing empiricism. But since Kant emphasizes the interdependence of intuition and understanding and says we never find one of these without the other in any real case, it hardly seems fair to treat this as a rigid dualism. In later works, Brandom treats Kant much more sympathetically, and does directly criticize empiricism.

“It is important to realize that the original dispute proceeded as a disagreement about the nature of theories in which the objects immediately given in observation were taken as the measure against which ‘theoretical objects’ were to be laid…. The notion of a theory-neutral, interpretation-free observation language was attacked by Wittgenstein in the Investigations and by Sellars among others, and had fallen into disrepute in the philosophy of science by the 1960s” (p. 75).

That is once again to say that a kind of dogmatic empiricism reigned almost undisputed in early 20th-century philosophy of science. Within analytic philosophy, this commitment to empiricism only began to be questioned in the 1950s, with the work of late Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine.

“[T]he current [1976] situation may be put as follows. In the light of many recent criticisms, philosophers of science have denied that there are sharp differences of kind between objects of observation and objects of theory. Contemporary instrumentalists ([such as] Quine, Feyerabend, and Kuhn) may be thought of as taking this work as … showing that [observation] is more like theory as classically conceived than we had previously thought. So observation is to join theory as a matter of holistically criticizable practices. Realists (such as Putnam, Field, and Boyd) have taken the demise of [the observation/theory distinction] as illuminating our notion of theory, letting us see that theoretical objects are as real, causally efficacious, and independent of our knowledge of them as the classical observable objects” (pp. 76-77).

Each of these latter views seems to make a good point.

“It is not clear, however, … that the new positions are incompatible…. I believe that this is precisely the virtue of Dewey’s theory of inquiry” (p. 78). “Dewey’s idiosyncratic and often obscure account of the mechanics of inquiry … exhibits the realist/instrumentalist dispute as a confusion based on insufficient appreciation of the consequences of abandoning the theory/observation distinction” (p. 70).

He goes on to discuss a number of passages from Dewey. Dewey’s “inquiry into inquiry” is grounded in a specialized notion of situation.

Dewey says “The situation as such is not and cannot be stated or made explicit… It is present throughout [inquiry] as that of which whatever is explicitly stated or propounded is a distinction” (p. 79).

Certainly we never have unqualified “mastery” of our practical or epistemic circumstances, but this doctrine of inherently ineffable “situations” goes further than is needed to make that point. What Dewey says here resembles existentialist claims that existence is ineffable in principle. I was unaware that there was such a dimension to his thought. To my knowledge, none of Brandom’s later works builds on this Deweyan theory of situations. But the way Brandom relates this dubious notion to the making of distinctions puts it in a maximally positive light.

Brandom comments “To ‘know’ something, rather than simply ‘having’ the situation is a matter of repeatables ‘instituted’ within an unrepeatable situation. It is this process which we must investigate to understand the nature of inquiry…. What is excluded by the unrepeatable, non-cognitive nature of situations is only that in a given inquiry I should come to know, rather than simply have, the situation which is the context of that very inquiry. I may investigate other inquiries and their contexts, and this is what one must do to produce a theory of inquiry” (p. 80).

The positive idea that universals arise out of our practices that institute “repeatables” is provocative. No human inquiry partakes of perfect reflexivity, but inquiry is possible nonethless.

“From this external point of view situations are sub-types of the natural occurrences which Dewey calls various ‘histories’ or ‘affairs’. These are the basic elements for which our collective name is ‘nature’ ” (ibid).

He quotes Dewey: “[N]ature is an affair of affairs” (ibid).

Then he goes on: “Situations are a class of affairs which contain sentient organisms. These are the most complicated and interesting affairs in nature, for it is within them that cognition occurs. The model of this sort of affair is the transaction between an organism and its environment in which ‘integration is more fundamental than is the distinction designated by interaction of organism and environment’. The environment here is not just that bit of the physical world which happens to surround the organism. It is that part of the surrounding world with which the organism interacts to live. So from the outside, situations are just congeries of objects ‘falling within boundaries’ determined in some way by the inquirer, and considered as unique, datable occurrences.”

I guess this predates the sentience/sapience distinction that Brandom dwells on in Making It Explicit.

“But if situations are thus unrepeatable constellations of objects, how are the repeatables crucial to cognitive inquiry, as Dewey says, ‘instituted’ within them?” (p. 81).

That is indeed the question.

He quotes Dewey again: “A starting point for further discussion is found in the fact that verbal expressions which designate activities are not marked by the distinction between ‘singular’ (proper) names and ‘common’ names which is required in the case of nouns. For what is designated by a verb is a way of changing and/or acting. A way, manner, mode of change and activity is constant or uniform. It persists through the singular deed done or the change taking place is unique” (ibid).

Adverbial ways of being and ways of acting are far more interesting than mere attributions of undifferentiated existence or action. The association of these adverbial “ways” with a formal characteristic of verbs that is agnostic to the distinction between particulars and universals is unfamiliar and intriguing.

Brandom notes, “Practices, modes of activity involving the objects making up the situation, are to be the basis for repeatability in inquiry” (p. 82)

Now he says it more categorically. Universals become instituted through commonalities in practice, rather than through putative resemblances in perceptual experience. No universal is simply passively acquired.

He quotes Dewey again: “We are brought to the conclusion that it is modes of response which are the ground of generality of logical form, not existential immediate qualities of what is responded to…. ‘Similarity’ is the product of assimilating different things with respect to their functional value in inference and reasoning” (p. 82).

This resembles Brandom’s later critique of assumptions about resemblance.

Brandom comments, “Dewey wants to be able to present a ‘naturalized epistemology’, a theory of inquiry which will account for the practices of an inquirer in the ordinary empirical way, in terms of a set of objects existing antecedent to any activity of the inquirer, and which causally condition his behavior in explicable ways. One of the terms by means of which Dewey formulates the results of his ‘inquiry into inquiry’ is thus the situation. The situation of any particular inquiry we choose to investigate may well contain objects unknown to the inquirer who ‘has’ the situation…. With this introduction to the notion of a situation, we are prepared to approach Dewey’s notion of inquiry” (pp. 83-84).

The way he uses “empirical” here seems to straddle the boundary between empirical science on the one hand, and ordinary experience and natural language use on the other.

“[Dewey’s] official definition of inquiry is: ‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.’ Dewey later decided that this was ill-put, and his considered view is that ‘the original indeterminate situation and the eventual resolved one are precisely initial and terminal stages of one and the same existential situation’. We will see that the ‘transformation’ which is inquiry according to Dewey is a transformation of practices of reporting, inferring, eating, etc. Dewey’s talk of ‘existentially transforming’ situations by inquiring will seem less paradoxical if we recall that the paradigm of a situation from the external point of view is an organism in its environment” (pp. 84-85).

Inquiry is something existentially transforming that occurs within a broadly natural context.

“By insisting on the role of pre-cognitive situations in inquiry, Dewey enforces the constraint of practices and changes of practice by causal relations of pre-existing objects which make those practices possible” (p. 85).

Here Brandom aims to show that Dewey addresses the concerns of the realists.

An interesting sentence in one of his quotations from Dewey is that “The attitude, when made explicit, is an idea or conceptual meaning” (p. 87). The phrase “making explicit” appears here at several important junctures in this discussion of Dewey. The title of Making It Explicit may reflect a Deweyan inspiration. This also sheds light on Brandom’s later talk about the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The attitudes in question are not purely or shallowly subjective. They are practical stances in situations, subject to concrete give-and-take in the situations, and therefore to objective constraints that go into making the situation what it is.

Young Brandom explains, “A situation is indeterminate insofar as it is uncertain what to do in it, what past situation to assimilate it to…. An inquirer enters any situation with a repertoire of practices differentially elicitable by features of that situation…. The situation is determinate or resolved insofar as a concordant set of practices is unambiguously elicited by the situation. Inquiry is the process of producing such settled situations by applying high-order practices of criticism and refinement of initially conflicting claims made in accord with established practices whether inferential or non-inferential” (ibid).

The notion of a differentiating elicitation does occur in his later work.

“For Dewey, as for Pierce, inquiry is a matter of refining one’s practices toward an ideal in which no situation would elicit discordant or ambiguous activity in accord with those practices. Every time a problematic situation does arise, a re-assessment of the practices involved is required, an adjustment and refinement of that set of practices until concord is reached in the concrete situation” (p. 89).

Brandom’s later works express this repeated re-assessment in terms of the ongoing re-constitution of Kantian unities of apperception. Pierce and Dewey apparently put too much stock in a sort of universal movement toward consensus.

“It is important to this picture of inquiry that the inquirer and the habits which determine his practices are part of the situation. This means that altering one’s practices is a way of transforming one situation into another” (pp. 89-90).

“The essential feature of language is that ‘it compels one individual to take the standpoint of other individuals and to see and inquire from a standpoint that is not strictly personal but is common to them as participants or “parties” in some conjoint undertaking’ ” (p. 90).

Language in part presupposes and in part constitutes intersubjectivity. (Intersubjectivity is not something added onto individual subjectivity, but rather a precondition for its possibility. We could not be talking animals at all without others to talk with.)

“Common sense inquiries and scientific inquiries are alike, in that the same general description as ‘controlled transformation of problematic situations into resolved ones’ applies to both. They are different in that the practices of scientific inquiry are developed, inculcated, and criticized in social institutions unparalleled in the extra-scientific community” (p. 91).

I would say that any serious inquiry is an instance of what Habermas calls communicative action, and involves many considerations that do not apply to action in general.

“By looking thus from the outside at an inquirer and his situation in terms of the best scientific theory we have of them, we can also in principle describe conceptual change in an ordinary empirical way” (p. 93). “By describing their practices with respect to the objects which our best theories tell us make up their situations, we provide the framework for an ordinary empirical investigation of inquiry and conceptual change in terms of the physiological and sociological basis of their practices…. According to Dewey, the activity of the physiologist and sociologist investigating the basis in relation of objects for the practices of various groups of inquirers is itself to be thought of as a set of practices which occur within some non-cognitive situation (had but not known) and transformed as inquiry progresses. Inquiry into inquiry shares with all other inquiries the utilization and adaptation of practices forged in previous inquiries, and hence the revisability-in-principle of all these practices and the claims made in accordance with them” (p. 94).

This seems to treat natural-scientific explanation rather than discursive inquiry into meaning as the paradigm for explanation in general. As evinced by the work of Habermas, revisability in principle is an attribute of discursive or dialogical inquiry in general.

“It should be clear at this point that the realist’s claims and the instrumentalist’s claims as they appear in Dewey’s view of inquiry are completely compatible. Objects and practices occupy correlative functional roles in describing inquiry. Conceptual change is indeed viewed as a change of practice, but neither the practices nor the change is viewed as inexplicable” (pp. 95-96).

This is the main point that young Brandom wants to make here. Issues with classical pragmatist sources notwithstanding, I think he is basically successful.

“On the contrary, any practice or change of practice may in principle be explained by appealing to the objects reported, inferred about, or manipulated in any of the practices which are not then in question. This does not mean that there is any practice which cannot be explained or changed, and which is somehow a basis for the rest. We simply cannot change or explain all of our practices at once” (p. 96).

Any particular belief or concept we may have is subject to revision. But we doubt one thing in light of other things that are provisionally held constant. In real life no one doubts everything at any given time.

“There is a certain sort of circularity here, but it is the familiar non-vicious circularity of any self-regulating enterprise, a formal characteristic acknowledged by contemporary philosophy of science as applying to empirical inquiries, capsulized most vividly in Neurath’s famous figure of a ship making repairs at sea” (ibid).

This idea of practical mutual dependence among the elements of inquiry makes foundationalism untenable.

