Tag: Immediacy

A Triangular Relation?

In the previous post, we saw a sharply binary model of signifier and signified being applied by Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus. At least in Bacon’s case, this goes hand in hand with a new kind of “direct” realism that aims to deal directly with things in the world, and repudiates the subtleties of the indirect account of knowledge and meaning by way of concepts and the passions of the soul that was broadly shared by Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius. But Scotus complicates the picture considerably by also promoting a triangular model that includes concepts understood in a certain way. Scotus also argues for a non-psychological approach to concepts.

“Does the sign signify the thing itself or the concept in the soul? — We have said that for Scotus, the great semantic controversy of the Middle Age, more fundamental than any other, is constituted by the following question: Is the vocal sound the sign of the thing or of the concept?” (Boulnois, L’Être et représentation, p. 35, my translation throughout).

“The line of the English Franciscans seems to have developed this theory long before him: for Roger Bacon, linguistic signs have been arbitrarily instituted by humans to directly indicate the things themselves. Words are not related to things by means of a conceptual interpretation. A new, radically non-Platonic way of thinking language arises: instrument of communication, it ‘takes the place of’ (supponit pro) the thing, and not the idea of the speaker. What is more, it exercises a representative function uniquely defined by its capacity to refer to present and existent things. For Roger Bacon, the name signifies solely the thing on which it has been imposed. It can only refer to things (even if it can signify connotata, by inference). But at the same time, there is a relation between the vox [vocal sound] and the species in the soul. The vocal sound is its proper presentification, but it makes the representation of a thing arise in the mind. It makes the thing be conceived, or makes it arise in the soul. Thus the sign in a single gesture refers to the thing and recalls a representation. The vox is not a concept, but a thing that signifies another; it signifies a singular thing in the present, without involving essence, and no longer passes by way of the intellectus to arrive at the res [thing]. There is a sort of collaterality of the sermo [spoken word] and the intellectus that both refer to the res” (ibid).

Scholastic accounts of language typically focus on proprieties of naming. Implicit in this approach is an account of meaning that begins from individual terms. Broadly speaking, this approach has an affinity to modern bottom-up theories of semantics, which aim to put together a picture of the world in a compositional way from individual terms taken as given.

In the early 20th century, Saussurean linguistics developed an alternative approach that treats the signifier in a relational way, such that each signifier is understood in the first instance as identified by its difference from other signifiers, independent of its nominal reference to a signified. This led to an incipient “deconstructive” analysis of individual terms in the broad current of 20th-century European (especially French) “structuralism”, which then came to be explicitly thematized in developments that Anglophone writers came to refer to as “post” structuralist.

From a completely different starting point in a pragmatist reading of analytic philosophy and German Idealism, in the late 20th century Brandom developed an “inferentialist” semantics that begins from whole sentences as the minimal unit of assertion, and focuses on explaining the “material” inferential properties of propositions in terms of normative assessments of proprieties of concrete assertion, rather than in terms of universal formal rules. Brandom understands the meaning of concepts inferentially, in terms of their use or functional role in assertions, and emphasizes the non-psychological character of meaning understood in this way. From this point of view, concepts are not to be identified with individual terms, and instead have a holistic character, such that each concept involves other concepts.

In sharp contrast to both of these as well as to Aristotle and Augustine, Scotus develops his triangular model of signification in a way that aims to be consistent with a primacy of individual things, and with a direct association of words to things.

“[I]n his first commentary on [Aristotle’s] treatise On Interpretation, [Scotus] maintains, like Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, that the vocal sound signifies the concept, which resembles the thing or ‘represents’ it. The vox immediately signifies the species, the representation of the thing in the intellect, but it mediately signifies that which it represents, which is to say the thing itself. But in the second commentary, closer to Bacon, he holds that the vocal sound directly signifies not the conceptions of the intellect, but the thing itself. When Aristotle and Boethius say that the name directly signifies the passions of the soul, it is necessary to understand by this not the concept, or the resemblance in the soul, but the thing that is conceived. This second version is evidently a radical revision of Scotist semantics. It is also the definitive position of the theological works” (pp. 36-37).

“Following Bacon and [Peter] Olivi, Duns Scotus breaks with the Boethian interpretation of signification, but he does so with a nuance, integrating the Aristotelian semantics; the verbal sign (verbum) is directly the sign of both the thing and the concept, but it is in the first instance the sign of the thing, and then the sign of the concept. The sign comes from a direct causality of the thing and signifies it directly. Nonetheless there is a logical anteriority of the concept, for it is on it that the linguistic sign depends. Scotus formulates his response in the vocabulary of his own theory of causality. The concept, the written sign, and the phoneme are all three ordered effects of the same cause: the thing itself…. Writing, the vocal sound, and the concept are signs, situated on the same plane, none of them exercising any causality over the others, and they signify the same signified” (p. 37).

If the sign is in the first instance the sign of the thing, it is difficult to see how the concept can be logically anterior to the relation of sign to thing. But Scotus apparently wants to assert both, and also that the concept is a kind of sign, and that the sign is a kind of thing.

“[T]he word, the concept, and the thing no longer form a series, but a triangle…. The play of natural causes, the weight of institution, and the semantic relation are articulated with one another, but remain autonomous…. The concept is the first, natural effect of the thing itself. It is it that is first of all a sign of the thing, and not the vocal sound or writing. It constitutes the object of logic, an anterior object, more fundamental than vocal sounds, and supposed by them…. If there is a science of things, metaphysics, and a science of words, grammar, logic occupies an intermediary and central place, as the science of concepts” (p. 39).

Scotus wants to give metaphysics a new status as a rational science, in a strong sense that is independent of Aristotle. Meanwhile, he also explicitly rejects Aristotle’s thesis that logic is a tool for clearly expressing meaning and not a science with its own subject matter, which Brandom has recently revived under the name of logical expressivism.

“Noetics studies the concept insofar as it constitutes an aspect of the mind (mens), where it is found as an accident in a subject. Logic, on the contrary, considers the concept as sign, insofar as it refers to a signified. This is the ambiguity of representation: we consider in it either the thing that represents, or the thing that it represents, the being of the representing or the being represented…. Logic is distinct from psychology…. The aim of thought is not reducible to its psychic reality” (pp. 39-40).

Boulnois does not point it out here, but Scotus’s assumption that the concept is in the mind “as an accident in a subject” is directly opposed to Augustine’s strong contention that the mind should not be seen as a subject in which knowledge and love inhere as accidents.

“In this triangle of word, concept, and thing, the concept is described as a sign, and reciprocally the cognitive act is itself a semiosis. Duns Scotus breaks with Augustine and Boethius, who reserve signification to vocal sounds and writing. He participates in what C. Panaccio has called a general movement of ‘semantization’ of thought. Logic, conceived as a rational science, a theory of signs or of ‘signifying reasoning’ (ratio significandi), is no longer a subalternate discipline, concerned with the expression of thought. Because thought is signifying, logic becomes a theory of thought itself. Nevertheless, it does not fall to it to resolve the problem of the place of thought. Concepts are natural signs, not conventional ones: they are combined in propositions according to logical rules, the structure of which subtends all possible oral or written propositions, even if they are not proffered. They constitute the elements of a universal mental language, of a general grammar and of a pure theory of communication. This language is for Duns Scotus a subjacent condition of all oral enunciations and effective writings” (pp. 40-41).

Thus apparently the treatment of concepts as a kind of sign is closely related to the non-Aristotelian idea that logic is a science with its own subject matter.

“But above all, this ideal possibility is real: it is accomplished par excellence in the domain of angelic communication. Angels communicate with the aid of intelligible signs, which is to say pure concepts, without phonetic or graphical support. Each angel directly causes a concept in another, by an immediate communication. It is on this occasion that Duns Scotus formulates a formal theory of pure thought” (p. 41).

