Tag: Experience

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

Cogitation, Intention

“Besides access to the five senses and the common sense, the cogitative faculty in effect has a power proper to it, to know ‘non-sensible intentions‘. John of Jandun adopts a formula of Avicenna, which he read in Albert [the Great]. These non-sensible intentions are non-sensible properties of the things we sense. These are ‘properties’ of individuals, precisely those of things, and not general notions…. All that particularizes a thing and places me in a situation before it is not limited to what the external senses passively apprehend…. That which is sensed does not exhaust the properties [of the thing], and it is the charge of a faculty like the cogitative to know what the senses do not know” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 245, my translation throughout).

“Common” sense in Aristotle has to do with coordination of the five particular external senses, and especially with identification of objects and properties that affect more than one sense. His brief mention of internal “sense” was elaborated in the Arabic and Latin traditions to include imagination, memory, and cogitation or estimation. Brenet finds major differences between the accounts of Averroes and the 14th century philosopher John of Jandun, who was supposed by 19th and 20th century scholars to be an uninteresting, uncreative dogmatist who only repeated Averroes.

“Where nonsensible and non-sensed intentions are concerned, memory preserves the reflexive perceptions of the acts of sensation. In effect, I see and I know that I see, I touch and I know that I touch, etc.; that which I touch, I sense; that which I see, I sense; but that I see or that I touch, is not sensible…. A particular sense does not know its own operation, it makes no return upon itself” (p. 270).

This is a somewhat delicate point. It seems that in the course of its work of combining percepts from different particular senses, the common sense can be said to have perception of perceptions, i.e., a kind of second-order perception, that accounts for the reflexive element in experience.

Claims about reflexivity in experience are often overstated, in part because they are expressed as top-down generalities, and because they are used as what Brandom would call an “unexplained explainer”. I prefer Kant and Hegel’s more bottom-up ways of speaking about “reflection”.

Aristotle says in particular that we do not have direct perception of self. Self can only be a “mediate” concept, approached indirectly through the perception of accidents.

“It is the cogitative that ‘tells’ us that Socrates is a father, or a caring father…. The Parisian master holds that the cogitative is the principal of the powers of internal sense, insofar as it knows the non-sensible forms…. Memory retains the intentions known by the cogitative, and for that reason it is called the ‘treasury of intentions'” (p. 246).

On this account, the imagination-based “cogitative faculty” is thus responsible for all of what is commonly called our empirical “knowledge”. The role of “intellect” is only to extract universals from the intermediate abstractions of individuals that cogitation produces.

As background, Brenet develops at length the views of Albert the Great and Averroes on the so-called common and internal senses. On this subject, he says that Albert owes more to Avicenna than to Averroes, and John of Jandun owes more to Albert than to Averroes.

“[John] is close to Albert: the senses do not passively receive the non-sensible intentions” (p. 249).

What are here called nonsensible intentions only exist as constructions or inferences resulting from a kind of activity of the perceiver and knower that is concerned with individuals. In an Aristotelian context, knowledge of individuals is a matter of practical judgment, which is also the kind of judgment used in ethical deliberation. In effect all empirical knowledge is of this kind. Furthermore, our apprehensions of essence are reflectively derived in this same way — ultimately inferred from a consideration of accidents — rather than being simply receptive of “what is”.

“Intentions are accidental percepts. In a first sense, a sensible is called ‘by accident’ if it is not known by a particular sense…. A common sensible, for example size, is not directly suffered by a sense (sight), but it is necessary that we sense it in sensation proper: thus there is no color without a colored surface…. Things go otherwise with intention. On the one hand, the substantial individual Socrates does not as such affect a particular sense, since the only things effectively sensed are the sensible accidents; on the other hand, his relation to what we sense of him is totally contingent…. Here is a first reason for the characterization of the intention … as sensed by accident: it is not suffered, but added fortuitously to what we sense — we judge fortuitously, on the basis of that which we sense. But there is a second: we say of a sensible that it is ‘by accident’, not because it is not known by the senses, if the senses are incapable of knowing it, but if it absolutely speaking escapes from sense as sense” (pp. 249-250).

I would not say that this kind of intention is “totally contingent”, which would imply that it has no objective basis whatsoever. Even “fortuitous” sounds a little strong to me. But the main point here is that these “intentions” are neither axiomatic nor somehow simply given to us.

“The question of the object of the cogitative is decisive for the noetic reading of John of Jandun. It is this faculty that spiritually dominates all the individual powers of the human, and founds her intellectuality. The proper object of this virtue is the intention, which John thinks on the model of the ‘non-sensible properties’ ” (p. 250).

“Otherwise said, I know by my cogitative what it is that makes a human what she is” (p. 252). “The ‘substantial difference’ of the individual or her ‘individual intention’, [John] writes, does not in fact designate her substantial form, but a non-sensed property that follows from her individual substance” (p. 253, emphasis added).

“This all leads John of Jandun to assert that the phantasia of Aristotle — the ymaginatio of Averroes — is made explicit [s’explicite] in the cogitative. And if we want to translate the full sense of the major proposition of the Philosopher, … ‘The intellect does not think without the phantasm of the cogitative‘: the actus phantasiandi in reality is the actualis cogitatio, we do not think without ‘cogitating’ ‘” (p. 254, emphasis in original).