“The difficulty with the instrumentalists is that, having noticed the problems resulting from an ontology of objects, they sought to put epistemology on a firm footing by substituting an ontology of practices, claiming that objects were derivative entities, ultimately reducible to practices which, as we say, involve them…. Dewey teaches us that the problem is with the notion of ontology itself. Once we have become naturalistic, accepting a thoroughgoing fallibilism means eschewing the notion of a categorization of the kinds of things there are which is outside of and prior to any empirical investigation. Objects and practices are mutually dependent functional notions. We cannot account for the changing roles objects play in our conceptual economy without appealing to practices as well, and we cannot individuate practices without reference to objects” (p. 96n).

Objects are derivative entities, and there is a problem with ontology itself, whether it be taken merely as an a priori enumeration of kinds of things, or as something supposedly more fundamental.

“The problem which faced the realists, as we have argued, is allowing for fallibilism in their account of scientific activity. On the face of it, the explanation which the realist wants to be able to offer of the success of current practices, in terms of the actual existence and causal efficacy of the objects purportedly referred to in the theory will not explain why previous views which we have good empirical reason to believe false worked as well as they did. Nor is it obvious how believing in all those unreal objects enabled us to reach our present privileged position of believing in real ones (i.e., the ones which ‘really’ enable us to engage in the practices we do). Finally, fallibilism dictates that we be willing to accept the possibility of revisions in our current view as radical as those which have occurred in the past” (p. 97).

Here there is a clear parallel to the entry conditions for dialogue developed by Gadamer and Habermas. These apply not only to scientific discourse, but to discourse in general.

“According to Dewey’s view, each time our scientific view of things changes sufficiently, we will have to rewrite our account of the history of inquiry in terms of the sorts of objects which we have new practices of making claims about. But this fact no more impugns the project of explaining how previous practices worked as well as they did, than it impugns any other empirical project which may have to be rethought in view of the results of subsequent inquiry” (p. 98).

Naive views of the history of scientific progress as a linear accumulation toward presumed present truth cannot be sustained. When one view supersedes another in any context, it is not a simple matter of truth versus error. For example, geocentric astronomy had an important practical use in navigation that was not negated by the greater “truth” of heliocentric astronomy.

“As long as knowledge is thought of on the Kantian model, as the product of the collaboration of a faculty of receptivity and a faculty of spontaneity (and the observation/theory distinction is a straightforward version of this model, it will seem that there is a philosophical task of explaining the relations of these faculties. (Even Quine falls into this view in the very midst of a recommendation of a Deweyan naturalism about knowledge.) On this picture, philosophers are to tell us how theory relates to evidence, concept to intuition, in every possible cognition. This project stands outside of and prior to any empirical investigation. Dewey, having wrestled free of the picture generating the classical epistemological project, is able to present inquiry into inquiry as an ordinary empirical matter…. Thus Dewey’s naturalized account of inquiry can retain a distinction between inferential and noninferential practices, and between repeatable and non-repeatable elements. These categories are now meant to have only the same force that any empirical classification has, however. They can be discarded when an empirically better idea comes along. Once we give up the receptivity/spontaneity distinction, and with it the project of a philosophical discipline called ‘epistemology’ which is to relate the operations of the two faculties, we lose also the means to formulate a dispute between realism and instrumentalism concerning which faculty is to be given pride of place” (pp. 98-100).

As I noted earlier, in later works Brandom never blames Kant for the bad idea that there is such a thing as pure observation without any interpretation. That is an empiricist prejudice that ought in fact to be regarded as decisively refuted by Kant. Broadly construed, “naturalism about knowledge” is a good thing, provided it does not lead us back to empiricism.

Next in this series: Truth and Assertibility

Understanding Social Actions

The concluding section of the introduction to Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action is again very rich with insights. Several different notions of what rationality is are in play.

“With a formal world-concept an actor becomes involved in suppositions of commonality that, from his perspective, point beyond the circle of those immediately involved and claim to be valid for outside observers as well. This connection can easily be made clear in the case of teleological [sic] action. The concept of the objective world — in which the actor can intervene in a goal-directed manner — which is presupposed with this model of action must hold in the same way for the actor himself and for any other interpreter of his actions” (p. 102).

There is a kind of objectivity associated with utilitarian concerns.

“In the case of objectively purposive-rational action, the description of an action … has at the same time explanatory power in the sense of an explanation of intentions. To be sure, even if the objective purposive-rationality of an action is established, this does not at all mean that the agent must also have behaved subjectively in a purposive-rational manner; on the other hand, a subjectively purposive-rational action can of course prove to be less than optimal when judged objectively” (p. 103).

He recognizes a gap between “subjective” and “objective” views of utility.

“In advancing what Weber calls a rational interpretation, the interpreter himself takes a position on the claim with which purposive-rational actions appear; he relinquishes the attitude of a third person for the performative attitude of a participant who is examining a problematic validity claim and, if need be, criticizing it” (ibid).

Like Brandom, Habermas argues for the constitutive priority of the second person, and of I-Thou relationships.

“An actor’s behavior is subjectively ‘right’ (in the sense of normative rightness) if he sincerely believes himself to be following an existing norm of action; his behavior is objectively right if the norm in question is in fact regarded as justified among those to whom it applies…. [But the actor] challenges the interpreter to examine not only the actual norm-conformity of his action, or the de facto currency of the norm in question, but the rightness of this norm itself” (p. 104, emphasis added).

Unlike Brandom, who is wary of “regulism”, Habermas seems to identify norms with precisely identifiable rules and instituted law. This does not prevent him from saying many similar things about how normativity works. In particular, they both uphold a Kantian notion of normativity as independent of causal explanation. They both uphold an essentially intersubjective view of normativity. Brandom acknowledges Habermas as a significant influence.

“If the interpreter adopts … a skeptical standpoint, he will explain, with the help of a noncognitive variety of ethics, that the actor is deceiving himself in regard to the possibility of justifying norms, and that instead of reasons he could at best adduce empirical motives for the recognition of norms. Whoever argues in this way has to regard the concept of normatively regulated action as theoretically unsuitable; he will try to replace a description initially drawn in concepts of normatively regulated action with another one given, for example, in causal-behavioristic terms. On the other hand, if the interpreter is convinced of the theoretical fruitfulness of the normative model of action, he has to get involved in the suppositions of commonality that are accepted … and allow the possibility of testing the worthiness to be recognized of a norm held by an actor to be right ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Normativity is not to be reduced to anything else. The rightness of norms can always be questioned.

“A similar consequence follows from the dramaturgical model of action…. Again, the formal world-concept provides a basis for judgment that is shared by the agent and his interpreter…. The interpreter can, furthermore, uncover the systematically distorted character of processes of understanding by showing how the participants express themselves in a subjectively truthful manner and yet objectively say something other than what they (also) mean (unbeknownst to themselves)” (p. 105).

Habermas carefully distinguishes sincerity from objective truthfulness. It is possible to be sincere and wrong.

“The procedures of rational interpretation enjoy a questionable status in the social sciences…. In my view these objections are themselves based on empiricist assumptions that are open to question” (ibid).

He defends and builds on Max Weber’s interpretive Verstehen method for the social sciences.

“In communicative action, the very outcome of interaction is even made to depend on whether the participants can come to an agreement among themselves on an intersubjectively valid appraisal of their relations to the world…. Unlike those immediately involved, the interpreter is not striving for an interpretation on which there can be a consensus…. But perhaps the interpretive accomplishments of observer and participant differ only in their functions and not in their structure” (p. 106, emphasis in original).

Validity in communicative action is always intersubjective or shareable.

“Sociology must seek a verstehenden, or interpretive, access to its object domain, because it already finds there processes of reaching understanding through which and in which the object domain is antecedently constituted (that is, before any theoretical grasp of it)” (p. 107).

Underlying explicitly theoretical interpretation is a kind of pre-theoretical interpretation, in which we are always already engaged. Interpretation of one sort or another plays a constitutive role in every activity that is distinctively human. Human uptake of culture is in large measure a preconscious uptake of shared interpretive principles.

“The object domain of the social sciences encompasses everything that falls under the description ‘element of a lifeworld’. What this expression means can be clarified intuitively by reference to those symbolic objects that we produce in speaking and acting, beginning with immediate expressions (such as speech acts, purposive activities, and cooperative actions, through the sedimentations of these expressions (such as texts, traditions, documents, works of art, theories, objects of material culture, goods, techniques, and so on, to the indirectly generated configurations that are self-stabilizing and susceptible of organization (such as institutions, social systems, and personality structures)” (p. 108).

The core of a lifeworld can be understood as a set of interpretive principles, an ethos.

“The problem of Verstehen is of methodological importance in the humanities and social sciences primarily because the scientist cannot gain access to a symbolically prestructured reality through observation alone, and because understanding meaning [Sinnsverstehen] cannot be methodically brought under control in the same way as can observation in the course of experimentation. The social scientist basically has no other access to the lifeworld than the social-scientific layman does…. As we shall see, this circumstance prohibits the interpreter from separating questions of meaning and questions of validity” (ibid).

Scientists are people too. All recognition of validity and invalidity depends upon shareable interpretive principles. For Habermas, meaning is inseparable from justification.

“Historicism (Dilthey, Misch) and Neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert) constructed a dualism for the natural and human sciences at the level of the contrast between explanation and understanding. This ‘first round’ of the explanation/understanding controversy is no longer alive today. With the reception of phenomenological, language-analytic, and hermeneutic approaches in sociology, however, a discussion has arisen in connection with Husserl and Schutz, Wittgenstein and Winch, and Heidegger and Gadamer” (ibid).

“Opposed to this case, the empiricist theory of science has defended the concept of the unity of scientific method that was already developed in the Neo-Positivism of Vienna. This discussion can be regarded as over. The critics … misunderstood Verstehen as empathy, as a mysterious act of transposing oneself into the mental states of another subject” (p. 109).

“The next phase of the discussion was introduced with the post-empiricist turn of the analytic theory of science…. In [Mary Hesse’s] view, the debate concerning the history of modern physics that was touched off by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Feyerabend has shown: first, that the data against which theories are tested cannot be described independently of the theory language in question; and second, that theories are constructed not according to the principles of falsificationism but in dependence on paradigms that … relate to one another in a manner similar to particular forms of life…. Hesse infers from this that theory formation in the natural sciences is no less dependent on interpretations than it is in the social sciences” (ibid).

“Giddens speaks of a ‘double’ hermeneutic because in the social sciences problems of interpretive understanding come into play not only through the theory-dependency of data description and the paradigm-dependency of theory languages; there is already a problem of understanding below the threshold of theory construction, namely in obtaining the data and not first in theoretically describing them” (p. 110).

“This is, of course, not a new insight; it is precisely the thesis that the critics of the unity of scientific method had always put forward. It has merely been placed in a new light because the analytic theory of science has, with its recent postempiricist turn, rediscovered in its own way the critical insight that was held up to it by the Verstehen theorists (and that was to be found in any case along the path of the pragmatist logic of science from Pierce to Dewey)” (pp. 110-111).

This is significant. Habermas joins Weber’s Verstehen method for social science with an explicitly pragmatist view of how science works, opposing both to empiricism.

“One who, in the role of a third person, observes something in the world or makes a statement about something in the world adopts an objectivating attitude. By contrast, one who takes part in a communication and, in the role of the first person (ego), enters into an intersubjective relation with a second person (who, as the alter ego, behaves to ego in turn as to a second person) adopts a non-objectivating, or as we would now say, a performative attitude” (p. 111).

Like Brandom, Habermas emphasizes a constitutive role for second-person forms over the first and third person. Again we see the importance of dialogue. Although by their respective avowals Brandom has a much more positive view of Hegel, they both adopt a Hegel-like critique of objectification and a Kantian/Hegelian critique of the supposed givenness of objects.

“Meanings — whether embodied in actions, institutions, products of labor, words, networks of cooperation — can be made accessible only from the inside…. The lifeworld is open only to subjects who make use of their competence to speak and act” (p. 112).