If concepts are natural signs and signs are real things, then concepts are real things.

“The sign establishes a double relation. On the one hand, it is the image of the thing that caused it; on the other hand, what is more important, it signifies it: the concept is a real object, which has a natural existence, belonging to a causal chain; but it bears a resemblance to the object it represents. This resemblance is produced by the concurrent double causality of the thing itself and the intelligible species conserved in memory. — Is it necessary to say that the concept preserves the transparency of representation, while the conventional sign loses it? For a concept, does representare signify a ‘resemblance to’, or simply: ‘taking the place of the presence’ of an object, which was already the sense of the word in Peter of Spain? Does the representivity of the concept for the intellect come from its resemblance to real objects, or from its dependence on a cause?” (pp. 41-42).

Given Scotus’s insistence that the sign refers directly to the thing, it is surprising to read that “We cannot pass directly from the representation to the thing” (p. 43). But our act is different from the reference of the sign, so technically there is no contradiction.

“But even in maintaining that the relation of cause to effect is first, Scotus does not go to the point of abandoning resemblance: both are real aspects of intellection. Even if it supposes the causality of the object, semiosis is a complex process that is not reduced to it, since it supposes a play of resemblances. The sign is recognized more than it is produced” (ibid).

In a way, the play of resemblances resembles the mutual dependence of signifiers in the Saussurean tradition.

That the sign is recognized more than it is produced is a nice injection of good sense that stands in obvious tension with the foundation myth of signs as imposed and instituted “at will”. But the user of a sign is usually not its institutor.

“The phoneme homo no longer signifies the concept of the human: like the concept, it signifies the real human, even if it depends on the concept for this. The three forms of signification (formal sign, oral sign, written sign) are parallel, even if their terms are ordered according to a serial dependency. The signification of the concept is a natural relation between the intellect and things. The signified of phonemes and graphemes remains the thing itself, but it depends on a conventional relation.”

“In this Scotus directly opposes Aristotle, for whom the vox is a sound emitted by the mouth of a human being, accompanied by an imaginative representation. Words are not the tools of knowledge, but of communication” (p. 43).

I think that knowledge in Plato and Aristotle (and Hegel and Gadamer and Habermas and Brandom, among others) implicitly has a dialogical (and therefore in part communicative) character. Gadamer has highlighted the dialogical element in Plato and Aristotle. The “communicative reason” elaborated by Habermas involves a dialogical view of knowledge. It is only “monological” conceptions of knowledge that do not involve an element of communication.

“In itself, the written or oral sign is only an ensemble of sounds or letters, which causes nothing more than the knowledge of itself. The imposition of the sign describes the passage from concept to sign, and reciprocally interpretation allows a reascent from the sign to the intelligible concept that subtends it. The process of interpretation follows a trajectory inverse to that of imposition. It is thus a contingent process of association” (p. 45).

“In the moment of imposition, the imposer associates sense and intellect, in relating a perceived name to a conceived thing. In the moment of interpretation, the hearer recalls the relation between the name perceived in the present, and the past thing that she knew more or less distinctly” (p. 46).

I don’t think of interpretation as happening in a moment. It is not only dialogical, but also involves mediation, concepts, and an extension in time. In the same way, only in a very improper sense is jumping to a conclusion a kind of judgment. But Boulnois is summarizing Scotus here, not necessarily asserting this in his own name.

“Signification cannot take the place of knowledge. There is no transparency between the sign and thought” (ibid).

Knowledge implies a knower in a way that formal signification does not. But the dialogical expression and elaboration of knowledge is closely interwoven with the dialogical elaboration of signification and meaning.

“But what is it that is signified? The thing, yes, but in what sense of the word ‘thing’? According to [Scotus’s] Questions on On Interpretation, not the thing in its singularity and its existence, but the thing as quiddity [what Aristotle calls the “what it is”], indifferent to singularity and universality, to existence and nonexistence: the thing as it is seen by the mediation of a concept…. According to this semantic, signification is no longer an intelligible correlation between the signifying and the concept” (pp. 46-47).

Indeed, “thing” is said in many ways. Thing as quiddity and thing as object are almost mutually exclusive. I use “object” in a deflationary way as a relative term, as in “the object of”, not as naming something that is assumed to be a free-standing thing in its own right. I don’t actively use the term “quiddity”, but I think of it as a more static and self-contained projection of essence, which in its more proper usages is not something self-contained. Brandom says that a concept is not the kind of thing we could have just one of. I think of essence in a similar way. All articulation is inter-articulation, involving more than one term.

“From now on, signification can be thought independent of the scope of the concept.”

“Linguistic signs signify directly, without passing through the concept. They can signify a thing more precisely than intellect can conceive it. The circulus vini, a sign that indicates the presence of new wine in the inn, causes nothing new in the intellect of the one who perceives it. It is an arbitrary sign, constituted by a convention…. Convention is limited to establishing a relation of reason between two things, two physical realities: the sonorous matter of the phoneme (the vox) and the reality signified (the res). To be valid, this relation-convention supposes the knowledge of the two terms…. A weak and confused knowledge of the thing suffices for us to be able to use a sign, and to signify in a suitable way. We can signify in a way that is more precise than we conceive” (pp. 47-48).

Signification is a “formal” concept, in what seems to be Scotus’s distinctive sense of the term “formal”, which is neither Platonic nor Kantian, and also not to be understood in terms of modern logical or mathematical formalism. The formal status of signification is what allows it to be “more precise” than the knowledge we actually have. But as Hegel reminds us, formal precision (in any of these senses) is not always a virtue when applied to real things.

“Duns Scotus is inspired by the analyses of Olivi to establish a relation between semantic representation and juridical representation, the sign and the law.”

Peter Olivi was another important 13th-century Franciscan, and another strong voluntarist.

“A sign can be speculative or practical. The speculative sign leads to knowledge; it allows a concept of the signified to be formed in the intellect, but its characteristic tells us nothing of its real existence; for example, homo is the sign of a concept, and allows the knowledge of an essence, of a nature in general, whether or not a human exists. The practical sign implies the existence of its signified; it is the sign of an existence, and not of a simple possibility…. Since the practical sign signifies the advent of an effect, and this effect depends on the ordered power (that is to say on the free voluntary disposition) of someone who can cause it, only the author of this effect can give this practical sign certain being. It suffices that the institutor is disposed to regularly produce the signified of the sign she institutes…. Contracts, pacts, and promises are examples. The practical sign pertains to a juridical order instituted by humans. It depends on a law…. The sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent, who is self-determining in limiting herself to the order she institutes. This one, in proportion to her political power, can engage in rendering real what she has disposed in the order of signs” (pp. 48-49).

To me it seems preposterous to say that the sign belongs to the domain of the will of a free agent. A sign belongs to a field of reciprocal determination that is independent of anyone’s will. (See also Hegel on Willing.)

“The practical sign is an ordination of power. In this sense, it belongs to the theology of absolute power and ordained power. In Duns Scotus, these two concepts apply to every free agent: absolute power includes all that a free being can effectively do, de facto. Ordained power includes all she can do in conformity to a law, de jure. The institutor is an absolutely free agent, who self-determines freely in choosing this or that order” (p. 49).

An earlier book by Boulnois develops the history of the theology of absolute power and ordained power in detail. A later book treats the history of theological voluntarism in the Latin tradition.

For Scotus “It is will that founds the truth of the practical sign, and not the inverse” (p. 52).

But “there are signs of which we are not the institutors, and that we receive as fully established by an alien will…. We are under the law of signs, and they do not always depend on us” (ibid).

Next in this series: Perspectiva

Scotist Semiotics?

