Tag: Hermeneutics

Thoughts on Meta-Ethics

When I first set up a category of “general meta-ethics”, it did not reflect a programmatic intent. It was a convenient heading for the broadest and sketchiest of my broad and sketchy notes. I see the whole development here as a sort of expanding spiral. The typical writing has evolved from extremely informal, minimalist fragments to somewhat more substantial pieces responding to some text or other.

At this point, “meta-ethics” very much has acquired a programmatic significance, particularly inspired first by Brandom’s idea of “normativity all the way down”, and then by Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed “axiological” reading of Aristotelian first philosophy, but encompassing all the concerns raised here. This now gives a more particular, more coherent form to my original goal of exploring possible connections between Aristotle and Brandom. It draws important support from the work of Paul Ricoeur, and from readings of Hegel developed by Robert Pippin and H. S. Harris, as well as my own work and that of numerous others on both the first-order history of philosophy and the second-order “historiography” of that history.

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).

Understanding Social Actions

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

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

There is a kind of objectivity associated with utilitarian concerns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Validity in communicative action is always intersubjective or shareable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This openness to all participants is very important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).

Culmination of the Culmination

Right before his final conclusion, Pippin recalls a wonderful quote from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols:

“Learning to see — habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual in all its aspects. This is the first schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language strong will-power: the essence of it is precisely not to ‘will’, the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus — one has to react, one obeys a stimulus” (The Culmination, p. 216).

Heidegger argues that art — and poetry in particular — represents a disclosure of meaningfulness that must be understood as prior to philosophy and to all the works of reason. Pippin explains Heidegger’s talk about attunement to the question of Being as a way of putting meaning before knowledge. I too think meaning comes before knowledge; I believe in a kind of Platonic reticence about knowledge claims.

But Heidegger effectively attributes to Aristotle and Hegel, among others, what Derrida would call a logocentrism — a bad-smelling thing redolent of ethnocentrism, but having to do with the role of reason. I sharply disagree with this characterization of Aristotle and Hegel, as well as with the characterization of the role of reason that Heidegger assumes.

I think that across a great many posts here, we have clearly seen that interpretation of meaning comes before knowledge in Aristotle and Hegel. Reason itself, for the two greatest “rationalist” philosophers, has a fundamentally hermeneutic or interpretive character, which takes precedence over logic in the sense of formal calculation. Hegel can be forgiven for using the term “logic” in a very nonstandard way, and even for calling it a science. Heidegger was an important promoter of a kind of hermeneutics in the 20th century, but he seems to think of a hermeneutic approach as standing in opposition to the “rationalism” of Aristotle and Hegel.

Pippin says that for Hegel, “The role of art is to make available the speculative truth of philosophy in a sensible and affective register, and that means in an incomplete and finally unsatisfactory, because not fully self-conscious, way, and that way must be and can only fully be articulated in the Logic. Obviously, this touches on the basic issue that has arisen scores of times in the preceding: is there or is there not a form of nondiscursively available meaningfulness in human experience, and one that bears directly on philosophy in a fundamental way, given that such original familiar meaningfulness must count as bearing on the ‘first’ question all philosophy must be oriented from — the possible availability of anything at all, the availability of being qua being?” (p. 217).

That some more fundamental interpretation of meaning must precede calculable, univocal forms of reasoning is, I think, abundantly clear. Even from the side of formal systems, it is always necessary to begin with axioms, postulates, or hypotheses that are presumed to have a status independent of the development of the system. No formal system is truly self-contained. But philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel are not developing formal systems.

And what does this all have to do with talk about “being qua being”? This connection, so important to Heidegger, seems like sheer presumption. I’m objecting to the identification from the hermeneutic side, but I could imagine that some Thomists might also be unhappy with it, because they would identify being qua being with God, and therefore not with human hermeneutic activity.

On the other hand, I do greatly appreciate Pippin’s gloss that Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being can alternately be expressed more simply as questioning about meaning. That takes the mystifying element out of it. But it still raises the question why it is necessary to raise the topic of questioning about meaning in such a roundabout and mystifying way, if that is really the aim.

Pippin equates the possible availability of being qua being to the “possible availability of anything at all” (ibid). I doubt this. Being qua being is a very specific historically developed theory or theories, mainly due to Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus. Anything at all is anything at all.