Meanings are immanently constituted, but the field of their immanence is the world or a shareable lifeworld, not someone’s private consciousness. There is no meaning without interpretation. Interpretation does not just play a supporting role in what Habermas calls communicative action, but is fundamental to it. Conversely, interpretation in its first instance is communicative. Monologue and private thought are derivative; dialogue is primary.

“Skjervheim draws our attention here to the interesting fact that the performative attitude of a first person in relation to a second means at the same time an orientation to validity claims” (p. 113).

The notion of performativity in language was introduced in Austin’s work on speech acts, for kinds of action that find their consummation in language. A performative attitude is involved in a promise or commitment. It is a social act. These are kinds of more full-blooded doing in language that are distinct from mere representation or logical assertion.

“Thus the interpreter cannot become clear about the semantic content of an expression independently of the action contexts in which participants react to the expression in question with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or an abstention. And he does not understand these yes/no positions if he cannot make clear to himself the implicit reasons to take the positions they do. For agreement and disagreement, insofar as they are judged in light of reciprocally raised validity claims and not merely caused by external factors, are based on reasons that participants supposedly or actually have at their disposal” (p. 115).

The “content” of meaning or assertion depends essentially and not just accidentally on the context in which it is embedded. This context has the shape of reasons and a space of reasons, though I haven’t yet seen Habermas use the latter term.

“These (most often implicit) reasons form the axis around which processes of reaching understanding evolve. But if, in order to understand an expression, the interpreter must bring to mind the reasons with which a speaker would if necessary and under suitable conditions defend its validity, he is himself drawn into the process of assessing validity claims. For reasons are of such a nature that they cannot be described in the attitude of a third person, that is, without reactions of affirmation or negation or abstention. The interpreter would not have understood what a ‘reason’ is if he did not reconstruct it with its claim to provide grounds” (pp. 115-116, emphasis in original).

There could be no “value-free science” of meaning. Interpretation is not separable from evaluation.

“One can understand reasons only to the extent that one understands why they are or are not sound…. An interpreter cannot, therefore, interpret expressions connected through criticizable validity claims … without taking a position on them” (p. 116, emphasis in original).

Evaluation is a matter of reasons and the goodness of reasons.

“We thereby expose our interpretation in principle to the same critique to which communicative agents must mutually expose their interpretations. But this means that the distinction between descriptive and rational interpretations becomes meaningless at this level…. Or better: that interpretation that is rational in conception is here the only way to gain access to the de facto course of communicative action ” (p. 119).

For Habermas, the social scientist and the philosopher in doing their characteristic work of interpretation themselves engage essentially in communicative action that is not fundamentally different in kind from the communicative action that the social scientist is concerned to study.

In sociology, ethnomethodology is concerned with the social construction of lifeworlds. It is commonly associated with the claim of a so-called social construction of “reality”, for which the canonical source is Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966). These nonphilosophers deny that there is any objective reality, and so fall into a relativistic subjectivism. Habermas, with his very serious concern for the justification of validity claims, strongly rejects this.

“In ethnomethodology and philosophical hermeneutics this insight has been revived and is upsetting the conventional self-understanding of sociology determined by the postulate of value-freedom…. [T]he social scientist … is moving within the same structures of possible understanding in which those immediately involved carry out their communicative actions…. These same structures also simultaneously provide the critical means to penetrate a context, to burst it open from within and to transcend it; the means, if need be, to push beyond a de facto established consensus, to revise errors, correct misunderstandings, and the like” (p. 120).

Here he explicitly rejects the empiricist notion of “value-free science”. At the same time, he stresses the liberating potential of the study of communicative action.

“Schutz makes a remark in passing that suggests the starting point for a solution: ‘Verstehen is by no means a private affair'” (p. 123).

He again cites the socially oriented phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. Schutz too agrees that Weber’s Verstehen is an essentially social kind of interpretation that is irreducible to any individual consciousness. Human subjectivity has its ground in intersubjectivity and shareable meaning, rather than in individual egos. This is not to say there is no ego, but that ego is a derivative result and not a principle.

“In everyday communication an utterance never stands alone; a semantic content accrues to it from the context the speaker presupposes that the hearer understands. The interpreter too must penetrate that context of reference as a participating partner in interaction. The exploratory moment oriented to knowledge cannot be detached from the creative, constructive moment oriented to producing consensus” (p. 125).

“The social scientist also has no privileged access to the object domain…. Ethnomethodological critique … attempts to demonstrate that the usual constructions of social science have at bottom the same status as the everyday constructions of lay members. They remain bound to the social context they are supposed to explain because they fall prey to the objectivism of ordinary consciousness” (ibid).

This “objectivism of ordinary consciousness” has the characteristics of what Kant calls dogmatism. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning; it is never self-contained.

“Theoretical work is, like religion or art, an activity distinguished by reflexivity; the fact that it makes an explicit theme of the interpretive processes on which the researcher draws does not dissolve its situational ties” (p. 126).

Even interpretation with the greatest explicitness, objectivity, and universality remains tied in principle to some limiting context of interpretation. Definiteness implies limitation.

“Garfinkel [in his work on ethnomethodology] wants to carry out the phenomenological program of grasping the general structures of lifeworlds as such by searching out in the interpretive activities of everyday routine action the practices through which individuals renew the objective appearance of social order” (p. 127).

“Garfinkel treats as mere phenomena the validity claims, on whose intersubjective recognition every communicatively achieved agreement does indeed rest — however occasional, feeble, and fragmentary consensus formation may be. He does not distinguish between a valid consensus for which participants could if necessary provide reasons, and an agreement without validity — that is, one that is established de facto on the basis of the threat of sanctions, rhetorical onslaught, calculation, desperation, or resignation…. The ethnomethodologically enlightened sociologist regards validity claims that point beyond local, temporal, and cultural boundaries as something that participants merely take to be universal” (pp. 128-129).

Habermas rejects Garfinkel’s conclusion that no genuinely objective reality emerges from social construction.

“But if Garfinkel is serious about this recommendation, he has to reserve for the ethnomethodologist the privileged position of a ‘disinterested’ observer” (p. 129).

“In thematizing what participants merely presuppose and assuming a reflective attitude to the interpretandum, one does not place oneself outside the communication context under investigation; one deepens and radicalizes it in a way that is in principle open to all participants” (p. 130, emphasis in original).

This openness to all participants is very important.

“The ethnomethodologist is interested in the interactive competence of adult speakers because he wants to investigate how actions are coordinated through cooperative processes of interpretation. He is concerned with interpretation as an ongoing accomplishment of participants in interaction, that is, with the microprocesses of interpreting situations and securing consensus, which are highly complex even when the participants can effortlessly begin with a customary interpretation of the situation in a stable context of action; under the microscope every understanding proves to be occasional and fragile” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics … is concerned with interpretation as an exceptional accomplishment, which becomes necessary only when relevant segments of the lifeworld become problematic, when the certainties of a culturally stable background break down and the normal means of reaching understanding fail; under the ‘macroscope’ understanding appears to be endangered only in the extreme cases of penetrating a foreign language, an unfamiliar culture, a distant epoch or, all the more so, pathologically deformed areas of life” (pp. 130-131).

When Habermas speaks of hermeneutics, he primarily has the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in mind. Gadamer is another figure I need to write about in the future.

“The paradigm case for hermeneutics is the interpretation of a traditional text. The interpreter appears at first to understand the sentences of the author; in going on, he has the unsettling experience that he does not really understand the text so well that he could, if need be, respond to the questions of the author. The interpreter takes this to be a sign that he is wrongly embedding in the text a context other than the author himself did, that he is starting with other questions” (p. 131).

“The interpreter … seeks to understand why the author — in the belief that certain states of affairs obtain, that certain values and norms are valid, that certain experiences can be attributed to certain subjects…. Only to the extent that the interpreter grasps the reasons that allow the author’s utterances to be considered rational does he understand what the author could have meant…. The interpreter cannot understand the semantic content of a text if he is not in a position to present to himself the reasons that the author might have been able to adduce in defense of his utterances under suitable conditions. And because it is not the same thing for reasons to be sound as for them to be taken to be sound … the interpreter absolutely cannot present reasons to himself without judging them, without taking a positive or negative position on them” (pp. 131-132).

“If the interpreter would not so much as pose questions of validity, one might rightfully ask him whether he is interpreting at all” (p. 133).

“We credit all subjects with rationality who are oriented to reaching understanding and thereby to universal validity claims, who base their interpretive accomplishments on an intersubjectively valid reference system of worlds, let us say, on a decentered understanding of the world” (p. 134).

“Gadamer endangers his fundamental hermeneutic insight because hidden behind his preferred model of philological concern with canonical texts lies the really problematic case of the dogmatic interpretation of sacred scriptures” (p. 135).

“Our discussion of the basic concepts of action theory and of the methodology of Verstehen have shown that the rationality problematic does not come to sociology from the outside but breaks out within it…. If this rationality problematic cannot be avoided in the basic concepts of social action and of understanding meaning, how do things stand with respect to the substantial question of whether, and if so how, modernization processes can be viewed from the standpoint of rationalization?” (p. 136).

“If the understanding of meaning has to be understood as communicative experience, and if this is possible only on the performative attitude of a communicative actor, the experiential basis of an interpretive [sinnsverstehenden] sociology is compatible with its claim to objectivity only if hermeneutic procedures can be based at least intuitively on general and encompassing structures of rationality. From both points of view, the metatheoretical and the methodological, we cannot expect objectivity in social-theoretical knowledge if the corresponding concepts of communicative action and interpretation express a merely particular perspective on rationality, one interwoven with a particular cultural tradition” (p. 137).

Habermas wants to deeply investigate particulars, without falling into particularism.

“We have, by way of anticipation, characterized the rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding in terms of (a) the three world-relations of actors and the corresponding concepts of the objective, social, and subjective worlds; (b) the validity claims of propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity or authenticity; (c) the concept of a rationally motivated agreement, that is, one based on the intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims; and (d) the concept of reaching understanding as the cooperative negotiation of common definitions of the situation. If the requirement of objectivity is to be satisfied, this structure would have to be shown to be universally valid in a specific sense. This is a very strong requirement for someone who is operating without metaphysical support and is also no longer confident that a rigorous transcendental-pragmatic program, claiming to provide ultimate grounds, can be carried out” (ibid).

He is very honest about the challenge of making his case for an emergence of objectivity out of interpretation and dialogue.

“It is, of course, obvious that the type of action oriented to reaching understanding, whose rational internal structure we sketched above in very rough outline, is by no means everywhere and always encountered as the normal case in everyday practice…. In claiming universal validity — with, however, many qualifications — for our concept of rationality, without thereby adhering to a completely untenable belief in progress, we are taking on a sizable burden of proof. Its weight becomes completely clear when we pass from sharp and oversimplified contrasts supporting a superiority of modern thought to the less glaring oppositions disclosed by intercultural comparison of the modes of thought of the various religions and world civilizations” (p. 138).

He calls a belief in progress in history “completely untenable”. This is a sharp difference from Brandom. On the other hand, he also rejects the pessimism of Adorno. I seek to develop a middle road in this regard, which is one of the reasons for my interest in Habermas.

“I shall take up conceptual strategies, assumptions, and lines of argument from Weber to Parsons with the systematic aim of laying out the problems that can be solved by means of a theory of rationalization developed in terms of the basic concept of communicative action. What can lead us to this goal is not a history of ideas but a history of theory with systematic intent…. Thus for any social theory, linking up with the history of theory is also a kind of test; the more freely it can take up, explain, criticize, and carry on the intentions of earlier theory traditions, the more impervious it is to the danger that particular interests are being brought to bear unnoticed in its own theoretical perspective” (pp. 139-140).