Still slowly working on a re-reading and partial translation of Olivier Boulnois’s L’Être et représentation (1999), we have already gotten a hint that Latin scholastics such as Roger Bacon and John Duns Scotus used some of the very same key terminology as the 20th-century Saussurean structuralists, but seem to have held a diametrically opposed view on the specific matter of the relation of signifier and signified. Boulnois does not explicitly mention the more recent French context. The last post was in part about what is called “signification”.

As a university student in the late 70s, I was tremendously excited to learn about French so-called “structuralism”, which seemed to support my own primitive insight that “relations are prior to things”. In this context there was a lot of talk about signifier and signified, growing out of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Together with the American pragmatist Charles Pierce, Saussure is considered to have originated modern semiotics, or the study of signs. For a while, semiotics was high on my horizon.

A key point in the Saussurean tradition, which grew very big in postwar France, was that there is no direct relation of the signifier to the signified. Instead, it was said in effect that we are signifying animals who live and thrive in a sea of signifiers, and build meaning out of differentiation.

For Saussure, the signified is not the referent but the concept. What the concept really is was not discussed in detail. Saussure himself seems to have seen it as falling under what he called psychology and social psychology, which was a rather conventional view when he was writing in the early 20th century, but this plays no real role in his theory.

What is essential is the detachment of signification from reference. For Saussure, the sign is a two-leveled thing that consists of (sensible) signifier and (conceptual) signified. But in relation to its referents in the world, the sign is “arbitrary”. The sound or word “tree” has no inherent relation to a tree. I am not concerned to argue for or against Saussure here, just setting the stage.

For Roger Bacon, signs refer directly to things. For Scotus, “The sign leads immediately to the signified. Between them, we must not ask about any intermediary. It attaches only to a single signified: the present thing itself. It represents it” (p. 26, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout)

Here we see an explicit strong positive valuation both on presence and immediacy, and at the same time on representation. Representability will be Scotus’s minimal criterion of being. I see all three of these claims as deeply problematic, but that does not mean they can be simply and categorically rejected.

“This theory is unfolded in four theses:

“1) Every sign is a thing, and reciprocally every thing can be a sign; it is thus that the father is a sign in relation to his son. ‘The sign is said relative to a signified, as “father” relative to a “son”; and it is also necessarily the sign of something, which is its foundation.’ A sign is at the same time the manifestation of something, and refers to an other. It is necessarily a real foundation, even if it also implies a relation of signifying/signified. On the one hand, it brings an information to the sense, the sensible species (visible, audible, etc.), or to the cognitive power (the intelligible species); on the other, it produces a knowledge of something else” (ibid).

The sign thus brings a (participial or ongoing) “information” or informing form to sense or intellect.

The notion of forms being somehow transmitted, and of their being a kind of thing that can be transmitted, has an interesting ambiguity. The image of species as discrete things flying through the air seems hard to sustain. And yet, there is a sense in which form is not locked up in one thing, but can be “communicated”. And what we call the thing — not merely stuff or an object, but participial “information”, or some form as a happening — is grounded in the becoming or manifestation associated with a present participle.

This manifestation is the mark of reality, which is not just a collection of ready-made objects or truths but a process of being manifested. This goes beyond mere presence as a snapshot or image capable of being mastered, and beyond mere representation as referentially standing for something. This is the sense in which objectivity as a happening involving essentiality goes far beyond the mere being of objects mastered or possessed.

I have always thought it was a happening or unfolding (or happening-as-unfolding, as distinct from happening as a mere punctual event — procession or “emanation”) like this that the neoplatonic talk about something beyond being aimed at — not mere being-there or a necessary support for it, but a nonpunctual unfolding of unmastered essence that is precisely not to be identified with “Being”, or with the putative object of “ontology”. And on the other hand, I want to think that ordinary being is already nonpunctual or outside of itself, and thus strictly transcends both representation and event, at very the same time that it is susceptible to genuine understanding and criteria of reasonableness.

“2) Every sign supposes an inference. Here Scotus recollects the Aristotelian heritage, in line with the unification aimed at since Albert the Great. Taking the theology of sacraments as a point of departure, and trinitarian theology as an example, it is not limited to the model of the linguistic sign. The sign permits an inference, which starts from the posterior to go back to the inferior [sic]: if b, then a. A thing signifies another if its existence entails that of another, be it anterior or posterior. Indeed it becomes the element of a reasoning by inference or likelihood (enthymeme). One same theory of the sign is to provide an account of signification and of inference. It allows a unified theory of semiotics as cognitive science to be constructed. The linguistic sign is only a particular case, thought on the model of inference. It functions not as a code (according to a biunivocal correspondence), but according to relations that are more numerous and more complex” (p. 27).

Quite unexpectedly, we have here not only an emphasis on inference in the context of signification, but it is contrasted with a mechanical code or biunivocal correspondence in a way that makes it sound like what Sellars and Brandom call material inference. But for Brandom this grounds a non-representationalist account, whereas Scotus, as we will see over the course of a number of upcoming posts, is arguably the arch-representationalist of the whole Western tradition.

“3) Scotus aims to provide a general and unique theory of the sign. To be a sign, it suffices to be a thing. But what is a ‘thing’? Not always a sensible, physical, material reality: for him it suffices to have a formal being, a reality sufficiently unified and positive to be able to be opposed to the term with which it is in relation, to become the foundation of this relation. The sign is the real term of a real knowledge. Unlike a sensible thing, a sign is first of all a formal object, a possible object of knowledge. ‘This is true not only of the sensible sign, taking “sense” [in Augustine’s definition] strictly, for the corporeal sense, but again it is true for the incorporeal sense, taking sense generally, for any cognitive power.’ The senses are not only sensibility (here, in the organic sense), but knowledge in the broad sense — intellection. The sign is not always sensible; it can be immaterial, and consist in a concept or an intelligible species. Like Bacon, Duns Scotus integrates in the theory of the sign the intelligible signs that are the concepts of the soul. But he envisions also the case of the angels, who communicate and transmit species or purely intelligible representations. By a philosophical decision, Scotus generalizes the status of the sign. The subtle Doctor gives an indifferent definition that is neutral and transcends genres. He conceives a transcendental semiotic” (pp. 27-28, brackets in original).

The idea of “formal distinction” — roughly, that there can be a “real” difference in definition where there is no difference in “being”, whatever that is — seems both plausible, and by no means inherently tied to the objectionable claims that will is superior to reason.

I’m still grappling with the suggestion that a concept could be a sign. That concepts are inferences, or at least are closely associated with inferences, seems plausible enough, and certainly better than the idea that a concept is a mental image. Brandom identifies concepts with rules we adopt to govern inference. That signification is closely related to inference also makes sense. But while it makes sense that a concept would be immaterial, I find it hard to affirm that the same would be true of a sign.

“4) The sign concerns the category of relation. Bacon had already remarked that ‘the sign pertains to the category of relation’. By itself, the sign brings about the knowledge of something else. It is constituted by a relation of inference to the thing signified. Does it go the same for signification as for knowledge? For Bacon, the sign represents something to someone: it implies two relations, in the accusative and in the dative, toward the signified and toward the interpreter, and it is the second that is essential. But Aristotle himself describes knowledge as a relation, and remarks that the destruction of the thing known entails that of the corresponding knowledge. Does the sign still signify when its signified disappears? The first, traditional, position consists in dissociating the truth of enunciation from the truth of the sign, and says, like Anselm, that there is a ‘true sign’ even when it does not signify something. Quite the contrary, for Bacon the sign loses its value as a sign. ‘If we cannot conceive anything by a sign, it is void (cassum) and vain, it cannot be a true sign; but it is only a sign according to the substance of the sign, and it does not have the status of a sign: it is thus that the substance of the father remains when his son is dead, but not the relation of paternity. And whatever vocal sound, the circle of wine or an other [sign], imposed in act in relation to a thing and instituted for it, can represent it and signify it, if what it signifies does not exist in act, it is not a sign in act.’ If the thing that it represents is absent, the sign represents nothing, it is indeed not a sign. It must receive a new institution” (pp. 28-29).