“[W]e can say that there is in [Hegel’s] Encyclopedia system a non-theoretical, nondiscursive, and philosophically significant role for art…. Heidegger’s affirmative answer… ranges from his early emphasis on the disclosive role of ‘attunements’ to his later emphasis on historical ‘uncoverings and self-concealings’ in the arts…. [I]n Hegel, … fine art should count as a ‘sensible and affective’ register of what could be called the way in which the meaning of Geist’s being is available to it at a historical period in a historical community” (ibid).

The medieval Albertist Dietrich of Freiberg would frankly tell us that the meaning of Geist‘s being should be understood to be the same as the meaning of Geist said simply (he says that a human being is in no way different from a human, and similarly for all such cases).

For Hegel “Consciousness as Sense-Certainty… assumes the world is available to it simply by virtue of its sensible presence. One is immediately onto sensed objects directly just by sensing them. But any distinctly human form of apprehension must, insists Hegel, be able to say what it claims to know, otherwise it is just differentially responsive and not an instance of knowing. The absence of such saying would be untrue to its experienced nature as a human knower and in that sense, not being who one is, would be unfree. It puts itself unavoidably to the test by trying to say what it knows and failing. This is the first manifestation of the conatus of freedom, the realization of self-conscious self-knowledge…. As we have seen Heidegger argue, … in phenomenological terms the ultimacy of this conatus, from the beginning… means that metaphysics as unconditioned thinking on thinking… is an illusion, question-begging (p. 219, emphasis in original).

Conatus is a term from early modern theories of motion that was used by Spinoza for the ongoing effort of a living being to be the being that it is. It seems to me to describe more or less the same phenomena as Aristotelian entelechy or Kantian internal teleology, in a vocabulary that is compatible with mechanism and avoids reference to teleology.

Pippin adds in a footenote to “question-begging” : “I state here the Heideggerian position, not my own. Heidegger has to claim that what for the Hegelian, or in the Hegelian tradition, must count as the pathologies of modernity — alienation, reification, domination instead of mutuality of recognitive status, the humiliating conditions of the modern organization of labor, anomie, deracination — are all best understood as implications of the still ‘unthought’ question, the meaning of Being, as descendants of the ‘metaphysical’ tradition…. [T]his claim is worth taking more seriously than it has been, but the way Heidegger formulates the issue seems to exclude all other options as derivative from and so complicit with that tradition. Even on strictly hermeneutical grounds, such exclusivity leaves us with an incomplete interpretation of what we need to understand” (p. 219n).

The theory of how the unconditioned can emerge from the conditioned, and the eternal from what is in time, is very delicate and easily misunderstood, but it is central to what Hegel is about. I don’t claim to know that that is how things are, but it is my fervent conviction. Hegel uses very idiosyncratic talk about “negation” and “negativity” to explain it.

“Heidegger has framed all such issues as dependent on, and reflecting some sense of, the historical meaningfulness of Being and that means the context of his question about the reconciling powers of reason is a question about mattering” (ibid).

I’m all for attention to meaning and mattering, but for me that means attention to interpretation and ethics, not ontology. Heidegger distinguishes an inferior, everyday “ontic” character of things from the superior, extraordinary, ineffable character of Being, and castigates others for ignoring this distinction. I think this distinction is false and should be ignored. Rather than a binary division between the ineffable and the boring world of ordinary things and ordinary life, it is better to learn to see the nonordinary in the ordinary.

Next in this series: Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

On Reason

Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all give reason an ethical mission that goes far beyond what formal logic can do. Formal logic has immense value in specialized contexts like the engineering of systems, but does not necessarily or directly yield any philosophical insight. As Aristotle said, it is a tool and not an independent source of knowledge.

As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, a wide variety of such technical tools can also indirectly serve to sharpen a hermeneutic understanding. But for that to be possible, a hermeneutic project must already be underway.

Nevertheless I would argue that for Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel among others, such a project is precisely what “reason” primarily amounts to. More than anything else, reason is constituted by reflective interpretive judgment. Only secondarily is it concerned to deduce consequences from premises. Every such deduction either implicitly presupposes reflective interpretive judgments about meaning, or simply assumes that meanings are already somehow pre-given.

But reason at its core is the ramified and expansive understanding of meaning, as well as the process of aiming at and achieving such understanding, and the putting of that understanding into practice. And “reasonableness” is a matter of an emotional constitution that allows judgments to be made without bias or prejudice or excessive self-centeredness, so that one’s actions reflect and manifest this kind of understanding.

