Making It Explicit – The Postmodern Peripatetic

I’m starting another pass through Brandom’s Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (1994). This post addresses the preface.

Apart from a brief dalliance with Wittgenstein and a bit of reading in logic, I was unaccustomed to analytic discourse when my late father commended this book to me two decades ago. My dad normally took a verging-on skeptical Socratic stance and was extremely reserved about endorsing anything, but he said this might just be the most overall satisfying account of things he had ever seen.

It’s been a while, but it feels like home ground now.

In contrast with the overtly Hegelian meta-ethical concerns of A Spirit of Trust, the focus here is more on advancing contemporary philosophy of language, and the other philosophers he discusses are mainly in the analytic tradition.

Already on page xii, Brandom says that authority is only intelligible against a background of correlative responsibility. This should have already prevented people from attributing to him any sort of one-sided appeal to existing norms.

He is extremely polite about representationalism, merely presenting inferentialism as an alternative. “The aim is not to replace that familiar idiom, but to enrich it.” The kind of inference at issue is in the first instance not formal but material. I think representation has an indispensable role as a kind of shorthand in ordinary communication, but want to emphasize (as Brandom does in the later Spirit of Trust) that it is always derivative, and therefore cannot play any sort of foundational role.

The book begins with normative pragmatics. Instead of starting from intentional states of individuals, this will ultimately address normative statuses as constituted through networks of open-ended mutual recognition. I always liked this interactive and reason-centered rather than subject-centered approach.

In place of the direct interpretation of intentional states, he puts the unattractively named but important notion of deontic scorekeeping, which provides a detailed, low-level model of the workings of recognition. The scorekeeping metaphor impeded my uptake, and I only learned the other day that linguistics has a well-established concept of deontic modality (literally mentioned in Making It Explicit, it turns out) that seems to be as committed to recognizing degrees of “should”, etc., as deontological ethics would seem to be to the unconditional application of ground-level rules. Deontic scorekeeping is keeping track of semantic, epistemic, and practical commitments, takings of responsibility, and entitlements, as well as attributions thereof.

In place of correctness of representation and consideration of truth conditions, he puts a consideration of inferential proprieties. Expression will explain the implicit structure of linguistic practices. Logical vocabulary is said to have an expressive role in this sense. Logic is not mainly about proving truth, but about explaining what we mean with our nonlogical vocabulary. It is “the organ of semantic self-consciousness”. An alternative approach via truth rather than inference would still treat truth as a normative matter rather than a factual one.

He will add a reasonable explanation of identity in terms of substitution in natural language, and an utterly fascinating discussion of anaphora, which is the technical linguistic term for chains of pronomial reference, also related to the constitution of identity. The whole aims at “a unified vision of language and mind”. (See also Sapience, Sentience; Material Inference; Determinate Negation; Material Consequence; Normative Pragmatics; Inferential Semantics; Objects, Anaphora; Scorekeeping.)

Hegelian mutual recognition puts ethical considerations of reciprocity with others to the fore. In part, it is a more sophisticated version of the idea behind the golden rule. It also suggests that anyone’s authority and responsibility for anything should always be evenly balanced. It is also a social, historical theory of the genesis of meaning, value, and identity. Hegel’s notion was partly anticipated by Fichte.

Brandom reads mutual recognition as central to Hegel’s ethics or practical philosophy, and Hegel’s practical philosophy as central to his philosophy as a whole. Prior to the publication of A Spirit of Trust (2019), what I take to be Brandom’s own deep ethical engagement was often not recognized. I hope the situation will soon improve.

Consistent with Brandom’s general approach, the ethics of A Spirit of Trust appears in a highly mediated form. Much of the work of ethics for Brandom comes down to the implementation and practice of normative pragmatics and inferential semantics, which he has been expounding at least since Making It Explicit (1994). So, I think he has been laying the groundwork for a long time.