This is another point I would strongly endorse. I like Hegel’s view that philosophy is inseparable from its history, as Habermas says about theory.

“I shall take the following path: Max Weber’s theory of rationalization extends, on the one side, to the structural changes in religious worldviews and the cognitive potential of the differentiated value spheres of science, morality, and art, and, on the other side, to the selective pattern of capitalist rationalization…. The aporetic course of the [“Western”] Marxist reception of Weber’s rationalization thesis from Lukacs to Horkheimer and Adorno shows the limits of approaches based on a theory of consciousness and the reasons for a change of paradigm from purposive activity to communicative action…. In this light, Mead’s foundation of the social sciences in a theory of communication and Durkheim’s sociology of religion fit together in such a way that the concept of interaction mediated by language and regulated by norms can be given an explanation in the sense of a conceptual genesis. The idea of the linguistification of the sacred … provides a perspective from which Mead’s and Durkheim’s assumptions regarding the rationalization of the lifeworld converge” (pp. 140-141).

This is a fascinating project, with much relevance to the work I’ve been pursuing here. I’m still curious for more detail on what he sees in the philosophically oriented social science of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead.

Rorty’s Pragmatism

We’re in the middle of Robert Brandom’s recent Spinoza lectures, published as Pragmatism and Idealism (2022). He has been situating the work of his teacher Richard Rorty (and implicitly his own as well) in the context of 20th-century philosophy in the English-speaking world. Rorty aimed to revive the minority tradition of American pragmatism, which historically adopted a number of insights from Kant and Hegel, upon which Brandom aims to further expand. Rorty wanted to question standard received views of experience and representation. Brandom has been contrasting pragmatist views of the philosophy of science with the mid-20th century orthodoxy of logical empiricism.

“[E]xperience is not an input to the process of learning. Experience is the process of learning” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 23, emphasis in original).

“The rationality of science is best epitomized not in the occasion of the theorist’s sudden intellectual glimpse of some aspect of the true structure of reality, but in the process by which the skilled practitioner coaxes usable observations by experimental intervention, crafts theories by inferential postulation and extrapolation, and dynamically works out a more or less stable but always evolving accommodation between the provisional results of these two enterprises. The distinctive pragmatist shift in imagery for the mind is not from mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to flywheel governor” (ibid).

Brandom has also been diagnosing inherent conflicts within the tradition of logical empiricism.

“A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is. Otto Neurath thought that naturalism should prevail, while Moritz Schlick thought that empiricism should. Rudolph Carnap struggled mightily to keep the two wings of the movement from flying off in different directions. In spite of his many pragmatist corrections to and emendations of his hero Carnap, Quine could never bring into harmony his own scientific naturalism and residual empiricist hostility to modality” (pp. 25-26).

It is in this context that Rorty calls for a revival of pragmatism. More than Rorty himself, Brandom brings out the Kantian and Hegelian background of the pragmatist alternative.

“Rorty’s call for a second pragmatist Enlightenment, completing the first, is a Hegelian extrapolation of the original Kantian understanding of the Enlightenment, extending the application of that concept from ethics to encompass also semantics and epistemology. Further on, I will say more about what makes it Hegelian, and what difference that step beyond Kant makes. But first it is worth filling in the argument behind this subsumption of semantic anti-representationalism under the banner of humanistic Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism. In its largest structure, I think it consists of two moves: a Kantian appreciation of the normative character of representational relations, and a Hegelian social pragmatism about normativity in general” (p. 30, emphasis in original).

Here we are at the core of Brandom’s work on Kant and Hegel. It is fascinating to see how much of this he attributes to Rorty. This is a nice capsule account. (I’m still wary of the extremely compressed term “social pragmatism”, which presupposes a much more elaborate understanding like the one he is developing.)

“The first [of the two moves Brandom attributes to Rorty] is part and parcel of Kant’s radical recasting of Descartes’s division of things into minds and bodies in terms of the distinction between norms and causes. Kant reconceives discursive intentionality (apperception or sapience) as a normative phenomenon. What principally distinguishes judgments and intentional actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is their normative status” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This has huge significance. In language compatible with modern notions of cause, discourse around the notion of normativity seems able to express all practical matters of mind or spirit. This was a great problem with which the early moderns mightily struggled.

“Knowers and agents are responsible for how they take things to be and make things to be. Candidate knowings and doings express commitments as to how things are or shall be. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority: the authority to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible. This is the authority to bind oneself by rules in the form of the concepts discursive beings apply in judging and intending. Merely natural creatures are bound by rules in the form of laws of nature. Discursive beings are bound by rules they bind themselves by: concepts they apply, which are rules determining what they have thereby made themselves responsible to and for. Their normative statuses (responsibility, commitments) are instituted by their attitudes of undertaking or acknowledging these commitments” (pp. 30-31, emphasis in original).

Brandom is literally reinventing the notion of authority. This is not some power emanating from a central source, but the authority of all rational beings to undertake commitments and responsibilities just by binding themselves to those commitments and responsibilities. This is a version of Kantian autonomy.

At the same time Brandom appeals to Kant’s provocative, non-representationalist suggestion that concepts should be thought of as a kind of rules.

He continues, “Autonomy is the essence of Kantian rationality. It is a distinctive normative sort of freedom, which Kant develops by turning Rousseau’s definition of freedom — [Rousseau] says ‘obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom’ — into a criterion for genuinely normative bindingness” (p. 31).

The autonomy of reason means that reason is not subordinated to any unquestioned assumptions. Its exercise is free.

I have long puzzled over Kant and Hegel’s enthusiasm for Rousseau, who has usually seemed to me like an anti-rationalist voluntarist, with his emphasis on will rather than reason. I also tend to viscerally reject social contract theory, as a vulgar business-transaction metaphor for considerations that ought to be treated in more comprehensively ethical terms. But this particular formulation does seem to have a more specific relation to Kantian autonomy. “Obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself” implies a strong consistency, which Brandom elsewhere relates to the Kantian meta-goal of unity of apperception. A delicate question that arises here is whether the mythical founding moment of such obedience is taken to be arbitrary, or rather on the contrary is subject to the same conditions of Socratic questioning as everything else.

“I think that in his later critique of representationalism in semantics on the basis of a more thoroughgoing and general version of Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism, Rorty follows Hegel in focusing on the rulishness of Kant’s conception of representation. For Hegel reads Kant as offering a normative concept of representation, as a way of filling in his normative conception of intentionality. Kant dug down below Cartesian epistemological concerns about the warrant for our confidence in the success of our representational undertakings to uncover the underlying semantic understanding of representational purport they presuppose” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Despite his emphasis on autonomy, Kant is very much a philosopher of rules and law, who emphasizes the nomos (law or custom) in autonomy. From Hegel’s point of view, this is partly a strength and partly a weakness. Kant sees formalism as a safeguard against arbitrariness, and implicitly expects it to be deployed in a reasonable way. Hegel recognizes this, but also thinks that every formalism will eventually go wrong.

Brandom continues, “Where Descartes takes for granted the representational purport of our thought (construing it as something we immediately know, just by having thoughts at all) — their being, in his phrase, tanquam rem, ‘as if of things’ — Kant asks what it is about our thoughts in virtue of which they so much as seem to represent something else, purport to point beyond themselves to something they are of or about” (pp. 31-32).

Descartes and many others take the contents of thought and their apparent meanings for granted. Kant and Hegel and the pragmatists do not.

“One lesson that Hegel learns from Kant, as I understand him, is that a representing is responsible to what it represents for assessments of its correctness, in a distinctive sense. What is represented exercises authority over what count as representings of it just in virtue of its serving as a standard those representings are responsible to for such assessments of correctness (as representings). This is a radical reconceptualization of the representational relations between representeds and representings as a normative relation of authority and responsibility” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom lays the ground for a response to Rorty’s rejection of the “authority” of Reality with a capital R. For Brandom, genuine authority is not something imposed on us from above, but something in which we too participate from a ground level. And representation is not just a matter of fact, but something we do well or poorly, and thus something subject to normative appraisal.

“Pragmatism in this sense is the claim that normative statuses — paradigmatically responsibility or authority, commitment or entitlement — are always and everywhere features of the role something plays in social practices. Norms are creatures of our practices, instituted by our practical attitudes: how we take or treat things. Apart from their involvement in such practices, there are no normative proprieties, only natural properties” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Brandom here implicitly associates pragmatism with the Kantian thesis of the primacy of “practical” reason. Kantian practical reason is ethical reason.

Pragmatism has commonly been presented as continuing something like the spirit of the British utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. The utilitarians certainly have ethical concepts of their own, but they are “ethical naturalists” who ultimately explain ethics in terms of utility or pleasure.

Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical reason, especially as radicalized by Brandom, goes in the opposite direction. It makes value judgment the root of all other judgment, including judgment of ordinary facts. Questioning about the good comes before any conclusions about the real or the true in the constitutive order of things. I think Plato and Aristotle would both endorse this.

“This is a social, Hegelian version of a central enlightenment idea. Samuel Pufendorf theorized about what he called the ‘imputation’ of normative characteristics of things: the way they acquire this new sort of normative significance by playing a suitable role in our practices. Social contract theories of political obligation looked for the origin of normative statuses of political authority and responsibility in practical attitudes of contracting and consenting. By contrast to traditional ideas of an objective natural or supernatural order of normative superiority and subordination (the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being), the modern idea is that there were no statuses of authority and responsibility, no superiors and subordinates, until we started taking or treating each other as authoritative and responsible, as entitled to command and obliged to obey” (pp. 32-33, emphasis in original).

Pufendorf played a major role in the development of the notion of a social contract, and early modern secular theories of “natural law”. He was a political voluntarist, and a defender of absolute sovereignty in the tradition of Bodin and Hobbes. But Brandom points out that Pufendorf also sought to explain normative significances in terms of roles in social practice. (Any serious thinker ought to be embarrassed at the prospect of defending sheer arbitrary will, so it is not surprising that voluntaristic political theorists ended up tempering their voluntarism.)

Now we come back to Rorty and Cartesian representationalism.

“The answer [Rorty] eventually came to, starting off with the rough, popular characterization of ‘privacy’ and ending with the substantially more focused notion of ‘incorrigibility’, was in explicitly normative terms. The key, he came to see, is a distinctive kind of first-person authority. Sincere contemporaneous first-person reports count as reports of mental occurrences just in case and insofar as they have a distinctive kind of un-overrideable epistemic authority. We can’t be either wrong about or ignorant of how things sensuously seem to us, or about what we are currently thinking, in the sense that no-one else’s claims about our experience have the social significance of decisive objections to our sincere first-person avowals” (pp. 33-34).

For this, Brandom cites articles by Rorty from 1965 and 1970. Incorrigibility is central to Brandom’s own account of Descartes. At a certain level, the argument does seem to be irrefutable. But it doesn’t seem to do much for knowledge, since what is thereby determined to be in a way incorrigible is just a certain seeming or appearing. I cannot be mistaken about how things seem to me. Everyone is an uncontestable authority on their own subjective feeling, and this has relevance in ethical contexts. But, needless to say, this incorrigibility does not extend to our beliefs about how things actually are. This is an important practical distinction in ethical contexts. You are the incontestable authority on how things seem to you. But the moment you make claims about what is true in the real world, you become responsible to answer questions and doubts about those claims.

Brandom seems to be suggesting that a broadly Cartesian concept of the mental can be retained, provided that we reinterpret it in terms of normativity rather than supposed facts of consciousness.

“Understanding minds in the Cartesian sense accordingly shows up as the task of understanding the nature of that authority. One option is that the authority should be understood as a natural, objective, ontological feature of mental phenomena. But Rorty has learned from the later Wittgenstein to be suspicious of this idea. Normative statuses, he thinks, must ultimately be understood as social statuses. (This is the positive, Hegelian, pragmatist lesson Rorty learns from Dewey.)” (p. 34).