In this way of speaking, imagination in the narrower sense gives us the apparent wholes of experience. Cogitation works upon the details of an imagined whole, allowing us to more clearly re-identify and re-cognize the whole by bringing its characteristic accidents into focus.

“This is again to say that the intelligible species, which proceeds from my phantasms, has nothing eternal about it, is not perpetually subjected in the intellect…. In itself, once again, the intelligible species does not exist. It only persists when the phantasms that cause it persist” (p. 255).

John of Jandun is among those medieval authors who contest the idea that intelligible species come to us directly in any simple way. They are not pre-formed. For him they are our constructs.

“He insists that the intention, which causes the universal, is imagined…. The phantasm, in general again, directly engenders the universal, without the mediation of the agent intellect” (p. 257).

It seems that John wants the eliciting of intentions to be entirely immanent to imagination in the broader sense. Here we are not far from the self-contained cogito of Descartes. “The” cogito is a reification of the immanent activity of the cogitative.

“What is the act of the cogitative? We must not reduce it to the distinction of non-sensed intentions. The cogitative knows all the individual material forms…. The cogitative integrally knows the singular, and each of its phantasms comes back to one of the determinations of the ‘thing’.” (p. 258-259).

In other words, the cogitative subsumes all empirical “knowledge”.

“The imagination receives a sensible form from the common sense; the cogitative knows that same form, but in another mode, for sure always individual, but less sensible: subtilized” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

“Each thought depends systematically on two phantasms: the imaginative and the memorative” (p. 262).

Without imagination, we would have no sense of anything being “present” to us. Without memory, nothing would have coherent connection. These are neither guaranteed to be true nor merely subjective. Here we are in a space in between what is merely subjective, and what is supposed to be objective and unconditionally true.

“What is the ‘passive’ or passible intellect? The Long Commentary [of Averroes] says it is ‘the imaginative faculty'” (p. 265).

In Averroes, the passive or passible “intellect” is a third thing, distinct from both the “agent” and the “material” intellect, and human thought involves all three. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to explain human intellect entirely in terms of the immanent imaginative faculty. John rather forcibly reads this view into Averroes, who would have rejected it as one-sided.

“Ymaginatio in Averroes has a specific sense and a generic sense. The first properly concerns the faculty that receives sensible forms from the senses, one of the faculties of internal sense. The second on the other hand has a much larger extension, and stands for the ensemble of these faculties, as well as their combination” (ibid).

“It is not upon the image in a strict sense — that is to say, upon the block of percepts that the imagination holds in reserve — that the agent intellect operates to extract the intelligible, but upon the product of a first denuding, upon that which the cogitative extracts from the image…. Thought does not just obtain a partial supplement of information, or an ultimate incitation; it requires as its condition that [the cogitative] refine the otherwise uninterpretable data of sensation or of the imaginative” (p. 266).

There is no such thing as “raw sense data”. Modern discussions of Aristotelian abstraction have often presupposed an unproblematic binary distinction between what is abstracted and what is not, just as discussions of Kant have often made too much of a dualism between understanding and intuition. This is a delicate point, because we equally want to avoid obliterating the distinction, and to avoid reifying the distinction into a dualism. It is an instance of the old Platonic problem of the One and the Many, where (I would maintain) all the interest is in the in-between parts.

“The cogitative com-poses the intention of the imagined form with its individual…. Remembering consists in bringing back (to present consciousness) an intention of the past…. But again the representation of an intention is not a memory…. [I]t is necessary to search… to recompose the imagined form with its individual…. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination” (p. 267).

This need to search and re-compose again expresses the active aspect of all interpretation.

“The cogitative re-composes what has been decomposed. It restores an integrity. It is the idol of the sensed thing that it tries to retrieve, and this idol does not in any way exist intact. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination. It is not the memory of an image that we seek, not the memory of an intention, but indeed the memory of a thing, by the reconstitution of the best experience of it, the richest and most faithful to the singularities of sensation” (pp. 267-268).

Next in this series: Turn to a Subject

Gadamer on Hermeneutics

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900- 2002) is another major 20th century German philosopher. Even more than Paul Ricoeur, he was the 20th century’s most widely recognized promoter of hermeneutics, going far beyond what had been developed by the romantic Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and the historicist Dilthey (1833-1911). Gadamer greatly emphasizes the importance of Platonic dialogue and Aristotelian practical judgment (phronesis). He takes the ethics of Plato and Aristotle very seriously. He is significantly inspired by Heidegger’s early work on a “hermeneutics of facticity”, but seems to have distanced himself from Heidegger’s dubious historical claims.

“Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics shows him to be a leading voice of historical romanticism…. Schleiermacher defined hermeneutics as the art of avoiding misunderstanding…. But the question also arises as to whether the phenomenon of understanding is defined appropriately when we say that to understand is to avoid misunderstanding…. We say, for instance, that understanding and misunderstanding take place between I and thou. But the formula ‘I and thou’ already betrays an enormous alienation. There is nothing like an ‘I and thou’ at all — there is neither the I nor the thou as isolated, substantial realities” (Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 7).