One recent commentator (Lewis 2018) suggested that ethics proper was just missing from Brandom’s earlier accounts. His citations for this were to Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, whose readings of Hegel are often compared to Brandom’s. I cannot find the text of Pinkard’s 2007 article, but Pippin in the course of his searching but still very sympathetic review “Brandom’s Hegel” (2005) had suggested there was at that time an important gap in Brandom’s reading, related to Hegel’s lifelong concern with a critical treatment of positivity, i.e., received views and institutionalized claims.

Pippin cited an ambiguous argument from Making It Explicit that seemed to support the social legitimacy of a commitment to enlist in the Navy by a drunken sailor who was tricked into a contract by accepting a shilling for more beer. Brandom has since clarified in several places that he did not mean to himself endorse this argument, based as it is on a partial perspective (see, e.g., Hegel’s Ethical Innovation). In Spirit of Trust terms, Brandom’s point in such a context would be to emphasize that the freedom associated with agency does not entail mastery, and in particular that we do not have mastery over the content of our own commitments. The issue for Pippin in 2005 was that Brandom appeared to put sole responsibility and authority for determining the content of commitments on the audience. Pippin found with respect to positivity “not so much a problem as a gap, a lacuna that Brandom obviously feels comfortable leaving unfilled” in Making It Explicit. I suspect Brandom’s lack of discomfort was directly tied to a deferral of such considerations to his 40-year magnum opus project, A Spirit of Trust.

For years, something like Pippin’s positivity issue was a main topic of discussion between my late father and me. For both of us, it was the big hurdle to overcome in fully recognizing Brandom as the world-historic giant we both thought he would probably turn out to be. I thought the positivity issue already began to be addressed in the early web draft of A Spirit of Trust, and I suspect it was a significant focus while Brandom was working on the final text.

In any event, I think it is clear that in the published Spirit of Trust, the determination of the content of commitments is envisioned not as stopping with an immediate audience, but as involving an indefinitely recursive expansion of mutually determining I-Thou relationships. On my reading, normative statuses that are both fully determinate and unconditionally deontically binding would only emerge from the projection of this expansion into infinity. But in practical contexts, we never deal with actual infinity, only with indefinite recursive expansions that have been cut off at some relatively early point. (See also Hegelian Genealogy.)

We always work with defeasible approximations — finite truncations of a recursive expansion through many relationships of reciprocal determination. This means in particular that judgments of deontic bindingness are defeasible approximations.

Further, the kind of approximation at issue here is not a statistical one, but a more Aristotelian sort of “probability”. It therefore cannot be assumed to monotonically improve as the expansion progresses, so it is not guaranteed that further expansion will not suddenly require a significant revision of previous commitments or concepts, as Brandom explicitly points out (see Error).

This means that the legitimacy of the queen’s shilling and any other received truth is actually open to dispute and therefore open to any rational argument, including those the sobered-up sailor might make. In Brandom’s favorite example, new case law — though of course subject to higher-level canons of determinate negation in its own future interpretation and evaluation — may significantly revise existing case law in unforeseeable ways.

I believe this gives us all the space we need for social criticism. We need have no fear that Brandom’s version of the mutual recognition principle will bind us to positivity. Nothing is out of bounds for the autonomy of reason. We only have to be honest about the conceptual content we encounter in the detail of the recursive expansion. I believe this is the answer to the lingering concerns I expressed in Robust Recognition and Genealogy. Even if Brandom himself were to turn out not to go quite this far, I think at worst this is a friendly amendment that does not disrupt the framework. (See also Edifying Semantics; Reasonableness.)

The recursive expansion of mutual recognition pushes it toward the kind of universality on which Kant based the categorical imperative. Practical outcomes from the two approaches ought to be similar. Hegel’s version is useful because it is grounded in social relationships rather than a pure metaphysics of morals, but still escapes empirical, “positive” constraints by indefinitely expanding the network toward the concrete universality of a universal community of rational beings. (See also Mutual Recognition Revisited; Pippin on Mutual Recognition; Hegel’s Ethical Innovation).