Tag: Pragmatics

All the Way Down

Once of the things I’ve most appreciated about Brandom has been his unwillingness to reduce normativity and value judgments to non-normative factors. Repeatedly in Making It Explicit, he speaks of norms “all the way down”. There is even a subheading for “all the way down” in the index entry for “norms” (p. 732). But in conjunction with this, he repeatedly suggests that the relation between pragmatics and semantics, while symmetrical in many respects, also includes an asymmetry, according to which it is more appropriate to say that normative pragmatics grounds representational semantics than vice versa. This is in distinction both to common views that privilege representation over inference and semantics over pragmatics, and to the purely symmetrical view of semantics and pragmatics that he seems to propound in Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons.

The symmetrical view can be seen in the favorable light of other symmetries that Hegel argues for in his campaign against “one-sidedness”. But it also implies that there is no sense in which normative pragmatics ought to be seen as coming before representational semantics.

Brandom’s 1976 dissertation, which is partly framed as the elaboration of a new form of pragmatism, makes links between the pragmatism it advocates, and a priority of pragmatics over semantics in philosophy of language. But as mentioned above, this year’s Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons, while applying inferentialist explanation to semantics in new ways, and while remaining as much as ever committed to an inferentialist order of explanation in general, nonetheless seems to back off from claiming any priority for pragmatics over semantics.

My worry is that this new symmetry and parity between pragmatics and semantics could end up weakening the commitment to “normativity all the way down”. The new thesis of full symmetry builds on his previous analogy between normativity and modality or subjunctive robustness, which I take to be sound. It may be that normativity all the way down does not really require the relative priority of pragmatics over semantics that Brandom claims in the dissertation and Making It Explicit, but I think more on this needs to be said.

Anaphora and Reason Relations

Applying Brandom’s 2025 concept of reason relations to his 1980 expansion of anaphora, it seems that the new reason relations codify and make explicit the same material inferences that are expressible in terms of anaphoric back-reference between sentences in a non-logical base language. Reason relations are constructed formal objects that are designed to codify an explicit formal representation of the material inferences expressed by anaphora. They provide a conservative extension and explanation of the material inferences expressible in the base language.

Convention, Novelty, and Truth in Language

We have been exploring the earliest publicly available work of the great contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom, his doctoral dissertation from 1976. He has been concerned to develop the philosophy of language along pragmatist lines, while working hard to point out that a pragmatist approach need not be construed as globally rejecting talk about objectivity, truth, and reality. The pragmatist approach is appealing as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivist and objectivist excesses. This is the last chapter before his conclusion.

“[W]e saw how the notion of truth and the truth conditions of sentences could arise in a pragmatic investigation into the social practices which are the use of a language by a population. That is, we saw how an account of social practices (which are whatever the linguistic community takes them to be) can require us to consider the sentences uttered in those practices as making claims which are objectively true or false, regardless of what the community takes them to be” (Brandom, Practice and Object, p. 129).

He has argued earlier that understanding the meaning of compound sentences (in which one clause refers to and modifies another) implicitly does after all presuppose a technical concept of truth that goes beyond the warranted assertibility that Dewey recommends as a less pretentious replacement for truth-talk.

Both in ordinary life and in ordinary ethical discourse, warranted assertibility — justification in taking things to be such-and-such — is able to do the work commonly allotted to claims about truth that is what it is independent of us. But insofar as we engage in the meta-level discourse about discourse that is already implied by the understanding of compound sentences, it becomes necessary to introduce a distinction between how things are for us and how they are in themselves. This kind of situation can also be seen as motivation for Kant’s talk about “things in themselves”.

“[W]e will see how that sort of inquiry requires that a sophisticated grammar be attributed to the language being investigated, and in particular requires notions of syntactic deep-structure, meaning, and denotation or reference. We thus extend the method of the previous chapter to consider sub-sentential linguistic components, and see what it is about the practices associated with them in virtue of which it is appropriate to associate them with objective things or features” (pp. 129-130).