This use of Latin substantia seems very far indeed from Aristotle’s ousia.

Earlier, Boulnois had contrasted the radicality of Bacon’s direct realism with traditional views. He said that Bacon’s notion of the sign — in contrast with either that of Augustine or that of Aristotle — involves only two elements, omitting the mediating role of concepts or of the soul. Here it sounds like Bacon on another level does still leave a role for an interpreter. But perhaps an implicit distinction is being made between interpretation as immanent to the level of content (which a direct realist would presumably reject), and a transcendent dimension of something like the person of an interpreter standing over and above any content, which may be related to the voluntarism we will be hearing about shortly.

“The distinction between the kinds of sign is at the center of the semiotic theory: it brings out the principal articulations, and in particular allows the relation of signs in general to linguistic signs, of semiotics to semantics, to be thought. In Scotus, the relation signifier/signified is organized along three divisions” (p. 30).

Much more than a simple division of the subject matter is going on here.

“1) The relation signifier/signified can be natural or conventional. The natural sign manifests a real relation that is found in nature, while the conventional sign translates a relation of reason, which only exists for the intellect that establishes it. This opposition recovers the division between two kinds of inferential signs. The non-linguistic natural signs imply a causality and a real relation; the instituted signs, of which linguistic signs are a part, imply an intellectual decision, and indeed a relation of reason. The conventional (ad placitum) sign has only a relation of reason with its object; it is a second intention, a simple perspective of the mind with no objective correlate. Scotus gives as an example ‘the voice and the gestures of the monks’ who have taken a vow of silence. These signs ‘could signify other things, if it pleased the institutors’, for what has been instituted at will can be revoked at will. — But the natural sign better reveals the essence of the sign: ‘The natural sign signifies more truly than the conventional sign’. In effect, the natural relation of the thing to its sign is a real relation, implying a first intention: an aspect of the thing has exercised a direct causality on what signifies it. For example, the relation of smoke to fire and that of the thing to the concept are real” (pp. 30-31).

The vocabulary of first and second intentions comes from Avicenna. Roughly, first intentions are supposed to refer directly to concrete real things and genera like “horse”, whereas second intentions refer to abstract concepts like “subject” or “genus”. For Avicenna, Scotus, and others in the scholastic tradition, second intentions generally have a second-class status and valuation in comparison to first intentions.

Whether there really are such things as natural signs is a question that will have to be considered. Of course insofar as there are natural things, or phenomena that we agree to call natural things, there “are” such natural things as smoke and fire. We can probably agree too that smoke is in some sense “caused” by fire. But that that inference from smoke to fire is truly naturally given, and not in any way due to us, is quite debatable.

Scotus’s talk about the will of the institutors of a language is also problematic. It can be fairly said that the state of a natural language at a given time is not the product of anyone’s will, individual or collective. Even more generally, real history is not based on a foundational moment. It is the cumulative compound of many accidents.

“Duns Scotus nonetheless does not relate signification to knowledge, but to will. Speech is an ordered communication, which makes manifest certain signs of a mutual will…. Language does not express a knowledge, but rather indicates a will…. What we understand, what is said, manifests what the speaker wants to say. It is inscribed in the space of reciprocity (mutuae voluntatis), and not that of monologue or meditation. Finally, it has communication in this space of interlocution as its aim. Language agrees with the human as a being who is not limited to reason, but who is given a will” (p. 31).

The invocation of mutuality and reciprocity and a “space of interlocution” here is an important surprise that makes this more interesting. This overlaps with the concerns of Hegel, Gadamer, Habermas, and Brandom.

I use the locution “I want to say that x” from time to time myself. Right now “I want to say” that while to speak of a definite will in the sense of intending this and not that is a perfectly good distinction, claims that there even is a power of pure arbitrary choice — let alone that it is superior to intellect — ought to be rejected. What the speaker according to herself wants to say is indeed a part of the story of meaning, but it is only a part.

“Signs suppose an institution on our part. They follow from a voluntary decision, and in no way from a nature of signs. The order of signs is not in the nature of things. Established, stopped, they found a status, a state, or an order among the participants in discourse. But the instituted sign can efficaciously represent an invisible reality: a will. It thus represents an intellection, but under its highest form, as will, and allows the willed effect to be produced. The sign thus instituted has a double function: it guarantees the certitude of recognition, it allows the efficacy of its operation. The model is thus that of a pact (pactio), whether it is a matter of a firm engagement (sponsio), a guarantee (fideiussio), or an oath (juramentum). The efficacy of signs comes from a pact between the liberties they represent” (pp. 31-32).

We can see that there is a high-level analogy between this notion of the “institution” of a regime of signs and the common early modern foundation myth of a social contract. Like the social contract, which is supposed to ground strong claims of political sovereignty — and unlike Hegelian mutual recognition, which is always in process and open to another chapter — the institution of signs for Scotus putatively has an “always already founded” status.

As is common in the scholastic tradition, efficacy here is also unequivocally associated with efficient causation, which is treated as the most primary kind of cause, whereas in a purely Aristotelian context efficient causes are subordinate, which implies that efficacy cannot be simply identified with efficient causality. Moreover, for Aristotle himself, something like the art of building is more truly an efficient cause than the architect or the carpenter or the hammer or the hammer’s blow.

“2) The signified can be permanent or intermittent. The sign that always has its signified is a ‘true sign’ in the sense of saint Anselm. It is also called ‘efficacious’ because it implies an efficient causality between the event and its sign. Reciprocally, for the one who depends on it, it always leads to a knowledge. It has no need of an interpreter, and always does what is expected of it: it always realizes its proper operation. The necessary sign can only appear accompanied by its signified: the eclipse is the true sign and efficacity of the interposition of the earth, since it is always the effect. This signification, which rests on a necessary inference, is necessary and always true. Thus all the natural signs are efficacious signs” (p. 32).

From an Aristotelian point of view, I have already expressed some skepticism about the claim that there are natural signs, but in the Catholic tradition it is commonly held that the sacraments, unlike linguistic signs, are efficacious in themselves, and Scotus is giving voice to this.

“But among the conventional signs, certain are efficacious (the sacraments), while others are not. The latter do not always imply their signifieds, but are sometimes true, sometimes false, that is to say neutral. This kind of sign is falsifiable, it is enunciated in variable propositions, and its signification is contingent. It is not efficacious, not having the power to realize its signified: in a proposition, it is not in the power of the speaker to make it so that the sign is accompanied by the thing it signifies. The sign is thus not true by itself, but is an exterior adequation to its signified. The ambivalence between the truth of the sign and truth of adequation mark the division between the conventional sign in general and the efficacious sign” (ibid).

The notion of efficacy here also seems be an all-or-nothing proposition — either total or inapplicable. I think there is a kind of efficacy of signs, but it is never total.

“3) Again we can distinguish signs according to their relation to a temporal signified. Some refer to the past (commemorative signs), others to the future (predictive signs: prognosticum), and others finally to the present (deictic signs: demonstrativum). For Scotus language is a commemorative sign, while the sacrament is a demonstrative sign” (pp. 32-33).

The “commemorative” status of linguistic signs is presumably supposed to be a kind of reference back to a founding event or will. Again I think of social contract theories.