“[Rorty thinks] social practices of according such authority to reports changed. Descartes both theoretically reflected and practically encouraged modern practical attitudes of taking or treating sincere first-person reports of contemporaneous mental events as having incorrigible authority. That change in normative attitudes brought into existence a new ontological category of thing: mental episodes as incorrigibly knowable by their possessors” (ibid).

“According to Rorty’s radicalized version of social pragmatism about norms, the very idea of objective things as exercising epistemic authority over our attitudes — underwritten by the semantic idea of representeds serving as normative standards for assessments of the correctness of what count as representings of them just in virtue of being responsible to them for such assessments — is deeply and irremediably confused. All authority is in the end communal authority. Further, as we shall see, the critical function of reason as legitimating norms, as understood by the Enlightenment and made most fully explicit by Kant, teaches that we can only be genuinely responsible to each other, to what we can engage with in conversation, to what we can give justifying reasons to and in turn demand justifying reasons from” (pp. 36-37).

“This radicalization of social pragmatism about norms is now explicitly construed in political terms of freedom and dignity. ’Only in a democratic society which describes itself in pragmatist terms, one can imagine Dewey saying, is the refusal to countenance any authority save that of consensus reached by free inquiry complete'” (p. 37).

“The incipient pragmatist emancipation Rorty is working toward is the substitution of a pragmatics of consensus for the semantics of representation. All we can do is give and ask for reasons with each other. Authority and responsibility are creatures of those discursive practices. We should accordingly reject the idea that our discursive practices answer to, are responsible to, need to acknowledge the authority of, anything outside those practices and the practical attitudes of those who engage in them. The constraint of the objective world should be understood as exclusively causal, not normative. We are normatively constrained only by our reasons” (p. 38, emphasis in original).

“Like his hero Dewey, Rorty never questioned the utility and importance of a basically ecological concept of reality…. This is the stubborn, recalcitrant reality that causally constrains, challenges, frustrates, and rewards our practical undertakings” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Rorty’s critique of representationalism is founded not on denying or ignoring the causal context in which our talk takes place…, but precisely on a hard-headed insistence and focus on that context” (p. 39).

“Rorty sees Dewey as having usefully added an emphasis on the social character of practices that transcend individual learning processes. At this level, the ‘habits’ that are cyclically shaped by ecological-adaptational causal interactions with the environment are in the first instance social practices. Rorty takes it that this broadened social naturalism (a ‘second-nature naturalism’ as per McDowell in Mind and World) is endorsed also by the later Wittgenstein and the Heidegger of Division One of Being and Time. And Rorty himself goes beyond even Dewey, in making common cause with Wittgenstein in further focusing on specifically discursive practices” (p. 40).

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of truth and representation), study use rather than meaning. When talking this way, he is following the later Wittgenstein (who recoils from his semantics-only Tractarian view to a pragmatics-only approach), James, and Dewey, but not Pierce, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. They should be understood as pursuing pragmatics-first, rather than semantics-first explanatory strategies, but not as trading the traditional neglect of pragmatics by the representationalist semantic tradition for a corresponding pragmatist dismissal of semantics holus bolus” (pp. 41-42).

“He does have views about meaning. But he thinks we should understand it in terms of justificatory practices rather than a notion of truth understood in terms of representation” (p. 42).

I for one understand ethical truth in terms of such justificatory practices. I also recognize poetic truth that is neither representational nor justificatory, but nonetheless significant.

Pragmatism and the Enlightenment

Brandom adds some more background in support of Rorty’s claim that American pragmatism represents a kind of second Enlightenment.

“The motor of the first Enlightenment was the rise of the new natural science — in particular, the mathematized physics of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton…. Because their thought was principally oriented by this project, all of the canonical philosophers from Descartes through Kant can sensibly be seen as at base philosophers of science” (Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 18-19).

“The physical science they were inspired by and interpreters of put forward mathematical theories in the form of impersonal, immutable principles formulating universal, eternal, necessary laws. Enlightenment empiricism sought to ground all our knowledge in self-contained, self-intimating sensory episodes whose brute occurrence is the most basic kind of knowing. Just how the natural light of reason could extract secure and certain knowledge of things as law-governed from those deliverances of fallible perception was a perennial puzzle” (p. 19).

To put it bluntly, the empiricist theory of knowledge lacks the resources to explain the results of modern mathematicized science. The emperor has no clothes.

“Even had Hume succeeded in his aspiration to become ‘the Newton of the mind’ by perfecting Locke’s theoretical efforts to understand the psychological processes of understanding in terms of the mechanisms of association and abstraction, the issue of how the subject of that science was to be found among the furniture of the universe described by the real Newton would have survived untouched, as an apparently intractable embarrassment” (ibid).

“The founding genius of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, was, like the original Enlightenment philosophes, above all, a philosopher of science…. He was impressed by the broadly selectional forms of explanation that he presciently saw as common to Darwinian evolutionary biology, at the level of species, and the latest psychological theories of learning, at the level of individual organisms. And he was impressed by the new forms of statistical explanation that were both essential to the new physical science of thermodynamics and becoming increasingly central to the new social sciences of the late nineteenth century” (pp. 19-20).

“Accounts that appeal to natural selection in biology, or to supervised selection in learning, or to statistical likelihood (whether in physics or sociology or economics), show how observed order can arise, contingently, but explicably, out of an irregular background of variation…. Pierce saw this as nothing less than a new form of intelligibility. Understanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a concrete, situated narrative of local, contingent, mutable, practical, reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats. Pierce speculatively generalized this model to a vision in which even the most fundamental laws of physics are understood as contingently emerging by selectional processes from primordial indeterminateness. No less than the behavior of biological organisms, those laws are to be understood as adaptational habits, each of which is in a statistical sense relatively stable and robust in the environment provided by the rest” (pp. 20-21).

My late father would have appreciated this tribute to the importance of Pierce, in the face of Dewey and Rorty’s neglect. While writing his dissertation on Pierce in the 1950s, he was denied access to various manuscripts by the executors of the Pierce archive at Harvard. He speculated that the executors, who were very concerned to make Pierce “fit in” with the narrow orthodoxy that dominated American academic philosophy at the time, were suppressing evidence of Pierce’s broader interests. Years later, it turned out he was right.

Many writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries treat a new appreciation for process and the emergence of new forms as characteristic of modernity. Of course, they were preceded in this by Hegel. (And if we read Aristotle on his own terms, rather than in ways beholden to later religious traditions, then behind Hegel stands Aristotle as a philosopher of process and emergence.)

“On the pragmatist understanding, … knower and known are alike explicable by appeal to the same general mechanisms that bring order out of chaos, settled habit from random variation: the statistical selective structure shard by processes of evolution and of learning. That selectional structure ties together all the members of a great continuum of being stretching from the processes by which physical regularities emerge, through those by which the organic evolves locally and temporarily stable forms, through the learning processes by which the animate acquire locally and temporarily adaptive habits, to the intelligence of the untutored common sense of ordinary language users, and ultimately to the methodology of the scientific theorist — which is just the explicit, systematic refinement of the implicit, unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures characteristic of everyday practical life…. This unified vision stands at the center of the classical American pragmatists’ second Enlightenment” (pp. 24-25).

The selectional structure Brandom speaks of here is not necessarily normative. Darwinian natural selection in terms of utility and practical success is its main inspiration. But it does already go beyond a narrowly mechanical view of causality.

“This happy concord and consilience between the distinctively pragmatist versions of naturalism in ontology and empiricism in epistemology stands in stark contrast, not only to the prior traditional British empiricism of the Enlightenment, but also to the subsequent twentieth-century logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. The reductive physicalist version of naturalism and the reductive phenomenalist version of empiricism they inclined to endorse were exceptionally difficult to reconcile with each other. Hume had already shown how difficult it is to provide suitable empiricist credentials for the way in which mathematical laws supporting subjunctive reasoning — the crowning glory of Newtonian physics — outran observable regularities, not only epistemically, but semantically. Adding the powerful methods of modern logic to articulate the phenomenal deliverances of sense did not alter this fundamental mismatch. A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of natural science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is” (p. 25).

Without hyperbole, Brandom points out the conflict between mechanist and phenomenalist strategies for explanation.

He exalts the original Enlightenment in the following terms.

“The Enlightenment marks the ending of humanity’s self-imposed tutelage, the achievement of our majority and maturity, for the first time taking adult responsibility for our own character and destiny. It is our emancipation from submission to the alien, nonhuman-because-superhuman authority of Old Nobodaddy in matters of practical conduct. Henceforth we should deem it incompatible with our human dignity to understand ourselves as subject to any laws other than those we have in one way or another laid down for ourselves. No longer should our ideas about what is right and good be understood as having to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority” (p. 27).

“Old Nobodaddy” is a reference to the poetry of William Blake.

(I like to tell a similar story about the birth of ethical reason with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For me, it is Plato and Aristotle (humanity’s greatest teachers, in Hegel’s words) who are the original sources of this “adulthood” of humanity that Brandom so eloquently commends. They certainly did not take what is right and good to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority. Most of the leading lights of the Enlightenment were more timid by comparison. But Brandom also does not acknowledge the ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to solve Kantian problems, pointed out so well by Robert Pippin. Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom all show little interest in pre-modern philosophy. Even the great have weaknesses.)

“The first Enlightenment, as Rorty construed it, concerned our emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters: issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be. The envisaged second Enlightenment is to apply this basic lesson to our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical, cognitive matters” (p. 28, emphasis in original).

The “non-human authority” in this latter case is what Rorty calls Reality with a capital R, which is supposed to be what it is completely independent of human discourse and judgment, and which is nonetheless claimed to be somehow known as such by some humans. This was already an implicit target of Kant’s critique of dogmatism. (And once again, Aristotle discusses being principally in terms of the normative saying of “is”, and everywhere inquires about the natures of real things in ways that cannot be separated from a consideration of discourse, language, and judgment. Our nature is to be animals that are in some degree capable of discourse, which is the origin of second nature.) But Rorty and Brandom are quite right in the sense that the kinds of things that Kant collectively called dogmatism have by no means disappeared from the scene today, even though they have long been called out by name.

Philosophical Storytelling

Plato uses a variety of literary devices to convey philosophical meaning — notably the dialogue form itself, but also the Platonic myths, which resemble traditional myths in form, but are deliberately constructed to make a point. In a contemporary context, Robert Brandom practices a kind of historical storytelling about the development of concepts of normativity.

Brandom’s recently published Spinoza lectures help fill out the picture of his own work, by critically reflecting on his teacher Richard Rorty’s relation to the tradition of American pragmatism, as well as to Hegel. The title of the first lecture, “Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment: Reason Against Representation”, well indicates its scope. Brandom is at pains to portray Rorty, “the quintessential anti-essentialist”, as a serious defender of reason.

We see here the apparent origin of Brandom’s preoccupation with the stories that we tell ourselves to anchor and orient our sense of meaning. He purposely gives pride of place to such informal orienting stories, over formal theories that are supposed to straightforwardly represent reality. This is part of his way of carrying forward Hegel’s sharp critique of the idea that concepts are fixed once and for all in representation. Hegel himself talks about the “life” and “liveliness” of things that qualify as genuine concepts in his sense.

(It is an interesting historical paradox that Aristotle — one of the figures with whom the Latin term “essence” is most strongly associated — broadly agrees with modern anti-essentialism. ”Essentialism” as understood in contemporary discourse is partly a later development, and partly a product of bad historiography.)

Brandom says that at the end of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “in a phrase he came not only to reject, but to regret, he prophesied the ‘death of philosophy'” (p. 2). By that Rorty mainly meant the enterprise of 20th century analytic philosophy, but also the Kantian preoccupation with epistemology and strict warrants for belief.