Here he already makes several important points. First, concerning definition (or better, the constitution of meaning) — even though differences are constitutive for meaning in general, we do not in general get an adequate (i.e., uniquely applicable) definition of what something positively is merely by saying what it is not. Second, he implicitly emphasizes that dialogue occurs in the second person. But finally, like many of the subtler philosophers, Gadamer refines this position by rejecting any sharp separation between I and thou that would resemble a simple subject-object polarity.

“It is not so much our judgments as our prejudices that constitute our being. This is a provocative formulation, for I am using it to restore to its rightful place a concept of prejudice that was driven out of our linguistic usage by the French and the English Enlightenment…. Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous” (p. 9).

This is indeed provocative, because it makes Gadamer’s views hard to separate from Counter-Enlightenment views. It is perfectly true that no real-world interpretation reaches a definite conclusion without some kind of assumptions. But the real challenge is to distinguish what assumptions are valid or unproblematic in any particular context. He seems to be working with an unconditionally negative view of the Enlightenment. I have issues with both the unconditionally positive view and the unconditionally negative view.

A bit less controversially, Gadamer makes a similar move to rehabilitate “tradition”. Pro-Enlightenment writers like Habermas and Brandom tend to use a high-level schematization that gives an unconditionally negative connotation to “traditionalism”. Gadamer would reject this.

“In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience…. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something — whereby what we encounter says something to us” (ibid).

No serious philosophical dispute was ever resolved by recourse to a dictionary. But every dictionary definition of prejudice I have seen explicitly treats it as something that is unjustified. Not every unjustified view is harmful or wrong. But when such a matter is contested, I say that the one who claims that a prejudice is benign should have a strong burden of proof.

“The nature of the hermeneutical experience is not that something is outside and desires admission. Rather, we are possessed by something and precisely by means of it we are opened up for the new, the different, the true” (ibid).

This is quite a long way from Robert Pippin’s insistence that discursive thought must be considered as entirely active, and can admit no element of passivity. On this particular issue, I would side with Gadamer.

“Experience” is another term that can be quite ambiguous. Gadamer discusses historical uses of Erlebnis at considerable length in his magnum opus Truth and Method. Apparently the German word in this form was first used by Hegel. The meaning here is rather far from its meaning in British empiricism.

“The concept of prejudice is closely connected to the concept of authority” (ibid).

Gadamer also wants to rehabilitate the notion of authority. Authority does not mean only an irrational force. Like Brandom, he emphasizes that legitimate authority is grounded in shared understanding. At the same time he highlights the importance of questions and questioning.

“No assertion is possible that cannot be understood as the answer to a question, and assertions can only be understood in this way. It does not impair the impressive methodology of modern science in the least” (p. 11).

Questions are more primary than assertions. He has little use for any kind of technical methodology that could be applied by rote.

“[M]ethodology as such does not guarantee in any way the productivity of its application. Any experience of life can confirm the fact” (ibid).

“How could one seriously mean, for example, that the clarification of the taxation practices of fifteenth-century cities or the marital customs of Eskimos somehow first receive their meaning from the consciousness of the present and its anticipations?” (p.12).

“It is imagination [Phantasie] that is the decisive function of the scholar. Imagination naturally has a hermeneutical function and serves the sense for what is questionable” (ibid).

As might also be said of Heidegger, Gadamer seems to be very strongly on the side of the romantics, and not that of the enlighteners.

I like the emphasis on what is questionable. It helps to moderate the conservative implications of his positive treatment of prejudice, tradition, and authority.

“The real power of hermeneutical consciousness is our ability to see what is questionable. Now if what we have before our eyes is not only the artistic tradition of a people, or historical tradition, or the principle of modern science in its hermeneutical preconditions but rather the whole of our experience, then we have succeeded, I think, in joining the experience of science to our own universal and human experience of life. For we have now reached the fundamental level that we can call …the ‘linguistic constitution of the world’. It presents itself as the consciousness that is affected by history [wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein] and that provides an initial schematization for all our possibilities of knowing… What I mean is that precisely within his scientific experience it is not so much the ‘laws of ironclad inference’ … that present fruitful ideas to him, but rather unforeseen constellations that kindle a spark of scientific inspiration (e.g., Newton’s apple…)” (p. 13).

He leaves a place for modern science in the broader context of human life. Romanticism is not necessarily hostile to science. He points to the universality of hermeneutic interpretation.

“[T]he romantics recognized the inner unity of intelligere and explicare. Interpretation is not an
occasional, post facto supplement to understanding; rather, understanding is always interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding. In accordance with this insight, interpretive language and concepts were recognized as belonging to the inner structure of understanding. This moves the whole problem of language from its peripheral
and incidental position into the center of philosophy” (Truth and Method, p. 306).

“Moral knowledge can never be knowable in advance like knowledge that can be taught” (p. 318).

I would not myself speak of moral “knowledge”, but the use here is highly qualified. He endorses Plato’s sharp critique of opinion, which I can only applaud. He seems to endorse Plato’s sharp contrast between knowledge and opinion.

“Plato shows in an unforgettable way where the difficulty lies in knowing what one does not know. It is the power of opinion against which it is so hard to obtain an admission of ignorance. It is opinion that suppresses questions. Opinion has a curious tendency to propagate itself. It would always like to be the general opinion, just as the word that the Greeks have for opinion, doxa, also means the decision made by the majority in the council assembly. How, then, can ignorance be admitted and questions arise?” (p. 359).