Husserl also speaks of “deictic” expressions, but gives the term the nearly opposite meaning of indexical or occasional, as contrasted with ideal. Something like Husserlian deictic expressions are called “floating” signifiers in the Saussurean tradition, because they have no fixed reference.

“According to Thomas Aquinas, every sacrament has an omnitemporal signification. It is the sign of the past, of the present, and of what is to come (it recalls respectively the Passion of Christ, source of all grace, the present which is the gift of grace, and the glory to which every grace destines the human). Its signification contains an essential presence, present to all the dimensions of time. For Scotus, on the contrary, the sacrament is a demonstrative sign. Like every sign, it has an intentionality pro praesenti. It refers to the present and to it alone. It is in this sense that it is a representative sign: the representational function of the sacrament as sign implies the realization of the signified at the instant of its utterance, and indeed the temporal presence of the object represented. It has a deictic dimension that is demonstrative, in contrast to memory and the promise. Representation is first of all a form of presence.”

Aquinas and Scotus are both doing things with presence, but it seems as though presence in Scotus is contracted to a punctual status that is connected with a punctual or all-at-once view of representation. The strong association of representation with presence is also important.

“Duns Scotus cannot accept the thesis according to which the verb in present tense signifies the instant at which the utterance of every enunciation is completed, or all the conclusions that depend on it. ‘When it is uttered, the verb cosignifies time in the same way that it signifies [the signified]’: as a consequence, when it cosignifies the present, it only refers to the instant of its utterance. When no indication comes to specify a proposition, the time of the enunciated in the present is that of its enunciation. The intention of the speaker comes to coincide with the rhythm of the phrase. Expressed temporality follows lived temporality. In the same way, by the force of discourse, the demonstrative pronoun hoc [this] signifies what it shows the instant it is proffered” (pp. 32-34).

For Brandom, pronouns like “this”, far from being indissociable from immediacy, are anaphoric back-references to something said before.

“Three metaphysical principles are interlaced in the Scotist semantics: the primacy of the will for justifying the institution of signs, that of univocity for establishing their ideal state, and that of presence for explicating their temporal reference” (p. 34).

Next in this series: A Triangular Relation

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).

Moore’s Meta-Ethics

As part of due diligence for my previous post, I did a quick search to canvas prior uses of the term “meta-ethics” or “metaethics”. The results were somewhat surprising. One source simply called it a branch of analytic philosophy. Another implied that the word was first used by the early analytic philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), but a search of his most famous work Principia Ethica (1903) did not find it there. Before this my closest contact with Moore had been Alasdair Macintyre’s very negative portrayal.

Moore’s work dominated analytic discussions of ethics in the first half of the 20th century. The aspect that later writers have identified as meta-ethical was his strong distinction between the good in itself and things that we merely call good. I cannot help but think of Plato in this context. Moore’s focus on questions of intrinisic worth recalls Aristotle’s discussion of what is sought for its own sake, rather than as a means to some other end. His prime examples of intrinsic worth were beauty and affection between people. He pointed out that in ethical judgements, a whole is not just the sum of its parts.

Moore held that good is undefinable and simple, which again recalls Plato. But contrary to the perspective of the “long detour” associated with Plato’s Republic, he held that good is something we apprehend immediately, in a kind of intuition. I even wonder if this influenced those who claim that Aristotelian “intellect” must be fundamentally intuitive and immediate.

In any case, Moore also held that there is no moral truth, and generally devalued first-order or practical or what some call “normative” ethics. While I do not at all agree with that, I do see philosophical ethics as mainly concerned with broad second-order or “meta” questions.

At the same time, he was principally responsible for highlighting the so-called naturalistic fallacy in utilitarianism and similar doctrines. He also rejected egoism as a moral theory, and identification of the good with will. He held that ethical propositions resemble neither natural laws nor commands. Ethics does not identify absolute duties, but rather makes relative distinctions between alternatives. He held that practical ethical judgements are concerned with means, and therefore involve an element of causal judgment. In general he was much concerned to point out linguistic confusions in ethics, such as the identification of good with a supersensible property. He pointed out the limitations of rule following, and held that the exercise of virtue in the performance of duties is not good in itself.

According to later discussions, Moore laid the ground for the “noncognitive” perspectives on ethics that dominated analytic accounts in the first half of the 20th century. These make practical ethics purely a matter of subjective feeling. That is the basis of Macintyre’s criticism of Moore.

(We saw earlier that Habermas is regarded as working on the “cognitive” side of this divide. I don’t care for this terminology, but on that score my sympathies would have to be with Habermas and his “ideal speech situations”. Habermas acknowledges influence from Gadamer, who saw Platonic dialogue as a model for ethical thought. And Brandom, with his emphasis on Hegelian mutual recognition, is an obvious “cognitivist” who has called Habermas a personal hero.)

Moore speaks of the proper approach to ethics as “scientific”. By science he seems to mean not rational elaboration and interpretation, but a broadly empiricist attitude. I don’t think ethics should strive to be scientific in that sense, but rather “reasonable”, and open and responsive to situations.

“Intellect” as Culminative Intuition

Once or twice before, I’ve somewhere mentioned the issue of interpreting the remarks Aristotle makes about intellect (nous) in the Posterior Analytics. Some people read this text as attributing to intellect a kind of immediate grasp that they associate with intuition. I have even seen nous translated as intuition.

If intuition is supposed to be immediate in an unqualified way, I don’t think this interpretation can be reconciled with Aristotle’s view that although there is what he calls an inner sense, the soul does not have direct self-knowledge, but only self-knowledge of an indirect sort.

My late father was quite impressed by Kant and Hegel’s critique of the notion that intuition is a source of immediate knowledge, but he also used to distinguish “culminative intuition” from “originary intuition”. This seems very useful to me. Originary intuition is the immediate kind that some people claim to have, but is rejected by Kant and Hegel. Culminative intuition on the other hand arguably resembles what the Arabic philosophers called “acquired intellect”. That is, it is an end result of a long process (see also Long Detour?; First Principles Come Last; Adeptio). One of my very first posts here suggested that Aristotle and Plato would have been sympathetic to the inferentialist account of reason propounded by Robert Brandom. Brandom himself reads Kant and Hegel as inferentialists.

Google returns zero references to culminative intuition on the internet. Now at least there will be one. If a kind of intuition does have a kind of immediacy, I think it must be what Hegel called mediated immediacy, which is like knowing how to ride a bicycle. That is, it depends on a process of learning, but eventually acquires a kind of immediacy.

Turn to a Subject

This continues a reading of Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s Transferts du Sujet (2003). Up to now, broader themes related to the common modern assumption that there must be a univocal “Subject” behind all the varied appearances and experience of subjectivity have remained mostly in the background. Now they are beginning to move to center stage. How did we get to a point where it seems natural to attribute all our particular thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to a tight unity called “the Subject”?

Plato famously likens the soul’s unity to the rather loose one of a city. Meanwhile the Aristotelian word translated as “subject” (hupokeimenon) has no specifically psychological meaning. It is a much more general logical term that applies to anything that in a quasi-syntactic way “stands under” something else. Brenet uses the Heideggerian term “subjectity” to distinguish this older meaning.

Augustine insists on the active character of the soul, as an image of God and analogue of the Trinity. Contrary to Aristotle, he attributes an immediate reflexivity to the soul or mind. But he sharply rejects the idea that the soul or mind is a “subject” (subiectum). Augustine argues that this would make things like knowledge and love inhere in us as mere properties or predicates.

But in the 13th century, the Latin translation of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle on the soul raised the question what is the Aristotelian “subject” of thought? Augustine’s followers began to insist on exactly what Augustine rejected. This is the point at which the term “subject” acquired a psychological meaning. Brenet points out its adoption by the Augustinian William of Auvergne, whose work Brenet previously translated to French.