He will defend Chomsky’s notion of deep syntactic structure objectively existing in natural language against Quine’s instrumentalist critique.

Only by abstraction from things said do we come to consider individual words in isolation. In common with his later work and at odds with the standard compositional account of meaning in linguistics and analytic philosophy of language, in the understanding of meaning Brandom here gives explanatory priority to sentences over words, and to propositions over terms. This will be more explicitly thematized in his later work.

The compound sentences analyzed by Dummett that Brandom refers to as requiring an auxilary notion of truth beyond epistemic justifiability partake of the character of discourse about discourse, because some parts of them refer to and modify other parts.

He considers what it means to investigate the use of a natural language — what he will later call normative pragmatics. Investigating language use implicitly means investigating proprieties of use, along with their origin and legitimation. We may also collect ordinary empirical facts about the circumstances of concrete “takings” of propriety and legitimacy and their contraries, without prejudice as to whether or not those takings are ultimately to be endorsed by us.

Using the neutral language of “regularities”, he specifies a sort of minimalist, almost behaviorist framework for investigating language use that is designed to be acceptable to empiricists. In later work, he develops a detailed analogy between the deontic moral “necessity” of Kantian duty and a “subjunctively robust” modal necessity of events following events that is inspired by the work of analytic philosopher David Lewis on modality and possible worlds.

“We may divide these regularities of conduct into two basic kinds: Regularities concerning what noises are made, and regularities concerning the occasions on which they are made…. The phonetic descriptions are just supposed to be some rule which tells us what counts as an instance of what utterance-type…. Without attempting to say anything more specific about these regularities, we can express what a speaker, as we say, ‘knows’, when he knows how to use an utterance-type by associating with it a set of assertibility conditions” (p. 130).

“In terms of these notions, we can represent a language by a set of ordered pairs called sentences. The first element of each ordered pair is a phonetic description and the second element is a set of assertibility conditions…. A linguist who has such a representation of the sentences of some alien language ought to be able, subject to various practical constraints, to duplicate the competence of the natives, that is, to converse with them as they converse with each other” (p. 131).

Here he is applying a stipulative re-definition of the ordinary English word “sentence”. “Ordered” pair just means it is always possible, given a member of the pair, to say which member it is. The pair here consists of 1) the sequence of sounds by which a particular sentence is identified, and 2) the conditions under which it is appropriate to use that sentence.

“[A] theory of the use of a language just is some mechanism for generating a list of ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions which codifies the social practices which are speaking the language” (p. 132).

Every sentence in every natural language has the two above aspects — a recognizable series of sounds that identifies it, and conditions for its appropriate use.

“Speaking only about the first element of the ordered pairs which we have taken to specify a language, Quine takes the task of a theory of syntax to be the generation of the infinite set of phonetic descriptions. He then argues that if the aim of a theory of syntax is determined by this target description of speaker competence, then many different axiomatizations will generate the same set of phonetic descriptions, and hence be descriptively adequate. Insofar as a theory of syntax is a part of the project of generating the right set of sentences, then, we may choose between alternative theories only on the basis of convenience of their representation (pp. 132-133).”

This is an example of Quine’s instrumentalism that was mentioned earlier. Syntactic constructs in a natural language like English are identifiable by their mapping to distinct series of sounds. I haven’t spent enough time on Quine directly to say much more at this point, but to identify syntax with the phonetics used to pick out syntactic distinctions seems reductionst. Before criticizing it, he elaborates on Quine’s view.

“Representing the conversational capacities as ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, we will see a good translation as associating with each phonetic description in one language a phonetic description in the other which is paired with the same assertibility conditions…. In this way a translation function would enable one to converse in a foreign language. If the goals of translation are regarded as determined in this way by pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, then convenience of representation and arbitrary choice will enter here as much as on the syntactic side” (p. 133).