Honest recognition of what we do not know is the beginning of wisdom.

“[Aristotle] is concerned with reason and with knowledge, not detached from a being that is becoming, but determined by it and determinative of it. By circumscribing the intellectualism of Socrates and Plato in his inquiry into the good, Aristotle became the founder of ethics as a discipline independent of metaphysics” (p. 310).

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 vs Foundationalism

In his recent Spinoza lectures, Brandom also summarizes the context of the 20th century Anglo-American analytic philosophy criticized by Rorty.

“In any case, the broadly Hegelian project Rorty was then recommending as an alternative to the degenerating Kantian research program he saw in analytic philosophy did not look to Europe for its inspiration, but to the substantially distinct tradition of classical American pragmatism.”

“Rorty’s remarkable diagnosis of the ills of analytic philosophy as resulting from an uncritical, so undigested, Kantianism is at least equally radical and surprising as the reimagined, redescribed, and revived pragmatism that he developed as a constructive therapeutic response to it. For Kant emphatically was not a hallowed hero of that tradition. Anglophone analytic philosophers thought that the ‘Kant [or] Hegel?’ question simply didn’t apply to them. After all, Russell had read Kant out of the analytic canon alongside Hegel — believing (I think, correctly as it has turned out) that one couldn’t open the door wide enough to let Kant into the canon without Hegel sliding in alongside him before that door could be slammed shut. Both figures were banished, paraded out of town under a banner of shame labeled ‘idealism,’ whose canonical horrible paradigm was the Bradleyan British Idealism of the Absolute” (Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 4-5). 

“The dominant self-conception (combatively made explicit by Carnap) was of analytic philosophy as an up-to-date form of empiricism, a specifically logical empiricism, whose improvement on traditional, pre-Kantian, Early Modern British empiricism consisted in the deployment of much more sophisticated logical tools it deployed to structure and bind together essentially the same atoms of preconceptual sensory experience to which the earlier empiricists had appealed” (p. 5, emphasis in original).

Brandom portrays logical empiricism as foundering on the skeptical “trilemma” (circular argument, infinite regress, or appeal to unjustified justifiers) formulated by the Greek Skeptic Agrippa. Foundationalism in the theory of knowledge typically arises from excessive worries about skepticism.

“Attempts to justify empirical knowledge must either move in a circle, embark on an infinite regress, or end by appeal to unjustified justifiers, which must accordingly supply the foundations on which all cognition rests…. The two sorts of regress-stoppers Rorty saw appealed to by epistemological foundationalists were immediate sensory experiences, as ultimate justifiers of premises, and immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts, as ultimate justifiers of inferences. In a telling phrase, he refers to these as two sorts of ‘epistemically privileged representations'” (pp. 5-6).

In order to avoid skepticism, foundationalism makes untenable claims about immediate (noninferential) knowledge, which depend on the assumption that certain representations are specially privileged, so as to be immune to questioning. I have always appreciated Brandom’s exceptional clarity on these issues, and it seems that in this he was preceded by Rorty.

“Rorty takes Kant at his word when Kant says that what he is doing is synthesizing rationalism and empiricism. But Rorty takes it that what logical empiricism made of Kant’s synthesis in the end takes over both sorts of privileged representations: the sensory given from the empiricists, and the rational (logical, inferential, semantic) given from the rationalists…. In this story, Carnap shows up as a neo-Kantian malgré lui [in spite of himself] — though that is not at all how he thought of or presented himself. It is, however, how Rorty’s hero Wilfrid Sellars regarded Carnap. (Perhaps the revenant neo-Kantian spirit of Heinrich Rickert, passed on through his student Bruno Bauch, Frege’s friend and colleague and Carnap’s Doktorvater [academic mentor, literally “doctor father”], was just too strong to be wholly exorcised by the empiricist rites and rituals practiced by the Vienna Circle.)” (pp. 6-7).

According to Brandom, Rorty criticizes mid-20th century logical empiricism in terms very similar to Brandom’s, except that Brandom is much less inclined to blame Kant.

“But the roots of those foundationalist commitments can be traced back even further, to Descartes. For he assimilated the images delivered by the senses and the thoughts arising in intellect together under the umbrella concept of pensées precisely in virtue of what he saw as their shared epistemic transparency and incorrigibility” (p. 7).

Descartes makes the extravagant assumption that not only that there is one unified subject of all thought, feeling, and sensation in a human, but that it has perfect transparency to itself, and therefore at a certain level cannot be mistaken about itself.

“In rejecting both sensory givenness and meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections, Rorty relies on the arguments of two of Carnap’s most important and insightful admirers and critics: Sellars in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ and Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism, respectively. (These are in any case surely two of the most important philosophical essays of the 1950s.) Tellingly, and with characteristic insight, Rorty finds a common root in their apparently quite different critiques. Sellars and Quine, he sees, both offer ultimately pragmatist arguments, which find the theoretical postulation of such privileged representations to be unable to explain cardinal features of the practices of applying empirical concepts” (ibid, emphasis in original).

These same two essays are recurringly cited by Brandom. I did not know that Rorty preceded him in that.

