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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is indeed the question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Truth and Assertibility