“[W]hen the reading of Averroes began, the notion of ‘subject’ was already on the scene. An exemplary witness is the work of William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris between 1228 and 1249. William asserts not only that the human soul is the ‘subject’ of thought, but that it knows itself reflexively as ‘subject’…. [I]t is the knowledge that it knows, and the knowledge that it knows as the subject of knowledge. This is not a deduction that from acts of knowledge oriented toward objects conjectures the existence of a power serving as their substrate, but indeed the knowledge of the self as that subject” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 333, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

According to Brenet, William takes up Avicenna’s metaphor of the flying man. “If since birth a man were suspended in the air, without use of any of the senses, he will nonetheless necessarily think, and think of himself as thinking, as a spiritual substance, as receptor and substrate of the intellectual forms. Besides the recurrence of the word subiectum, attributed to the soul in this spiritualist conception of the human, the great interest of William of Auvergne’s psychology lies in the combination he makes of this notion of ‘subject’ with the dynamic one of ‘agent principle’ (principium agens). The thinking soul in effect is not pure passivity…. It must be actrix and effectrix…. (this is why William, a firm adherent of the principle of the indivisibility of the soul, rejects the division within it of an agent intellect and a receiving intellect). The sensible is nothing but an occasion for an immanent act of intellection, which excites the soul to produce its own proper concepts from itself and within itself. William cites the joint authority of Augustine and Boethius here…. When it thinks itself, as a result the soul apprehends itself as the receptacle of a self-engendered knowledge; it is like the water of the sea or a river that welcomes the fish to which it gives birth” (p. 334).

“This is a captivating double aspect for us: first of all because, having been said of the human in a fundamental sense (the human is her soul, and it is first of all as subject….), the subiectum in William of Auvergne is intimately related to an idea that our modernity retains: an active power of foundation, a causal determination of acts…. Secondly, because William of Auvergne injects the concept of the subject into an Augustinian analysis of cognitive processes or of spiritual knowledge that a priori does not tolerate it. We know in effect that Augustine rejects the model of ‘subject’ as support of accidents, for thinking the relation that is maintained between the spirit and its faculties” (pp. 334-335).

Brenet summarizes the view of Augustine:

“The spirit knows that it understands and thinks, it knows itself entirely in its proper substance; and it is not as ‘subject’ that it is present to itself; it is that being of which the very essence is to know itself; it is not as attributes that its spiritual powers are manifested, since they each reveal to the spirit its own being or substance. Neither intelligence, nor memory, nor will, etc., is a quality in the spirit, inhering in it. The spirit is made in the image of God, who in the proper sense does not subsist (God is not susceptible to being the subject of accidents that affect their bearer). It is the model of the Trinity itself that allows the relation of the faculties and the spirit to be thought. That is to say, the circumincession of the Persons, or perichoresis (perichoresis being the mutual immanence of the Persons of the Trinity)” (pp. 335-336).

“It is thus necessary to think the relation of the powers to the spirit as like that which the divine Persons have to God. In the ‘perichoretic model’, to take up the expression of Alain de Libera, the spirit and its faculties, while being distinct from one another, are essentially one. The paradigm of inherence of qualities in the subject is indeed inoperative in this context, and its rejection leads to the expulsion of the Aristotelian notion of hupokeimenon [underlying thing] from the field of psychology” (p. 336).

“From this angle, William of Auvergne’s theory of the soul breaks the project that wants to be Augustinian at the heart. In elucidating the unity of the mens [Augustinian “mind”] with the subiectum, that is to say the infallible intuition that gives the soul knowledge of itself as ‘subject’, the Parisian bishop did much more than enrich a vocabulary. He crossed two models that the Middle Age up to that time had kept distinct: a theory of the me as clear presence to self, and a theory of the subiectum as being sub-jacent. He introduced subjectity in the soul, and conferred on the thinking human, active in this production, the new status of support of mental acts” (pp. 336-337).

“Having once raised the preceding considerations, we can better appreciate the anti-Averroist solutions of Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Herve Nedellec, who both affirm that the human thinks only as subject of the intellective act…. Before the problem posed to the Latins by the duo subiecta [two subjects] of Averroes, there was already question of the human-subject of thought” (p. 337).

“What effectively characterizes the anti-Averroist conception that John of Jandun confronted, and what is progressively put in place, is a new articulation of ‘human’ and ‘subject’…. It is not only a matter of saying, like William of Auvergne, that the soul is the subject of intellectual sciences, and that it thinks itself as such. It is not only a matter of posing, with Thomas Aquinas, that that by which the human thinks can only be her substantial form. It is necessary from now on to ensure, like Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Herve de Nedellec do, that the human can only be thought in her status as subject of the intellective act” (ibid).

“One says not only that the human thinks, and that she is the subject of her thought, but that she thinks insofar as she is the subject, on this condition alone. ‘Subject’ is not the term that one predicates of the thinking human (in supposing the necessity of a sub-jective power, assuring the possession of acts of knowledge), neither is it how she intuits herself, but rather it is the very thing on which the propriety of her acts in thought depends. Otherwise said, it is less the appearance of the subiectum in the field of psychology that we remark on here, than its place in the anti-Averroist project of the Latins. The notion of subject, applied to the human, becomes the centerpiece of the offensive. Where did this come from? What authority justifies that one has recourse to a ‘subject’ in the conceptual construction of these responses? None other than that, evidently paradoxical, of the Long Commentary itself. It is from the text of Averroes that the Latins take the idea that they oppose to him” (p. 338, emphasis in original; see “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera).

“The faulty reading of the theory of ‘junction’ and of the duo subiecta brought about the appearance of two things: on the one hand the attribution to the human, by the inclination of her images, of the title of subiectum; on the other hand the idea that the individuality of thought depends on this status. This is to say, combining the two: that the human only comes to think under her subjective condition, insofar as she is subject, if not of thought, at least of the intelligible species that lead to it. It is this articulation that the Latins preserve, while denying that it can be realized in the system of Averroes. They denounce in him the impossibility of a thing whose importance was invented by their misunderstanding. It is in the work of the Cordovan, interpreted crookedly, that this adjunction was brought out that was supposed to rationally justify the multiplicity of acts of intellection, in spite of the unity of the intellect” (ibid).

“As a consequence, the pivotal role of this transposition of subjectity into the human is not attacked, any more than it is in Thomas Aquinas. When the Aquinate reproaches Averroes for making the human only a being that is thought, and not a thinking one, in truth he has no issue with it being said that the image is the ‘subject’ of the intelligibles, and indeed with the placement of the human so that she thinks as the subject of universal species: he does not contest the idea of the human-subject, but the fact that reason is given for a doctrine in which individual images, and ultimately the individual herself, are nothing but furniture for the act of intellect. Averroes claims that the thinking human is (also), by means of her images, subject of the intelligible, but this is theoretically impossible for him, since the image has to be abstracted and by it, in it, the human can receive nothing of the universal” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet is not saying that images and the individual are mere furniture for Averroes, but recalling that according to Aquinas’ critique, they would be.

“In fact, Aquinas does not insist on the term subiectum — which after a few years became, notably among other Dominicans, a decisive philosophical element that was believed to take Averroes at the stronghold of his own logic, and show that it is incapable of satisfying its principal postulate: contrary to what [Averroes] says, the human is not the subject of the intellecta in actu, and the intellect in which the intelligibles are truly subjected has nothing to do with the human or the individual” (pp. 338-339).