“[T]he new kind of pragmatism with which Rorty proposed to replace that sort of philosophy is evidently and avowedly Hegelian in spirit — albeit inspired by the naturalized (but still social and historical) form of Hegelianism he admired in Dewey and self-consciously emulated in his own work” (ibid).

Brandom continues, “Later, Rorty would applaud the broadly naturalistic, sociological, historicist impulse he saw Hegel as having bequeathed to the nascent nineteenth century, and speculate about how much further we might have gotten by now if at the end of that century Russell and Husserl had not, each in his own way, once again found something for philosophers to be apodeictic about, from their armchairs” (pp. 2-3).

“Apodeictic” was a favorite term of Husserl’s, referring to the certain knowledge he believed to be achievable by following his phenomenological method. Russell is considered by many to be the founder of analytic philosophy. A great champion of modern science and a pioneer of mathematical logic, he was hostile to what he called speculation in philosophy. Old mainstream analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology both make foundationalist claims of certain knowledge, and they both owe something to Kant’s distinctive emphasis on the theory of knowledge as coming before a direct account of things. (Although I do not regard Kant as a foundationalist, some of his rhetoric could be read that way). According to Brandom, Rorty presents these 20th century ambitions as a retrograde development compared to Hegel.

Hegel’s great lesson, on Rorty’s Deweyan view according to Brandom, lies in his storytelling. (I would note that Hegel himself also makes claims of strong knowledge, even though he is an anti-foundationalist.) This is fascinating to me, because I have come to know Brandom as emphasizing this kind of storytelling, and I wondered where it came from, because it seemed to only very partially fit Hegel. Where Hegel himself is concerned, I think storytelling is an interesting theme, but (I find myself spontaneously saying) making it the theme throws out way too much of what Hegel is doing.

In the case of Brandom himself, I would not at all say that his main strength is his historical storytelling. It is other aspects of his work that make him a contemporary giant — the inferentialism, the mutual recognition ethics, the developed account of the “historical fine structure” of the genealogy of normativity, and so on. I think Brandom overemphasizes telling a particular story, and at the same time the particular stories he tells are a bit historically shallow. Paul Ricoeur has a much richer meta-level account of the distinctive aspects of narrative as compared to ordinary assertion, and puts less emphasis on particular stories.

I think of the storytelling that Brandom invokes as one way of expressing results of interpretation. I prefer to focus on the process of interpretation, before everything is decided.

“Rorty’s idea of the form of a justification for a recommendation of a way forward always was a redescription of where we have gotten to, motivated by a Whiggish story about how we got there that clearly marks off both the perils already encountered and the progress already achieved along that path. This is the literary genre of which Rorty is an undisputed master” (p. 3, emphasis in original).

The Whigs were a liberal political party in Enlightenment Britain, famous for promoting belief in the linear forward march of historical progress. Brandom contrasts an optimistic “Whiggish” genealogy with what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion, associated with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Ricoeur, though, is far from simply condemning the “suspicious” point of view, and even says it is a necessary complement to the more affirmative approach he wants to emphasize.

Brandom quotes Rorty’s reminiscence of his undergraduate days, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, and Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being gave me a taste for ambitious, swooshy, Geistesgeschichte [cultural history, literally “history of spirit”] that I never lost” (ibid).

I am well familiar with the experience of reading Hegel at the “swooshy” level, and would certainly acknowledge that historical storytelling is a valuable literary device that I too often use to make a point. But H.S. Harris’ monumental Hegel’s Ladder reconstructs the fine grain of Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph, with great success. And albeit at a much higher level, more recently Robert Pippin has even reconstructed what is at stake in the argument of Hegel’s Logic.

Brandom himself impresses me for the exemplary thoroughness of his own detailed arguments, not the quality of his stories. But he clearly has a soft spot for Rortyan stories. Although I tell such stories myself as part of a necessary pedagogy, I’m very concerned on the other hand not to lose the fine grain of the twists and turns and transformations and reversals that make up history. I don’t give my own stories any higher status than Platonic “likely stories”.

Of the three works Rorty mentions in the quote, Hegel’s Phenomenology is among the most important books ever written. By contrast, Whitehead’s Adventures (1933) is a only a minor classic. Lovejoy’s Great Chain (1936) is a shallow popular work of the 20th century that oversimplifies and badly misrepresents the philosophical thought of the middle ages, about which scholarship has vastly improved since it was written. But mentioning the three together suggests that Rorty is taking a lowest common denominator approach, as if the main point of all three were the telling of simplified stories. Lamentably, Brandom too seems to use Lovejoy as his main source for generalizing about the history of philosophy before the time of the Enlightenment.

Incidentally, Brandom’s view of the Enlightenment seems to be largely based on Jerome Scheewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, whereas mine is particularly influenced by Jonathan Israel’s trilogy Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011).

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Desire, Image, Intellect

In the previous post, we saw an argument developed by Giorgio Agamben that for the great medieval Italian poets Dante and Cavalcanti, there is a very close connection between love, imagination, and intellect, and that in this they were inspired by the controversial views of the great commentator Averroes in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. Taking Agamben’s essay as a point of departure, Jean-Baptiste Brenet explores Averroes’ critique of his Andalusian predecessor Ibn Bajja on the relation between intellect and imagination.

Ibn Bajja is historically important for his very strong notion of the role of imagination in the constitution of a human being. He develops this as an elaboration of the Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias’ view that the so-called material intellect is a “pure preparation”, and is purely immanent in a faculty of imagination that is ultimately grounded in the body. Alexander’s view partly anticipates modern empiricism. Averroes’ criticisms of Alexander and of Ibn Bajja partly anticipate some contemporary criticisms of empiricism.

Brenet begins by recalling Aristotle’s statement in book Lambda of the Metaphysics that the first cause “moves as the object of love” (quoted in Agamben and Brenet, Intellect d’amour, p. 35, my translation throughout). Following Alexander, Averroes repeats that “Every thing is related to the prime mover as the lover to the loved” (ibid, emphasis in original).

According to Brenet, Averroes holds that “[T]he human, in tending toward the prime mover, only achieves her desire in acquiring in a complete way her initially extrinsic intellect.”

“This idea here of mental acquisition is an Arabic concept, and not a Greek one” (ibid, emphasis added). It seems to have been Alfarabi who particularly developed the distinction between intellect “in habit [hexis]” and intellect fully “acquired”. In the tradition that Alfarabi founded, the “acquired” intellect is sometimes said to result from a human being’s “conjunction” with a transcendent “agent intellect”. Unlike Alexander, who identified the agent intellect (nous poietikos, literally “doing or making intellect”) with the intellect Aristotle associates with the first cause, Alfarabi and the subsequent Arabic tradition treated it as a distinct metaphysical entity subordinate to the first cause.

The sense of the distinction between “in habit” and “acquired” seems to oppose a common level of achievement and actualization to an extraordinary one, or perhaps an ordinary empirical psychology to a normative ideal.

Averroes in his early works generally follows Ibn Bajja on this issue, but later develops his own unique position.

“In [Averroes’] Compendium of the Metaphysics, he too recalls that that which moves the lover is nothing but the form (sura) of the beloved that we bear within ourselves. What form? Not the absolute intelligible that the lover’s intellect apprehends, but that singular one that her imagination summons: her phantasm” (p. 36).

Aristotle separately says that the first cause moves as the object of love, and speaks of the large role of imagination in what we might call the psychology of thought. Ibn Bajja and the early Averroes thoroughly merge these two considerations.

“When we say that the intellect moves itself toward the object of love, we should not see a metaphor that translates the tendency toward accomplishment. To describe the process of intellectual acquisition, Averroes poses that ‘we move ourselves toward the conjunction’ (dicimur moveri ad continuationem), and with him this recovers a veritable physics of thought…. or more precisely, cinematics…. Certainly, he says, we find a celebrated manner of apprehending movement, which consists in making it ‘a path toward perfection’, this path being distinct from perfection itself (via ad perfectionem quae est alia ab ipsa perfectionae). But there is another way, ‘more true’, according to which ‘movement […] does not differ from the perfection toward which it tends, except by the more and the less […]. Movement in effect is nothing other than the engenderment, part by part, of this perfection (generatio partis post aliam illius perfectionis)” (p. 37, emphasis and bracketed ellipses in original).

We have recently seen that Aristotle himself treats all motion as a kind of entelechy.

“Fascinating thesis, where movement is nothing but the thing itself in its partial realization” (ibid). He quotes Averroes, “To go toward heat is in a certain way heat itself” (ibid). He continues, “This is the model that applies to thought. To move oneself toward the conjunction is to go toward the complete intellect, that is to say to become it, part by part, being it more and more” (ibid).

As individuals we approach this completeness not by perfectly realizing some one particular thought, but primarily by simultaneously realizing many thoughts, from multiple perspectives. Spinoza seems to have been influenced by this, as well as by Averroes’ critique of the image.

Brenet also says that Averroes implicitly references Alexander’s remarks in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (surviving Arabic fragments of this lost work having been recently translated to French) on the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity observable in the process of a body of water’s freezing. Averroes applies a similar combination of continuity and discontinuity to thought. Brenet suggests that Averroes compares arriving at determinate thought to a process of “freezing”, and suggests that Alexander’s model of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity holds good for the history of concepts and sciences as well.

“From Ibn Bajja, Averroes takes [the idea] that our concepts of things are composites. If they are, as universals, abstracted from matter, they conserve a form of materiality in that they only exist for us as applied to the images from which they are extracted. The concept is not simple, pure. It bears the mark of its concrete origin, and is first conceived only through this. That is to say, [the concept] only occurs in relation to the image which is its source, to the point of including this in its nature. That every thought is the thought of something signifies not that it aims at a noematic content, but that it is the thought of an image, of the intelligible of an image, and that necessarily the two, like all relational things, coexist while thought lasts. There is no concept but in presence of its image, with it, just as there is no son in act except by and from a father in act” (p. 38).

This is emphasizing the role of psychological immanence in thought, as distinct from thought’s objectivity, a transcendent object, pure structure, or an ideal concept in itself.

“In this composition, the required image plays the role of matter, not only as furniture, but in the sense that it is a point of support that must be integrated into the grasp of what is supported there. This is what the text repeats, that the concept is related to the imagined form, that it is attached to it, coupled. Copulatio in Latin translates Arabic irtibat, which designates a bond, like the rope that holds an animal. The universal only appears to humans in the copula to the image (from which proceed, moreover, language and speech). In its first aspect, thought thus presents two united sides, or better, occurs as their very ligature” (p. 39).

In more modern terms, even if thought primarily resides in inference rather than in some presented content, a psychologically immanent “content” corresponding to the image is nonetheless what gives it a point of application. Averroes emphasizes the role of immanent presentation in the form of images in the genesis of thought, while refusing to grant them normative status.