When Brandom here mentions “meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections”, he is referring back to what he earlier called “immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts”. (There is a very different sense in which material inference can be seen as simultaneously grounded in, and grounding, concrete meaning and the understanding of meaning, as opposed to formal operations. But in that case, the concrete meaning is something arrived at, not something given or immediately grasped. Meaning is always a question, as Socrates might remind us.)

“Rorty then widens the focus of his own critique by deepening the diagnosis that animates it. The original source of foundationalism in epistemology, he claims, is representationalism in semantics. Thinking of the mind in terms of representation was Descartes’s invention” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Representationalism — the explanation of meaning in terms of reference to (nonlinguistic) objects — still dominates mainstream discussions of semantics. It is associated with a view of truth as a correspondence of claims to a reality that is assumed to be independently accessible. But this is not the only way meaning and truth can be explained. I think that, first and foremost, meaning needs to be explained by relating it to other meaning. Variants of this include dictionaries, the coherence theory of truth, and Brandom’s inferentialism.

The Latin term repraesentatio in fact played a large role in scholastic discourse. The status of sensible and/or intelligible “species” or representations was hotly debated. Scholastic discourse also included quite vigorous and sophisticated debates about nuances of representational semantics, under the rubric of the theory of “supposition”. This refers not to speculation, but rather to something close to the modern notion of reference. Scholastic philosophers even tended to treat questions of knowledge and truth in terms of what we might call questions of referential semantics. 

Descartes did not invent thinking about the mind in terms of representation, though he certainly practiced it. Arguably, this goes back even past scholastic theories of species and supposition, to Stoic theories of phantasia. The Stoics also had a somewhat foundationalist outlook. They were the original dogmatic realists in Kant’s sense.  But Descartes drew especially vivid conclusions from his claim of the incorrigibility of appearances. 

Brandom wants to redeem a positive valuation of Kant from Rorty’s hostility, and he even suggests that Rorty is making a Kantian move without realizing it.

“It is perhaps ironic that in digging down beneath epistemological issues to unearth the semantic presuppositions that shape and enable them, Rorty is following Kant’s example. For Kant’s argument, culminating in the ‘Refutation of Idealism’, was that once we understand how to respond to the threat of semantic skepticism about the intelligibility of the relation between representings and what they represent, there would be no residual issue concerning epistemological skepticism about whether any such relations actually obtained: whether things were ever as we represent them to be” (p. 8, emphasis in original).

Kant was understood by scientifically oriented neo-Kantians as effectively putting epistemology, or the justification of knowledge, before all else. A refreshing aspect of Brandom’s reading of Kant is that he shifts the axis toward questions of meaning and value.

Brandom strongly supports Rorty’s critique of epistemological foundationalism, but thinks that Rorty throws out the baby with the bath water when he claims that all talk about representation is implicitly authoritarian. Momentarily playing devil’s advocate, he reconstructs Rorty’s “global anti-representationalist” argument as follows.

“The starting point is the Cartesian idea that if we are to understand ourselves as knowing the world by representing it (so that error is to be understood as misrepresentation), there must be some kind of thing that we can know nonrepresentationally — namely, our representings themselves. On pain of an infinite regress, knowledge of representeds mediated by representings of them must involve immediate (that is, nonrepresentational) knowledge of at least some representings. Our nonrepresentational relation to these representings will be epistemically privileged, in the sense of being immune to error. For error is construed exclusively as misrepresentation. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of premises.)”

“Next is the thought that when we ask about our knowledge of the relation between representings and representeds, another potential regress looms if we are obliged to think of this knowledge also in representational terms, that is, as mediated by representings of it. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of inferences.) On this dimension, too, appeal to nonrepresentational access to representational relations seems necessary…. Rorty saw that according to such a picture, the epistemological choice between foundationalism and skepticism is already built deeply into the structure of the semantic representational model” (p. 9).

Brandom recounts that in 1996 discussions with Rorty on the occasion of Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism lecture in Gerona, “We all agreed that if one found oneself obliged to choose between epistemological skepticism and epistemological foundationalism, then somewhere well upstream something had gone badly wrong conceptually” (p. 11).

I wholeheartedly concur with that conclusion. Skepticism (claiming that there is no knowledge) and foundationalism (claiming to systematically ground knowledge in certainty) are both equally implausible, extreme positions.

“For Rorty, a principal virtue of the sort of pragmatism he endorsed that it had no need and no use for the traditional concepts of experience and representation in talking about how vocabularies help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, from a pragmatist point of view, the very distinction between epistemology and semantics becomes unnecessary — a lesson he took himself to have learned from ‘Two Dogmas’…. He sums up his anti-representationalist pragmatism in the pithy slogan: ‘language is for coping, not copying‘” (p. 12).

The kind of experience at issue here is not that which is acquired over a period of time, but the immediate experience that is supposed to be a privileged source of knowledge in empiricism. Brandom recalls John Dewey’s unsuccessful attempt to get the public to change the prevailing notion of “experience” as something immediate.

“Dewey worked tirelessly to give ‘experience’ the processual, interactive, broadly ecological sense of Hegelian ‘Erfahrung,’ rather than the atomic, episodic, self-intimating, epistemically transparent Cartesian sense of ‘Erlebnis’. (Dewey’s is the sense in which, as he says, it is perfectly in order for a job advertisement to specify ‘No experience necessary’. It is not intended to be read in the Cartesian sense, which would invite applications from zombies.) But Dewey signally failed to get the philosophical and generally educated public to shake off the Cartesian associations of the term” (ibid).