“When we look at the 70 years that separate the entry of the Long Commentary into the Latin language from the intellectual activity of John of Jandun, we are as it were constrained to ask why the notion of ‘subject’ came to play a preponderant role in regulating the problem of the individuality of thought. Why is it all based on a certain arrangement of the triad human-subject-thought? How, in the paradoxical opposition to the noetics of Averroes, did the matter of intellectual individuation become in part constituted or effectuated in the University as the question of the subject? The idea of the human as subject of acts of thought was not the already available counter-argument, and the evolution of formulae from Thomas Aquinas to Durand de Saint-Pourcain or Herve Nedellec is revelatory of the intense elaboration that took place, up to the vindication of a human subjectity for thought” (p. 339).

“While Averroes posed the question of the noetic subject of thought, the Latins, based on his text, problematized that of its personal or human subject. This came down to transposing subjectity into the human, to placing into the terrain of subjectity, insofar as it is human, the problem of the humanity of thought, that of her individuation, that of thought’s appropriation by singular persons” (p. 340).

“This human who thinks, Socrates, is the body composed with intellect: an aggregate, a whole that unites the soul that cogitates and that which thinks. When thought is produced, intellect is not only a separate intelligence whose act passes on occasion by the intermediary of human images and is joined by humans who are humans without that; on the contrary, ‘it’ enters into the definition of each person. Even if in a non-substantial way, ‘it’ is constitutive of what individuals think. Otherwise said: in its separation, intellect is a part of the thinking human; and from this angle the humanity of the latter participates as ‘intrinsic operator’ that exists as her form” (p. 341).

“Thomas Aquinas says that a thing only acts by its form? John of Jandun too! Durand de Saint-Pourcin says that an individual can only think if the subject of thought is aliquid hominis [something human]? John of Jandun too! Certainly they don’t strictly understand the same thing: because this form and this subject are for John an ‘intrinsic operator’ without substantial support, because it raises an issue for personal immortality, etc.; no one denies the importance of these disagreements. Nonetheless, John shares this idea that it is necessary to include intellect in the human, and not only unite the latter to thought. We can see the effect of [Siger of Brabant’s] De anima intellectiva, but not only that; it is the effect of a previous Latin problematization that poses the subjection of the concept in the human as the condition of her proper thought. One could say also: which required that intellect in its entirety be an intellective soul. If we say that Averroes decentered the subject, John of Jandun recentered it: this thought is mine if that which it operates as thought is ‘of’ me” (ibid).

I have frequently commented on the non-Aristotelian character of the common scholastic term “intellective (or intellectual) soul”. Here we see its motivation.

“With Siger of Brabant, John constructs his response in two stages: he shows first that intellect-operans intrinsicum, along with the body, is a part of the thinking human; then, playing anew with the cosmologico-noetic analogy, that the act of a part can be referred back to its whole. On the basis of the human-aggregatum, the second function of the celestial comparison is in effect to indicate that the act of a part can be attributed to the composite — a way of maintaining with Aristotle that ‘it is the human, by her soul’ who thinks, and not only the soul” (p. 342).

“Vision is only in the eye, in the organ that receives the seen, and nonetheless we say that the human sees…. When the human thinks, the intellect is operans intrinsicum for her” (p. 344).

“In his questions on the Metaphysics, John defends the idea of an effective unity, a unity realized by the production of an effect” (p. 346).

“The exclusivity of human being follows from the affinity that the cogitative, the best of the sensory faculties, has with intellect” (p. 349). “The intellect does not abstract the brute image, the image of brutes, it requires a preliminary refinement…. The human intellective soul is the first of the separate forms, the most distant from the First, and the cogitative is the last and most spiritual of material forms” (p. 350).

“More exactly, without the existence of bodies the intellect cannot accomplish its end, which is the thought of the pure intelligibles, junction with the separate beings and with God” (p. 352). “Without the body, which conditions the engenderment of the intellect in habitu, the intellect, deprived of adeptio, cannot really be intellect…. Intellect depends on the human species, conceived as an uninterrupted succession of multiple supports of images, and not on this or that one in particular” (p. 353).

“The cogitative is a sensitive soul, the perishable form numbered with the humans, inherent to the body. It is its individual proper form, which also constitutes its specificity. Moreover, and without contradiction (on the contrary, because the order of the universe requires it), the human has a second substantial perfection, which is aggregated to her body in thought…. The human is not only a cogitating body, the bodily individual, but the whole formed by the operative unity of intellect with the body” (p. 357).

“For one who asserts that the possible intellect is unique, it remains to find solely in the particular organic faculties of humans the reason justifying the diversity of their thoughts” (pp. 358-359).

“A human thinks if she produces the act of thinking…. [T]he vocabulary of junction is succeeded by that of production, and the idea of a continuatio with the intelligible in act is succeeded by that of a production of the intellective act itself” (p. 361). “It is in the individual herself that thought is produced, and it is the internal dimension of its engenderment that makes a thought her own…. In estimating that junction with the intelligible in act is equivalent to production of the act of thought, that this production is the act of the human and that it occurs within her, John distances himself [from Averroes]” (p. 363). “John’s position coincides on an essential point with the anti-Averroist theses of certain great doctors of the School…. In spite of all their oppositions, John supposes no different thing: the human produces thought, and it occurs in her” (p. 364). “More generally, the act of intellect is attributed ‘denominatively’ to the human, in the measure that the last is in some way the cause” (p. 366).

“What governs the question of individual thought is not a doctrine of continuatio like that of Averroes: it is the idea of an intellectual production founded on a theory of the ‘subject’: a theory of the human as subject of the actus intelligendi, such as is elaborated at nearly the same time, in thinkers like Durand de Saint-Pourcin or Herve Nedellec” (p. 368).

Next in this series: Adeptio

Gadamer on Socratic Questioning

“Socratic conversation [has] the single goal of achieving an authentic shared process of speech…. Part of the meaning of genuine substantive explication is that it can continually justify and clarify itself…. A sophistic logos fails to meet this requirement because one did not acquire it with a view to the facts of the matter but rather with a view to its effectiveness in impressing the people around one” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (German ed. 1931), p. 56).

Since Habermas cites Gadamer as an influence, Gadamer’s work may well be the primary source for Habermas’ striking remark “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech”. In any case, it provides a good explication. I find this particularly valuable, because although Habermas and Brandom neglect Plato and Aristotle, Gadamer himself treats them as not merely of antiquarian interest, but as having central contemporary relevance. (In the introduction to his Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), Brandom too cites Gadamer’s hermeneutics as representative of one of two major ways of reading philosophical texts, neither of which he intends to follow strictly.)

“Precisely because the sophist’s logos, with its agonistic goals, does not make explicit or stick to the sense in which it is intended in each case, it falls prey itself to these ambiguities when someone else uses them against it. Socrates, on the other hand, keeps his eye on the subject matter even in these circumstances” (p. 57, emphasis added).

Real dialogue is not a social negotiation between individuals confronting one another. It holds fast to the shareable subject matter under discussion. Not our “immediate” egos but the rich and variegated terrain of open-ended meaning that we jointly inhabit is at issue here. What matters is not the competitive question of who is right, but the open-ended, shared exploration of what follows from what.

(Brandom’s first major work is called Making It Explicit. Sophistical sleight of hand — be it in politics, religion, or everyday life — depends on an opposite strategy of keeping it obscure what really or properly follows from what, in order to keep things safe for arbitrary “truths” plucked out of thin air. Although Making It Explicit does not directly address the topic of sophistry, that book of linguistic philosophy is a very substantial and original development of something like the positive side of Gadamer’s argument here, which folds in additional perspectives not addressed by Gadamer. Brandom also points out that Habermas’ work articulating what constitutes an “ideal speech situation” provides a detailed and interesting explication of Hegel’s central ethical notion of mutual recognition.)