“That which is constitutive in the human, who is neither god nor angel, is a predisposition to think, and this, insofar as it is not mixed, necessarily has an anchorage. This pure mental aptitude is not floating, absolutely separated. It has its place, exists only as preparation of a subject, which, according to Ibn Bajja, can only be the image. By this, Averroes thinks Ibn Bajja means not only that imagination constitutes the substrate of which intellect as a power has need in order to exist, but that it is also, via the disposition of which it is the bearer, that in which thought in act is realized. The reading, which takes in a maximal sense the intermediary (mutawassit) status of the imagination, is dizzying. This would not only be the support of the faculty of thought, nor indeed, by the active images, the correlate of conception, but… the very space of intelligibilization, the place of the happening of the intelligible” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Averroes, after having been seduced, contested this, bequeathing to scholasticism an exclusively negative portrait of his first master. The image in the intellect moves, it is not moved; it is subiectum movens, and not recipiens. What Ibn Bajja loses is the equivocity of the very notion of the power of thought. If we mean to designate the capacity for universalization, a universality latent but virtual, initially this works well for the image, which conceals an intelligible charge of multiple ‘states’ (ahwal) close to the universal immediately susceptible of becoming concept. But if we dream of the power to receive thought, which the tradition calls the ‘material’ intellect, this no longer works. Reading Ibn Bajja, writes the final Averroes, ‘it seems […] that he wanted to say that the material intellect is the imaginative faculty insofar as it is prepared for the entities that are in it conceived in act, and that there is no other faculty serving as subject for these intelligibles outside of this faculty’. But he was wrong. The image is only the landmark and the subject-mover, and not the subject-substrate (that which leads it to invest the body). Thought cannot realize itself in the place from which it is pulled, even though it depends on it, and if there must be an intermediary, a diaphaneity of the intelligible, and then a receptacle for what is extracted from the image, this can only be an intellect adjoining but substantially distinct (‘separated’), this ‘possible’ intellect about which Cavalcanti as a poet will repeat that in it ‘as in a subject’ (come in subiecto) the form ‘takes its place and its abode'” (p. 40, emphasis and ellipses in original).

For a general orientation to the point of view Averroes is expressing here, Brenet turns to Hannah Arendt, summarizing part of the argument of her Life of the Spirit.

“To think, she explains, consists in a retreat, withdrawing oneself from place, not from where one is, from the quotidian space of worry and noise, but from all place, from all space, from spatiality itself. For thinking has for its object ‘essences’, and essences, as generalities, products of a de-sensorialization or of a stripping away of matter, offer themselves subtracted from spatial qualities: ‘In other words, the “essential” is what applies everywhere, and this “everywhere” which gives to thought its characteristic weight, is in terms of space a “nowhere”. The thinking me which moves itself among the universals, the invisible essences, is strictly speaking found nowhere: it is a non-citizen of any state, in the strongest sense of the term — that which explains perhaps the precocious development of a cosmopolitan mentality among the philosophers'” (pp. 40-41).

“Cosmopolitan” literally means “citizen of the cosmos”, indeed an appropriate epithet for a philosopher. Thought is nonspatial in the sense that it cannot be reduced to “seeing” an image, as something immediately there in a place. He notes that she particularly singles out Aristotle as having understood “that this status of being a non-citizen is the state of nature of thought” (p. 41).

To be a “citizen” of the cosmos , or of the universal community of rational animals, makes one to an extent a “non-citizen” of one’s particular community. It is also to be capable of detachment from the immediacy and naturality of imagination in experience.

Brenet quotes Albert the Great’s summary of the views of Ibn Bajja. “They say that there is no possible intellect in the human that is the subject of the intelligibles insofar as they are intelligible, because for them the form thought (forma speculationis) […] cannot have a subject in which it is found, given that it is universal, that is to say valid everywhere and for all time — but if it had a subject, it would be necessarily individuated, since every form is individuated and determined by its subject. From this they concluded that what we call possible or potential intellect is that which is potentially the thinking (speculativus) intellect, and that this is the image (phantasma) in the imagination (phantasia)” (ibid, ellipses in original).

“Without following Avempace [Ibn Bajja], many ‘Averroists’ contemporary to Dante and Cavalcanti also insisted on a form of implantation of thought by the image. This is the case with Antonio di Parma, medical doctor and philosopher, whom the two poets could have read or crossed paths with. The problem for him is not to conceive of the non-place of the universal, the atopia of the concept as such, that which is in evidence. Inversely, it concerns a being-there that makes of thought, in spite of the substantial separation of the intellect, something other than a cosmic phenomenon without relation to the incarnate personality of the thinker. The solution is in the image. Thought indeed is abstracted from the image, it is pulled from it, but this does not mean that it ‘leaves’ (leaving us at the same time), as if intellectual abstraction corresponded to a transit of the form, from the place that is the image (where it is intelligible potentially), to another place (the intellect, where it would be in act). For the universal form there is no other place, since by the way properly speaking it ‘does not go outside of us’ (non exit extra nos) when we abstract. And not only does the intellect ‘think nothing outside of us’ (non intelligit extra nos), even if it is separated, but since thought does not happen somewhere else than there where the image is transmuted, it is ‘in us’ (in nobis) that it happens, so to speak, in place. Thought does not migrate, it is not exported, and the atopism of its being promotes the immanence of its fabric. The image, homeland of thought” (pp. 41-42).

But if the image is the homeland of thought, for Averroes and his many Latin followers it is not thought’s destiny.

“These philosophers nonetheless did not make the image their last word. The individual thought that conjoins the universal to the phantasm from which it is extracted is only a form of thought in mid-course, characteristic of the apprenticeship by which physical knowledge proceeds from the punctual experience of things. A human of this sort accedes to the true, but always in mediate fashion, in a dependency on the body that keeps the ‘thing itself’ at a distance. ‘The one who attains the theoretic rank, writes Ibn Bajja, certainly regards the intelligible, but through an intermediary, like the sun appearing in water, where what we see in the water is the image and not [the sun] itself’. The intelligible linked to the image, as a consequence, is like the sun reflected in water, or in a mirror, that is to say also an image, that it is necessary to go beyond if we intend to approach reality as closely as possible.”

“To express this going beyond, Averroes uses a strong term: abolition” (pp. 42-43, emphasis in original).

Brenet quotes Averroes: “The form of the intellect in habitus is corrupted and destroyed, and nothing remains but the material intellect” (p. 43, emphasis in original).

“Finally, the image and that which it founds are reduced to nothing, leaving the power alone faced with the full act” (ibid).

This is indeed strong language, almost ascetic in character. But the emphasis is not on a rejection of worldly being, but on a detachment from overly specific representations as they spontaneously arise. The goal is not abstraction or suppression of passion, but true universality.

“The notion of Entbildung in the ‘mysticism’ of Meister Eckhart is not without support — under the veil of sermons — from the Averroist idea of the effacement or the annihilation of phantasms. Entbilden is to dis-imagine, and this de-figuration imposes itself on the soul, to render it available to the highest truth” (pp. 43-44).

Meister Eckhart has become famous in popular spirituality as a mystic, but he was also the third German master of theology from the University of Paris after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, and held important positions in the Dominican Order. Scholars increasingly emphasize the importance of his philosophical work. Brenet quotes from Meister Eckhart’s commentary on the gospel of John:

“This is why certain philosophers affirm that the agent intellect, which they call a separate substance, is united with us in the images (nobis uniri in phantasmatibus) thanks to its light that illuminates and penetrates our imaginative faculty by that illumination, and when this intellect is multiplied by multiple acts of intellection, it unites itself finally with us and becomes for us our form (tandem nobis unitur et fit forma) in such a way that we perform the works proper to that substance, which is to say that we intellectually know the separate beings, as these last know themselves. And according to these philosophers, this intellect is therefore in us an acquired intellect (iste est in nobis secundum ipsos intellectus adeptus)” (p. 44).

Someone might object that this passage only seems to refer to the Arabic tradition in a general way. References to Arabic philosophers are not exactly uncommon in scholastic theology. But I think Brenet’s implicit argument here is that the reference to the imaginative faculty in the passage suffices to establish that the philosophers mentioned are not just Arabic but specifically Andalusian in the tradition of Ibn Bajja, and this in turn allows us to safely infer that the reference is to Averroes, because it was overwhelmingly through translations of Averroes that the Latin-speaking world gained knowledge of the Andalusian tradition. In presence of such a reference, it seems unlikely that Eckhart’s explicit talk about “dis-imagination” is a mere coincidence.

“Why this abolition of the image?… Even if their competition was necessary and must expand, the images need to disappear because our current intellect, that of abstract thought, disengaged from the world, is never transmuted. There is no great work in the individual intelligence, no alchemy. The possible does not turn into the necessary, the transitory into the incorruptible, and the intellect in habitus must finally be corrupted in order to allow to subsist, under its collapse, only the in-itself universal and timeless power of thought that is the intellect called material” (p. 45).

“But the destroyed images have been indispensable (as a path, otherwise desired, that it is a question of traveling, and not as an impurity that it would be preferable to immediately get rid of)…. The image allows the power of thought to accede, not first to the act but beneath that, to its own power; in actualizing it, it opens it up to its essential capacity” (p. 46, emphasis in original).

“If it has to build its power (for it does not at first have it, being at first only an aptitude), our intellect must also increase its scope, to the point of maximizing it, and it is by the image that it can do so. The image that the human desires, in which and by which she desires, is for the person the space of the appropriation of thought. It is like the mark made on the concept that not only individualizes it, but imputes it and attributes it” (ibid).

“In his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, which the Latins could read, Averroes recalls the progress of the material intellect toward the acquired intellect, and of the first he writes: ‘if this intellect strips itself of all potentiality, when human perfection is realized, it is necessary that its act, which is not itself, annihilates itself (yubtilu; destruatur)’. Stripping, then ruin of the fruit of the stripping. Intellect must divest itself of its power in actualizing itself in the thoughts of the world, then obliterate this actualization solidary with the images of things…. It is on this intentional nihilism, of which the image is the paradoxical operator, that felicity depends” (pp. 46-47).

Nonetheless, “The theory of thought by ‘conjunction’ is founded on a doctrine of desire, which raises the subalternate question of moral action. There is never thought except by desire” (p. 47, emphasis added).

Brenet recalls that in book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains choice by orektikos nous (desiring intellect) “or” orexis dianoetike (reflective desire), “and such a principle is a human” (quoted, ibid). Averroes in turn speaks of cogitatio — the cogitative faculty of the soul, responsible for deliberation — sometimes in terms of discursive reasoning and sometimes in terms of imagination, but it should be understood as both simultaneously. “The principle of the human is only made effective in the crossing and the permanent division of these two dimensions” (p. 48).

The claim is that without ever becoming exempt from desire, “[T]he intellect of the human can have as object not only the abstract intelligible but the separate intelligible, universal in itself” (ibid, emphasis in original). “For Averroes, convinced of the necessity of this thought that is literally supernatural (though operated in the world here below, and by the force of reason alone), the question is not one of knowing whether our intellect accedes to the pure intelligible, but of establishing how it does so, how it can do so, what is the power that will make it capable of this” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This worldly and rational “supernatural” is a technical consequence of Aristotle’s narrow identification of the natural with terrestrial materiality. I prefer to use the term “natural” in a more expansive way, as including both astronomical entities and the whole scope of Aristotelian teleology.

“Why are all the individuals not already thought ‘in’ the thinking intellect, in the way that Augustine held that all humans have sinned in Adam? The solution again draws on the image” (p. 50).

“We have said that there are two dispositions to think in the human. The first is that which her images procure; … the second follows on this, and is its reward. This is the disposition toward the supreme thinkable, which occurs when the intellect has been taken to the limits of its capacity by the cumulative effect of all kinds of images” (p. 51).

“As for the philosopher, the beatific thinker, she is intellectually subtracted from time, and as Ibn Bajja says, that of her which is eternalized does not ‘redescend’.”

“In spite of all this, knowledge does not remain without a body. Each singular body that wears out and perishes in its images must be constantly relayed if the resulting universal is to be a constant event…. [T]he body in its phantasms is dead. Long live the immense Body” (p. 53).

“While Dante wrote his Monarchy to defend in the name of Averroes the existence of a ‘multitude’ allowing all its power to be activated, the theologian Thomas Wylton in Paris wrote an ‘Averroist’ text also maintaining that what the intellect completes is always in the first instance the species and not the individual: ‘the first perfectible of the material intellect is not Socrates or Plato, nor is it the universal abstracted by the intellect, but human nature itself, which in itself and in relation to quiddity is one in all its supports, even though it is numerically distinct in them. Insofar as it is one in this manner, it is the first perfectible of the material intellect, and as such it is — if we speak of a determinate singularity within a species — neither numbered nor singular: one may call it singular, but [only in the sense of] a vague singularity‘” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet has written an entire book on Wylton.