Brandom endorses Rorty’s sharp critique of experience talk.

“I was entirely of [Rorty’s] mind as far as the concept of experience is concerned. Outside of explicitly Hegelian contexts, where it figures in his conception of recollective rationality, it is not one of my words…. I agree that the associations and correlated inferential temptations entrained with the term ‘experience’ go too deep, easily to be jettisoned, or even for us to success in habituating ourselves completely to resist. The light of day neither drives out the shadows nor stays the night. We are on the whole better off training ourselves to do without this notion” (pp. 13-14).

But Brandom does not accept Rorty’s “global anti-representationalism”.

“But by contrast to the concept of experience, it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that things are otherwise with the concept of representation. There are many things that one might mean by ‘anti-representationalism’. When I use the term ‘representationalism’, I mean a particular order of semantic explanation. It starts with a notion of representational content (reference, extension, or truth conditions) and understands proprieties of inference in terms of such already representationally contentful contents. Those contents must accordingly be assumed to be, or made to be, theoretically and explanatorily intelligible antecedently to and independently of the role of representations in inference. ’Representationalism’ in this sense contrasts with inferentialist orders of semantic explanation, which begin with a notion of content understood in terms of its role in reasoning, and proceed from there to explain the representational dimension of discursive content. I recommend and pursue inferentialist rather than representationalist semantic explanations,” (p. 14, emphasis in original).

“But not giving representation a fundamental explanatory role in semantics does not disqualify it from playing any role whatsoever…. [T]here is a big difference between rejecting global representationalism, in the sense of denying that the best semantics for all kinds of expressions assigns them a fundamentally representational role, and being a global anti-representationalist, by insisting that no expressions should be understood semantically to play representational roles” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom makes a very Hegelian kind of point. All-or-nothing, black-and-white distinctions like the forced choice between skepticism and foundationalism can only be defended by a kind of sophistry.

“It seemed to me in Gerona, and still does today, that a suitable pragmatist explanatory strategy, beginning with social practices of using expressions to give and ask for reasons, could unobjectionably both underwrite theoretical attributions of representational content to some locutions and also underwrite the viability and utility of the common-sense distinction between what we are saying or thinking and what we are talking or thinking about” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

Brandom takes the reasonable position that we don’t have to ban all talk about representation in order not to be representationalist. What he wants to get away from is the notion of privileged representation that is supposed to be beyond question.

Imagination and Reflection

I find myself advocating a quasi-dualist account of subjectivity grounded in imagination and reflection, on top of a non-dualist first philosophy that puts questions of value and meaning before questions of logistics.

Imagination lies at the basis of all first-order awareness. Closely tied at an organic level to sense perception and emotion, it immediatizes things into the form of apparently self-contained, presentable objects. Immediatization is a complex process of synthesis of awareness or “consciousness” that in a human combines what common sense would call impressions of external things with previous results of reflection. This initial synthesis of awareness or consciousness occurs outside of awareness or consciousness.

Once the immediatization by imagination has done its work, we are left with the appearance of a simple transparency of consciousness in which objects are presented. “Appearance” and “consciousness” are correlated terms — all consciousness is consciousness of appearance, and all appearance involves consciousness. Everything in consciousness is an appearance. Some appearances are well-founded, others are not.

It is reflection that works on appearance to distinguish whether or not it is well-founded, and that grounds any well-foundedness of the appearance. Reflection may also consider what is better in a given context. It is the basis of both practical and theoretical wisdom. There is no reflection without the involvement of consciousness at some point, but consciousness does not necessarily involve reflection. Reflection is an open-ended discursive relation, in which the identities of things are not necessarily taken for granted.

One of Kant’s important conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the figurative synthesis of imagination involves the same fundamental forms of judgment as conscious reasoning. Hypothetical (if-then) and disjunctive (distinction-making) judgments are what give meaning to both, and this is why reason can be applicable to experience: for us talking animals, all experience already involves judgment at a preconscious level. Reflection then involves a questioning and refinement (up to possible overturning) of our preconscious judgments that apply patterns of past judgment to new experience.

Identity, Difference, Reflection

Reflection is also the key to Hegel’s often misunderstood views on identity and difference.

“Reflection is the shining of essence within itself. Essence, as infinite immanent turning back is not immediate simplicity, but negative simplicity; it is a movement across moments that are distinct, is absolute mediation with itself. But in these moments it shines; the moments are, therefore, themselves determinations reflected into themselves” (Hegel, Logic, di Giovanni trans., p. 354, emphasis in original).

He goes on to discuss identity, difference, and the notorious “contradiction” as principal moments or determinations of reflection. Sometimes he uses these terms in the conventional way — of which he is highly critical — and sometimes he gives them his own meaning.

On Aristotelian grounds, I have long had doubts about appeals to an implicitly immediate simplicity or “identity” of substance in traditional metaphysics. I take these to be a form of Platonizing that originated in the neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle. Hegel’s alternative suggestion of a “negative simplicity” seems much more plausible generally, as well as more consistent with the Aristotelian texts. We just have to get past the difficulty of Hegel’s idiosyncratic metaphorical straining of language about “negation”, and recognize that he is inventing ways to talk about the limits of representation, rather than grossly abusing the “classical” negation of formal logic.