Gadamer goes on, “Socrates’ logical traps are not meant to be the manipulations of a virtuoso technician which are simply applied where they promise success; instead, they are living forms of a process of seeking shared understanding” (p. 58). “[R]efutation in the Socratic style is positive: not a process of reducing the other person to silence so as, tacitly, to make oneself out as the knower, in contrast to him, but a process of arriving at a shared inquiry” (p. 59).

“The good, then, is knowledge’s object; that is, it is the unitary focal point to which everything must be related and in relation to which human existence in particular understands itself in a unified way. The general character of the good is that it is that for the sake of which something is, and thus, in particular, that for the sake of which man himself is. It is in the light of it that human beings understand themselves in their action” (ibid).

Here Gadamer brings out into the clear the central role of what Aristotle calls that for the sake of which — the telos or “final cause” — which extends all the way from the understanding of living beings in nature to the highest first philosophy. To ask after that for the sake of which is precisely to step back from what is immediately present. This is the beginning of wisdom.

“Just that, then, which presents itself unambiguously as good, in its immediate presentness, should and must be ‘measured’, if it is supposed to be ‘the good’, in relation to something that is not contained in its immediate attractiveness itself. So it certainly cannot be the immediate attractiveness that constitutes the goodness” (p. 61).

“Thus it is no more the case that the immediate experience of well-being is an indubitable testimonial of its goodness than that any behavior that is regarded as virtuous is so automatically, without being justified by reference to the good itself. Thus the demand for an art of measuring pleasures — which alone could justify the claim of pleasure to be the good — succeeds, despite the impossibility of such an art, in making clear what the good is sought as. Dasein understands itself in relation to what it is ‘for the sake of’, not on the basis of how it feels at any present moment but on the basis of its highest and constant potential” (pp. 61-62).

Real understanding is precisely a movement beyond what is immediate. Gadamer is still partly under the spell of Heidegger, and refers to Heideggerian Dasein, but this plays no real role in the argument. I would refer more simply to “our” understanding of ourselves.

“The methodological point of the imagined art of measurement, then, is to show that an understanding of Dasein must understand present things in terms of non-present ones and can grant them goodness only in such a relation. Thus this Socratic course of argumentation allows us to see what the good must (in any case) be sought as: namely, the central thing on the basis of which human being understands itself. So the positive point of Socratic refutation consists not only in achieving a positive perplexity but also — by the same token — in explaining what knowledge really is and what alone should be recognized as knowledge. It is only in the concept of the good that all knowledge is grounded; and it is only on the basis of the concept of the good that knowledge can be justified” (p. 63).

Again, for Dasein I would just say “ourselves”.

Here he again brings out the central role of the good in the constitution of what we call knowledge and truth. He points out that in order to make distinctions at all, we must have some preliminary idea of the good, even if we cannot articulate it.

“Insofar as the search for grounding that gives an accounting is a shared search and has the character of a testing, it operates, fundamentally, not by one person’s making an assertion and awaiting confirmation or contradiction by the other person, but by both of them testing the logos to see whether it is refutable and by both of them agreeing in regard to its eventual refutation or confirmation. All testing sets up the proposition to be tested not as something for one person to defend, as belonging to him or her, and for the other person to attack, as belonging to the other, but as something ‘in the middle’. And the understanding that emerges is not primarily an understanding resulting from agreement with others but an understanding with oneself. Only people who have reached an understanding with themselves can be in agreement with others” (p. 64).

Between Good and Evil

Title for this post recalls the English subtitle of Rüdiger Safranski’s biography Martin Heidegger (German ed. 1994, English tr. 1998). I’ll try and keep this relatively short, but I wanted to make few remarks on this and Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993). In the last few days I have been pouring over these, with a few specific questions in mind: What led to Heidegger’s profoundly negative view of Plato, Aristotle, and Western philosophy in general? What details are known about the development in his religious views? And what else is known about his political views, and involvement with the Nazis?

In 1907, one of his teachers gave him a copy of Franz Brentano’s dissertation on the meaning of being in Aristotle. Brentano was the one who introduced the medieval term “intentionality” into modern philosophy. Latter, Heidegger enthusiastically read the Logical Investigations of Brentano’s student Husserl. But in 1915, he anticipated a career interpreting medieval philosophy. He was originally going to be a Catholic priest. Some time around 1916, though, he left the Catholic church, citing “epistemological issues”, and for a time identified himself as a “free Christian”. Around the same time, he came into personal contact with Husserl, eventually becoming Husserl’s assistant. His early work under Husserl was devoted mainly to a phenomenology of religion.

Heidegger in his early works favors intuition over reason, and puts a high value on immediacy. He identifies with German romanticism, particularly the work of Schleiermacher on religion. As late as 1921, he still refers to himself as a theologian. An early work on Augustine decries the bad influence of Greek philosophy on Christian theology.

His early philosophical involvements were mainly with medieval philosophy, and with the German philosophy of his own day. Plato and Aristotle hardly figure at all in the story told in these two books, up to the point when Heidegger starts lecturing on them as a supposed expert. He claimed to be working on a book on Aristotle in the early 1920s, but only completed the introduction. He did give several lecture courses on Aristotle, and a couple on Plato.

I used to be fascinated by his discussions on the etymology of Greek philosophical words, but my understanding is that these are not taken very seriously by linguists. As someone who “reads” classical Greek mainly in bilingual editions with heavy use of a dictionary, I came to realize that this kind of informal talk about etymologies did not imply a very deep study of the texts in question, or a very deep knowledge of the language. I could write with great confidence about individual Greek words the way Heidegger does, but I am nowhere near competent to critically discuss major Greek texts in the original.

In 1923, Heidegger apparently had the flash of inspiration that Greek ousia really meant standing presence. Neither the biography nor the study of his early work gives any indication of close textual or historical study of Greek philosophy leading up to this. His attention seems to have been mostly elsewhere. It seems that ousia as presence was no more than a quite unhistorical intuition. But Heidegger apparently had great charisma as a teacher, and he asserted it with great confidence. Cheap shots against Aristotle are an easy sell in the modern world; hardly anyone looks at them critically.

I cannot help but notice that a notion of “presence” does play a significant role in Husserl, while it really does not in Plato or Aristotle. The most plausible hypothesis, I think, is that Heidegger reads a strong notion of presence into Plato and Aristotle because he has been immersed in Husserl, for whom presence is very important.

The biography does fill in a bit more about his involvement with Nazism. Heidegger was originally a Catholic conservative, though he left the church during the First World War. He seems to have supported the Nazis at least as early as 1931. He does not seem to have been personally anti-Semitic, but he was willing to adopt anti-Semitic behavior in order to conform.

In 1933, Safranski says Heidegger was positively “electrified” by Hitler’s ascendance. This had some kind of huge significance for him, and he wanted to give it a profound philosophical meaning. He reportedly even called it a collective emergence from Plato’s cave. Evidently he imagined that there was a world-historical philosophical significance to nazification as a new spiritual era, and he had the hubris to believe that he himself could somehow personally guide the movement. Those last hopes were dashed fairly quickly. They didn’t listen to him at all. He was never part of the Nazi inner circle, and he left his Nazi-appointed university rectorship in 1934. But at least as late as 1935 and perhaps quite a bit longer, he still politically supported the regime.

Later, Heidegger downplayed the Nazi chapter of his life as a simple “error in judgment”. Biographer Safranski does not find this disavowal to be credible. He says there is just too much evidence of how tremendously important these events were for him, and how excited he was about it all. It was the most important thing in his life for over a year. But the great phenomenologist Husserl at one point called this man his best student. The young Hannah Arendt, who would go on to become one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century in her own right, apparently was really in love with her professor. And I cannot honestly say I am sure that the philosophical positions I have major issues with in themselves lead to fascism or anything like that. But I do find it troubling.

So we end still with deep ambivalence.

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.