“Denotational relations are presumably correlations between phonetically distinguishable elements … which appear in the phonetic descriptions of many sentences, and some element which regularly appears in the assertibility conditions of those sentences. A theory of denotation would consist of a relatively small list of such correlations, together with a set of structural rules which would permit the derivation of the full set of ordered pairs which are the sentences of the language, by combination of the various elements…. If one such axiomatization or recipe is possible, many are” (p. 134).

“More generally, given any scheme, we can substitute as the denotation of any phonetically specified expression anything systematically related to it, …and adjust the rest of the scheme to get the same assertibility conditions” (pp. 135-136).

“The point is that we may think of a language as being an abstract object consisting of a set of social practices…. If one now considers the various theoretical notions which have been thought to be crucial to the specification of a language by those who are not primarily concerned with social practices — the syntactic and semantic structure of its sentences, their meaning and the denotation of expressions occurring in them — one finds these notions playing drastically reduced roles” (p. 136).

“It is our purpose in this chapter to show how to circumvent … conventionalism while retaining the pragmatic point of view which renders language as comprised of social practices” (p. 137).

Classic 20th century analytic philosophy has a very thin notion of language use, effectively identifying it with empirically existing conventions. In contrast to this, Brandom sees in Noam Chomsky’s linguistics a crucial recognition of the ubiquity of linguistic novelty. He quotes Hilary Putnam’s critique of conventionalism:

“We see now why conventionalism is not usually recognized as essentialism. It is not usually recognized as essentialism because it is negative essentialism. Essentialism is usually criticized because the essentialist intuits too much. He claims to see that too many properties are part of a concept. The negative essentialist, the conventionalist, intuits not that a great many strong properties are part of a concept, but that only a few could be part of a concept” (ibid).

In contemporary usage, “essentialism” is a bad thing that consists in taking putatively unproblematic essences of things for granted. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle’s preoccupation with questions of what we translate as “essence” reflects a significant problematization.

Brandom now turns to a careful criticism of Quine.

“Quine’s arguments as we have reconstructed them seek to show that, for a particular specification …, the role of a translation function (or of syntactic deep structure, or of denotational scheme) can be played equally well by a number of different notions” (p. 138).

“Such sound conventionalist arguments cannot be refuted. They can be shown not to impugn the usefulness or objectivity of the notions they apply to. To do this one simply has to come up with some other project, with respect to which the various versions of, e.g., translation, do not play equally well the role that notion is invoked to play” (pp.138-139).

“The question I want to consider is, roughly, where the assertibility conditions and phonetic descriptions come from. In virtue of what does a sentence have the assertibility conditions and phonetic description that it does?” (p. 140).

Questions about conventional use are questions of empirical fact. Brandom’s “in virtue of what” question is on the other hand properly philosophical, in a sense that Plato and Aristotle would recognize.

We come to Brandom’s defense of Chomsky against Quine.

“Chomsky has argued on statistical grounds that most sentences used by adult native speakers have never been heard or used by that speaker before, and indeed that the majority of these have never been uttered by anyone in the history of the language. This is a striking empirical observation of far-reaching theoretical significance. Let us consider the sentences of English which have never yet been used. Not just any phonetic description is the phonetic description of some sentence of this set…. But a native speaker can not only discriminate between the phonetic descriptions which are on this list and conform to them in his own utterances, he has exactly the same acquaintance with the assertibility conditions of such a sentence that he does with the assertibility conditions of some familiar sentence like ‘Please pass the salt’. That is, a native speaker can discriminate between occasions on which it might be appropriately used and those on which it would be inappropriate. Granting, as we must, that there is a community of dispositions concerning these novel sentences which is sufficient to determine a social practice regarding their use, a notion of correct or incorrect utterance, surely this fact is remarkable. Why should the community agree as much about how to use sentences no one has ever heard before as about how to use common ones?” (pp. 140-141).

“For human beings, training in the use of the relatively few sentences we have actually been exposed to determines how we will use (or would use) the vast majority of sentences which we have not been exposed to” (p. 142).