On the Good as a Cause

Having recently prototyped a modest textual commentary of my own on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, I feel in a somewhat better position to begin examining the more detailed arguments of Gwenaëlle Aubry on what exactly the Metaphysics aims to do. Her very important 2006 work Dieu sans la puissance: dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin highlights Aristotle’s own neglected statements on what his most distinctive contributions in first philosophy were, and argues that they make Aristotle very relevant today.

This leads to a very distinctive reading of the intent of the Metaphysics, which differs greatly from both the “ontological” view of Avicenna and the Latin scholastic mainstream, and the “forgetting of Being”, “metaphysics of presence” view promoted by Heidegger in the 20th century. Here I’ll just provide a top-level introduction.

Aubry sees the Metaphysics primarily as a very innovative work of philosophical theology, centered on what I would call a kind of teleological meta-ethics.

Aristotle’s first cause is the highest good, which works by attraction and motivation, not by creating, or by directly intervening in events. (This makes what Kant calls internal teleology Aristotle’s most fundamental explanatory principle, as is also made especially clear in Aristotle’s biological works, but also even in the Physics.)

Aristotle’s first philosophy treats the world as most fundamentally governed by the values that are at work in it. The logistical working out of means and ends is also essential to how things play out in the world, but Aristotle insists that orienting values come first in the order of explanation. The highest good is a kind of ultimate moral compass for those values. (And from a Kantian standpoint, the resolution of empirical questions of fact depends on the resolution of normative, ultimately ethical or meta-ethical questions of interpretation.)

Formal and Material Interpretation

Human reasoning has two sides, that could be called formal and material. Any reasoning applicable to the real world necessarily involves the “material” side that is concerned with actual meaning “content”. It may also involve the “formal” side, which aims to express reasoning in terms of mechanically repeatable operations that are completely agnostic to the actual meanings they are used to operate on. Reasoning in some abstract contexts may rely entirely on the formal side.

Aristotle is usually credited with inventing formal logic, but he paid a lot of attention to the material side as well. In the Latin middle ages both sides were recognized, but the formal side was generally emphasized.

Formal mathematical logic underwent an immense development in the 20th century, somewhat like the earlier success story of mathematical physics. The syntactic devices of mathematical logic seemed so powerful that its rise led to a great neglect of the material, interpretive side of logic. Husserl was one of the few 20th century authors who questioned this from the start. More recently, Brandom has argued that Kant and Hegel were both fundamentally concerned with the material, interpretive side of logic, and that this is what Kant meant by “transcendental” logic (and what Hegel meant by “dialectic”).

Generally when I mention interpretation here, I have the material side in mind, but there is also such a thing as formal interpretation. Formal interpretation or “evaluation” of expressions in terms of other expressions is the most fundamental thing that interpreters and compilers for programming languages do. As with material interpretation, formal interpretation makes meanings explicit by expressing them in terms of more elementary distinctions and entailments, but it uses purely syntactic substitution and rewriting to do so.

Material interpretation can always potentially go on indefinitely, explaining real-world meanings by relating them to other meanings, and those in terms of others, and so on. In practice, we always cut it short at some point, once we achieve a relatively stable network of dependencies.

Formal interpretation on the other hand is usually engineered to be decidable, so that it actually does reach an end at some point. The fact that it reaches an end is closely related to the fact that precise formal models are always in some sense only approximations of a determination of reality that is actually open-ended. Formal models are a sort of syntactic reification of open-ended material interpretation. We may think we have taken them as far as they can go, but in real life it is always possible that some new case will come up that requires new detail in the model.

We also use a kind of formal interpretation alongside material interpretation in our spontaneous understanding of natural language. Natural language syntax helps us understand natural language meaning. It provides cues for how different clauses are intended to relate to one another. Is what is meant in this clause an exception? A consequence? A presupposition? A fact? A recommendation? Something being criticized? (See also Formal and Informal Language.)

Multiple Explanations

One of the great strengths of Aristotle’s approach to things is the way it makes use of multiple, complementary kinds of explanation. The paired modalities of actuality and potentiality and the four “causes” (ends and means, form and materiality) all interweave together to create rich tapestries of understanding. Aristotle famously said that to know is to be able to explain, and his notion of explanation is clearly hermeneutic and expansive, rather than reductive. (See also Interpretation; What and Why.; Difference; Classification; Definition.)