Hegel’s remarks about identity are actually pretty clear, and worth quoting at length. As with negation, in Hegel identity, difference, and “contradiction” only have the meanings that they have in classical logic when he is pointing out their limitations. The alternative meanings that he actually endorses deeply reflect his critique of representationalism.

“In its positive formulation, A = A, [the principle of identity in classical logic] is at first no more than the expression of empty tautology. It is rightly said, therefore, that this law of thought is without content and that it leads nowhere. It is thus to an empty identity that they cling, those who take it to be something true, insisting that identity is not difference but that the two are different. They do not see that in saying, ‘Identity is different from difference’, they have thereby already said that identity is something different. And since this must also be conceded as the nature of identity, the implication is that to be different belongs to identity not externally, but within it, in its nature. — But, further, inasmuch as these same individuals hold firm to their unmoved identity, of which the opposite is difference, they do not see that they have thereby reduced it to a one-sided determinateness which, as such, has no truth. They are conceding that the principle of identity only expresses a one-sided determinateness, that it only contains formal truth, truth abstract and incomplete. — Immediately implied in this correct judgment, however, is that the truth is complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and, consequently, that it only consists in this unity. When asserting that formal identity is incomplete, there is vaguely present to one’s mind the totality, measured against which that identity is incomplete; but the moment one insists that identity is absolutely separate from difference and in this separation takes it to be something essential, valid, true, then what transpires from these two contradictory claims is only the failure to reconcile these two thoughts: that identity as abstract identity is essential, but that, as such, it is equally incomplete. What is lacking is awareness of the negative moment as [that by] which, in these claims, identity itself is displayed. — Or when this is said, that identity is identity essentially as separation from difference or in the separation from difference, then right there we have the expressed truth about it, namely that [formal] identity consists in being separation as such, or in being essentially in the separation, that is, it is nothing for itself but is rather moment of separation.”

“As to the other confirmation of the absolute truth of the principle of identity, this is made to rest on experience in so far as appeal is made to the experience of every consciousness; for anyone presented with this proposition, ‘A is A’, ‘a tree is a tree’, immediately grants it and is satisfied that the proposition is self-evident and in need of no further justification or demonstration.”

“On the one hand, this appeal to experience, that every consciousness acknowledges the principle universally, is a mere manner of speaking. For nobody will want to say that the abstract proposition, ‘A is A’, has actually been tried out in every consciousness. The appeal to actual experience is therefore not in earnest but is rather only an assurance that, if the experiment were made, universal acknowledgement of the proposition would be the result. — And if it is not the abstract proposition as such that is meant, but the proposition in concrete application, from which application the abstract proposition would then have to be developed, then the claim to the universality and immediacy of the latter would consist in the fact that every consciousness assumes it or implies it as a foundation, and indeed does so in every utterance. But the concrete and the application are precisely in the reference that connects simple identity with a manifold which is different from it. Expressed as a proposition, the concrete would be first of all a synthetic proposition. From this concrete itself, or from the synthetic proposition expressing it, abstraction could indeed extract the principle of identity through analysis; but, in actual fact, it would not then leave experience as it is but would have altered it, since in experience the identity was rather in unity with difference. And this is the immediate refutation if the claim that abstract identity is as such something true, for what transpires in experience is the verry opposite, namely identity only united with difference” (pp. 358-359, emphasis in original).

“Identity, instead of being in itself the truth and the absolute truth, is thus rather the opposite; instead of being the unmoved simple, it surpasses itself into the dissolution of itself.”

“More is entailed, therefore, in the form of the proposition expressing identity than simple, abstract identity; entailed by it is this pure movement of reflection in the course of which there emerges the other, but only as reflective shine, as immediately disappearing…. The propositional form can be regarded as the hidden necessity of adding to abstract identity the extra factor of that movement…. Consequently, if appeal is made to what appearance indicates, then the result is this: that in the expression of identity, difference also immediately emerges” (p. 360, emphasis in original).

“From this it is clear that the principle of identity itself, and still more the principle of contradiction, are not of merely analytical but of synthetic nature” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here he uses Kant’s distinction of analytic from synthetic judgments. Analytic judgments are purely formal and tautological; canonically, the predicate is considered to be literally implied by the subject. Synthetic judgments on the other hand go beyond what is already implied by the subject or premises. This includes most judgments in ordinary experience. Synthetic judgments involve the material inference that Robert Brandom has particularly expounded in recent times.

“Thus the result of this consideration is this: (1) the principle of identity or contradiction, when meant to express merely abstract identity in opposition to difference as a truth, is not a law of thought but expresses rather the opposite of it; (2) these two principles contain more than is meant by them, namely this opposite, absolute difference itself” (p. 361, emphasis in original).

Practical Knowledge?

Granted that there is such a thing as practical wisdom (phronesis) and deliberating well about actions, should it be called “knowledge” in the sense of episteme as used by Plato and Aristotle?

Episteme is generally associated with reason rather than with experience. It is supposed to have a kind of permanence. I have previously argued that the empirical “knowledge” associated with so-called justified true belief should instead be called a kind of well-founded belief, because it is subject to revision.