“It appears, but as a vague individual, of which we perceive only that it is some animal, or some human, an aorist, the indeterminate individual of which what follows must show the figure or the face” (p. 54, emphasis in original).

“The phantasm is abolished, indetermination advances, the images return. Desire resumes” (ibid).

Empathy and Psychology

The English term “empathy” is of recent origin; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was introduced only in 1909. But the idea is clearly present from ancient times, e.g., in Aristotle’s idea that a friend is for us like “another self”. At the end of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel speaks of the softening of the hard heart of someone in the position of judging someone else, and more generally he proposes a sort of Kantian universalization of the Aristotelian ethical stance of friend toward friend, in his notion of mutual recognition.

Reflecting contemporary attitudes, the Wikipedia article on empathy is dominated by mentions of various psychological research. In general, I feel deep ambivalence about psychology as a discipline. It deals with matter of vital importance and sometimes affords valuable practical insights, but psychological theories often seem to me to afford narrow or partial insights into the complexity of human being that their proponents don’t recognize as narrow or partial. Psychology and psychiatry are dominated by an uneven mixture of empiricism and “common-sense” views of human subjectivity, only rarely leavened by engagement with philosophical approaches to the subject matter. What philosophy does get a hearing is most often a sort of popularized existential phenomenology, not the sort advocated here.

(Insofar as so-called anti-psychiatry advocates a more deeply philosophical approach to subjectivity, I am sympathetic, but here too the proponents often engage in unsound over-generalization. As many issues as there are with the medicalization of “mind”, therapy can still have real value for helping people, and research continues to uncover new and interesting results. We just have to be wary of overstated theoretical claims.)

I think about empathy mainly in an ethical rather than psychological way. Interactions between ethics and psychology (indeed, between ethics and empirical disciplines in general) are tricky. From an ethical standpoint, we need to take relevant empirical information into account, but in a thoughtful and practical way, without putting the results on a pedestal, and especially without over-generalizing.

Empathy is a very important value to me. In personal life, I tend to err in the direction of trusting too much and sharing too much. It is an important principle to me to give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove they don’t deserve it. I sometimes give too many chances, because I’d rather err in a kind-hearted way than in a hard-hearted way.

Much of the psychological literature on empathy treats it as a faculty or skill, and as part of a kind of social normalization. Unlike the standard caveat that normativity in ethics has nothing to do with mere social conformity, in the institutional context of psychology and psychiatry, “normality” is typically judged by empirical statistical criteria. What is “normal” in this sense is purely a matter of fact, which nothing to do with what is really good or best. But many people assume that what is empirically “normal” somehow has a normative status anyway.

It is likely that there are low-level neurological functions that may facilitate things like empathy, but that does not mean that empathy is reducible to these functions. So-called mirror neurons, initially discovered in monkeys, are specialized neurons that fire both when we do something and when we observe someone else doing the same thing. This could be seen as contributing to our partial tendency to spontaneously identify with others, but the initial finding only concerned externally observable motor functions, not deep feeling.

Again, from an ethical point of view, what is most important is not what the psychologists call “empathic accuracy”, but rather how much weight we give to empathy as a value in our lives. And from my more specific Aristotelian-Hegelian point of view, how much weight we give to empathy as a value is to be discerned primarily from our doings rather than from our self-reports. The “common sense” bias of empirical psychology shows up in the assumption that we can get accurate views of people’s character by simply scoring their responses to survey questions. People’s self-reporting does tell us something, but not the whole story.

How much weight people really give to empathy as a value also should not be judged by the incidental features of immediate social interaction. Someone may be a poor “mind reader” and socially somewhat clueless, yet care about others more deeply than those who are better mind readers, and manifest that in deeds when it really matters. But many people quickly judge others based on superficial aspects of immediate interaction. (See also “Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy.)

Pure Reason?

Hegel’s “logic” takes what Kant calls pure reason as its subject matter. Hegel regards Kantian pure reason as a world-changing revolution, because in contrast to early modern views, it seeks not to imitate the formal character of mathematical reasoning, but rather to achieve the discipline of a kind of self-sufficiency that does not appeal to anything external to it. Kant and Hegel differ on the scope of this self-sufficiency, but that is a different matter.

Early modern views of the world generally rely on many substantive assumptions. There is strong motivation for them to do so, because in order to yield any substantive conclusions, reasoning of a broadly formal kind requires substantive assumptions. The assumptions are typically of a sort analogous to those that Aquinas regards as grounded in the natural light of reason, which is not itself reason, but a kind of originating intuition of truth given to us by God. Descartes, for example, explicitly appeals to a variant of the Thomistic doctrine of natural light.

(The strong Thomistic notion of the natural light of reason and of reason’s relative autonomy from the simple dictates of authority is itself a development of almost inestimable importance, compared to completely authority-bound views of religion such as present-day fundamentalism. Indeed, something like the natural light of reason was never completely absent from the earlier medieval tradition either.)

But for Kant, reason is purely discursive, and cannot appeal to any intuitive source of truth like a natural light. Pure reason is nonetheless supposed to be able to stand on its own. In Kant’s language, it is “autonomous” (see also Kant’s Groundwork; Self-Legislation?). Kant’s critique of dogmatism especially targets assumptions that are naively realistic in the sense of claiming direct knowledge of external or inner objects, but it is broader than that.

Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason is most directly responding to empiricist views broadly associated with Locke, which were dominant in England and France, and popular in Germany in his day; but even more so to the rationalist system of Christian Wolff (1679-1754), which then dominated German academic teaching. (Wolff was an accomplished mathematician who had corresponded with Leibniz, and greatly contributed to popularizing the part of Leibniz’s philosophy that Leibniz had published in his own lifetime. Like Leibniz, he is associated with moderate Enlightenment, while at the same time showing a degree of sympathy for scholastic philosophy.)

Kantian pure reason effectively aims to be free of unnecessary assumptions, especially those of the Wolffian system, but also those of the empiricists. Kant also criticizes Wolff’s and Spinoza’s idea that philosophical reasoning should as much as possible resemble mathematical reasoning. What makes it possible for Kant to avoid assumptions beyond the famous “God, freedom, and immortality” (and for Hegel to avoid any assumptions at all) is a move away from the early modern ideal of reason as formal.

Without ever explicitly saying so, Kant in fact takes up and works with a notion of reason that is close to aspects of Plato and Aristotle that were generally neglected in the intervening tradition. Reason in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel is not limited to formal reasoning. It includes what in more recent times Sellars and Brandom have elaborated under the name of material inference.

Formal reasoning is called formal because it is supposed to apply to all things, independent of any analysis of meaning. But this makes it dependent on assumptions in order to yield conclusions. Material inference — which was also present as a minor theme in scholastic logic — is on the contrary grounded in the interpretation of meaning. It is this reflective grounding that can enable reason to be autonomous and “pure”, with no reliance on anything external to it.

Sellars illustrates material inference with examples like “there are dark rain clouds in the sky, so I should take my umbrella when I go out”. Brandom elaborates with an account of how such judgments may be successively refined based on additional information. In general, if I strike a match correctly, it will light. But under certain conditions, it will not light. But under yet more specific additional conditions, it will in fact still light.

Both Sellars and Brandom — working within the tradition of contemporary analytic philosophy — tend to reach for examples that involve empirical facts, and relations of cause and effect in the broad modern sense. But material inference is more general than that. It is grounded in meaning as we encounter it in real life. Its scope is not limited to any particular kind of meaning, nor does it assume any particular theory of meaning.

Pure reason, then — far from excluding meaning, as formal logic does — is concerned with the progressive self-clarification of meaning — or Kantian “taking as”, or judgment — in a reflective context.

For Hegel, “logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought” (Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., introduction, p. 29). This is what he calls the “concept of science”, and also “absolute knowledge” (p. 28). As I’ve pointed out before, in Hegel these terms have specialized meanings that are far from their ordinary connotations in English. Science need not be empirical, and “absolute” in this context just means the same thing as “pure” or “autonomous” — that reflective judgment need presuppose nothing outside itself.

For Hegel, the standpoint of pure reason (or “science”, or “absolute” knowing) is that of reflective judgment. The whole effort of the Phenomenology of Spirit is required to reach this point, which he then uses as a starting point in the Logic.

“Pure science thus presupposes the liberation from the opposition of consciousness [between itself and its object]…. As science, truth is pure self-consciousness as it develops itself and has the shape of a self, so that that which exists in and for itself is the conscious concept and the concept as such is that which exists in and for itself” (p. 29, emphasis in original).

The reflective concept has the shape of a “self” — a reflexivity — that is not to be identified with our empirical self, but rather is related to the reflective character of self-consciousness, which overcomes the simple opposition between consciousness and its object.

“This objective thinking is thus the content of pure science. Consequently, far from being formal, far from lacking the matter for an actual and true cognition, it is the content which alone has absolute truth” (ibid).

He calls reflective judgment objective thinking, precisely because it begins only after the separation of consciousness from its object ends. Reflective judgment and self-consciousness will not be separated from “the concept” in which they are embodied. Rather, we have here a case of the Aristotelian identity of pure thinking with what it thinks.

“Logic has nothing to do with a thought about something which stands outside by itself as the base of thought; nor does it have to do with forms meant to provide mere markings of the truth; rather, the necessary forms of thinking, and its specific determinations, are the content and the ultimate forms of truth itself.”

“To get at least some inkling of this, one must put aside the notion that truth must be something tangible. Such tangibility, for example, is carried over even into the ideas of Plato which are in God’s thought, as if they were, so to speak, things that exist but in another world or region, and a world of actuality were to be found outside them which has a substantiality distinct from those ideas and is real only because of this distinctness” (pp. 29-30).

Truths are not objects, and they are not given to us in the way that ordinary consciousness takes objects to be. For Hegel, moreover, spiritual values do not have to do with turning away from this world in favor of another one. They are intended to guide us in life.

“There will always be the possibility that someone else will adduce a case, an instance, in which something more and different must be understood by some term or other” (p. 28).

Reflection and interpretation are inherently open-ended.

“How could I possibly pretend that the method that I follow in this system of logic, or rather the method that the system itself follows within, would not be capable of greater perfection, of greater elaboration of detail? Yet I know that it is the one true method. This is made obvious by the fact that this method is not something distinct from its subject matter and content — for it is the content in itself, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which moves the subject matter forward. It is clear that no expositions can be accepted as scientifically valid that do not follow the progression of this method and are not in tune with its simple rhythm, for it is the course of the fact [Sache] itself” (p. 33).

Translator di Giovanni comments in his glossary, “In non-technical contexts, [Sache] can and should be translated in a variety of ways, such as ‘substance’, or even ‘thing’. As category, however, ‘fact’ seems to be the best rendering. Sache, like ‘fact’, denotes a thing or a situation which we understand to implicitly contain all the factors required for an explanation of its existence. Its presence therefore cannot be doubted even when those factors have yet to be made explicit. The related word, Tatsache, was first coined… in order to translate the English term ‘matter of fact'” (pp. lxxi-lxxii).

To me, these sound like reasons for calling Hegel’s Sache something other than “fact”. Especially in a work of “logic” that invokes “science”, the English word “fact” would most commonly be taken taken to mean an unambiguous empirical truth. Both what I think Hegel means and the explanation di Giovanni gives of it seem better suited by the more open connotations of an English phrase like “the concrete case” or “the matter at hand”. The Sache is something objective, but it is objective in the indefinite sense of a Gegenstand [“object” in the sense of something standing over and against us, but whose nature has yet to be determined].

I used to think that reason that would be applicable to life (or to anything like Hegel’s Sache) could not possibly be pure. I now think that with the inclusive character of reflective judgment and material inference, it can be pure.