Aristotle distinguishes phronesis from episteme by saying that the former is concerned with (contingent) particulars, whereas the latter is concerned with universals (subject to necessity). He calls something a universal if it is said in the same way of multiple things, and necessary if there are no counter-examples. He is very careful to point out that wise ethical judgment is not characterized by the kind of “precision” or univocal interpretation that would characterize, say, a geometrical proof.

Kant makes a provocative counter-case for the possibility of unconditional universals in ethics, which could be said to potentially constitute ethical knowledge after all. But something like Aristotelian practical wisdom is still required to close the gap between those universals and real-world cases, and so if “practical” has to do with actions, this ethical knowledge would still not be practical in Aristotle’s sense.

Hegel points out that nothing in human experience is a pure particular, that some form of non-empirical judgment about the applicability of some universals is always mixed in. But it seems very doubtful that anything in experience would for Hegel qualify as purely universal, either. We come back again to the Platonic theme of the irreducibility of mixture and mixed things.

Pippin seems to imply that Hegel claims there is such a thing as practical knowing. But Pippin says “Practical knowing consists both in acknowledging the ‘reality of the good’ and in participating in the world’s own constant realization of its ‘purpose’ by acting”. If that is what that means, that is fine. But it does not remotely sound like knowledge in the sense of episteme. Rather, it captures some aspects of a good ethical stance.

From Imagination to Reflection

It seems to me that for both Aristotle and Kant, something called “imagination” is the very root of what Locke and Hegel call “consciousness”. As a result of pre-conscious processes of synthesis, we get the feeling and appearance of immediacy in experience that already has richly differentiable content.

Whatever levels of transcendental reflection we may ascend to, for us rational animals every new apprehension gets reflected back into a new synthesis of imagination that enables us to simply “experience” it along with the rest of our experience, somewhat in the way that we “know” how to ride a bicycle. As long as we live, we never leave imagination behind, any more than we leave breathing behind. (See also Meaningful “Seeing”; Animal Imagination; Imagination, Emotion, Opinion.)

Form and Things

I use the word “thing” in a very general sense for anything at all — real, ideal, or imaginary; abstract or concrete; including properties, actions, processes, and adverbial characteristics.

Kant controversially wanted to assume that things of all sorts have definite ways that they objectively are “in themselves”, i.e., completely independent of our experience and knowledge of them. But for him, there is inevitably a gap between our knowledge and reality. Every attempt to ignore or overleap that gap he called dogmatism. This was his way of practicing what I have called epistemic modesty, or the ethical virtue of avoiding unfounded knowledge claims. When we don’t know, we go ahead and act based on the best beliefs we have, while in principle remaining open to the possibility that our belief may require revision.

Hegel and others have worried that there is something wrong with Kant’s way of expressing the situation — with this gap between knowledge and reality that is inevitable and even virtuous for Kant. Some of Kant’s remarks make it sound as if reality as it really is and our experience could be two entirely nonoverlapping realms. If this were true, Kant’s position could be seen as leading to skepticism, or the conclusion that genuine knowledge of reality is impossible.

Kant himself would have resisted this conclusion with all his might. He does believe we have genuine knowledge; he just wants us to be very careful about what we claim to know. For Kant, genuine knowledge does not require access to things in themselves; rather, it keeps within the bounds of possible experience. It minimally designates an objectivity toward experience, consisting in the absence of dogmatism and an unceasing effort toward unity of apperception.

Hegel agrees with Kant in opposing dogmatism and emphasizing the effort toward unity of apperception. His strongest opposition to Kant’s talk of things in themselves assumes that “in themselves” means “in isolation”, as it would under the Wolffian view (rejected by both Kant and Hegel) that all knowledge is analytical. Hegel emphasizes that unities of apperception are not just individual but also shared. At the same time, he revives the Aristotelian idea that thoughts should be distinguished as forms or meanings shareable in principle with any rational being, and that as such, they are whatever they are independent of subjective presentation. This makes it quite reasonable for Aristotle and Hegel to claim that the form or meaning that is properly being thought is the very same as the form or meaning that is being thought about.

An analogous identity certainly does not apply to experience or consciousness. To assert that would be dogmatism in Kant’s sense. The thought that Aristotle and Hegel identify with form or meaning is not a kind of consciousness. The most fundamental characteristic of consciousness for Hegel is the separation of subject and object, whereas in thought proper there is no such separation, only a succession of forms. In Hegel, the gap between consciousness and its objects takes the place of the gap between knowledge and reality in Kant, and similarly commends to us a practice of epistemic modesty in life.

Another dimension of epistemic modesty in Aristotle and Hegel has to do with the non-univocal character of form in Aristotle, and with Hegel’s repeated warnings about the “falsity” of all fixed representations. Form is said in several ways in Aristotle, e.g., sensible form, mathematical form, linguistic meaning, and the life or soul of a living being. Of these the first two are univocal, but the last two are not.

From the point of view of form, we take a deflationary view of “things”. Things — like the thing in itself in Kant — are in a strict sense indexes delimiting our ignorance rather than univocal “objects” of knowledge.

The fact that our ignorance is delimited means it is not total. We do have knowledge, but insofar as either proper knowledge or Hegelian spirit has “objects”, those objects lack univocal identity.