“The question ‘In virtue of what is there a correct usage for a sentence no one has ever used before’ is distinct from, but not independent of the question ‘How do individual members of the linguistic community come to acquire dispositions which conform to the standard of correct usage for novel sentences?’ The questions are distinct because no individual’s dispositions, however acquired, establish a standard of correct usage. The questions are not independent since using a sentence is a social practice…. The question of how such agreement is achieved, its source and circumstance, is clearly related to the question of how individuals come to behave in ultimately agreeable ways…. The explanation of projection by populations must ultimately rest on facts about individual projective capacities…, although that explanation need not resemble the explanation of any such individual capacity” (pp. 143-144).

He clarifies what he means by projection.

“I want to argue that a theory of grammar is properly a part of the attempt to explain and predict the projective capacities of language-using populations. A theory of syntactic structure, of meaning, and of denotation and truth are to provide a framework for accounting for the empirical fact that the practices of a population which are the use of [a] relatively small number of sentences of a natural language determines, for that population, the use of a potentially infinite remainder they have never been exposed to” (p. 144).

“The notion of ‘grammar’ which I am addressing here is that of an interpreted categorial-transformational grammar. Such a grammar is an account of the generation of surface sentences of a language … from an underlying set of deep structures” (p. 144).

This is grammar in a Chomskyan rationalist, antibehaviorist sense.

“The projective capacities which are to be explained are obviously not entailed by the practices and dispositions codified in a set of those phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions…. An account of projection is thus an explanation of how people, being the sorts or organisms that we are, can engage in the complex social practices we do engage in. It is just this sort of inquiry which we considered … as the sort of inquiry within which the objects involved in a practice become important” (p. 145).

This puts new light on how individual words and phrases come to mean what they do.

“Consideration of projective facts of this sort can lead us, further, to attribute structural classes of sub-sentential components to some speaker” (ibid).

“We are interested in seeing how, by looking at facts about the acquisition of vocabulary and compounding forms by a subject, we can in principle explain his open-ended competence to use novel utterances, by exhibiting that competence as the product of projective capacities associated with classes of sub-sentential components” (p. 147).

“Projective classes for an individual were pictured as attributed on the basis of two sorts of acquisition, roughly the acquisition of some projective form, and the acquisition of vocabulary” (pp. 147-148).

“Indeed, it is only in terms of such projective dispositions that we can explain the notion of correctness for novel utterances. We can only explain how there should be such an agreement in terms of shared structural classes induced by familiar expressions, which determine the projection to novel utterances” (p. 148).

Linguistic structure is a theoretical object of just the kind whose status is a matter of dispute between the realists and the instrumentalists.

“This picture of linguistic structure as postulated to account for a speaker’s ability to use novel utterances correctly, on the basis of facts about the acquisition of capacities to project sub-sentential expressions, leads immediately to a change in the criteria of adequacy we impose upon translation functions, and accordingly to a change in the notion of the ‘meaning’ of a sentence which is preserved by translation” (p. 150).

From an empiricist point of view, questions about norms are questions of fact about what is usually the case. Empirical norms are “norms” in a non-normative, statistical sense of “normal” that has nothing to do with what should be the case, except accidentally. The projection of grammar to novel cases on the other hand is possible because grammar has a properly normative sense of “right” usage that is independent of whatever we conclude are the facts about statistically “usual” usage.

“[I]f translation is really to transform the capacity to speak one language into the capacity to speak another, it must transform an individual’s capacity to project novel sentences…. In order to learn to speak the new language, to form novel sentences and use them appropriately, an individual must have a translation-scheme which does more than match assertibility conditions. It must generate the matched assertibility conditions of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a familiarity with the elements out of which they are constructed, as exhibited in fairly small samples” (p. 150).

Speaking is not merely the utterance of sounds, and it is not just an imitation of other speaking. Concrete meanings presuppose learned notions of rightness or goodness of fit that are furthermore always in principle disputable. This also requires a non-behaviorist account of learning.

“Our account of this fact must show how what the subject learned to do before enables him to use this expression in just this way now, even though he has never been exposed to a correct use of it” (p. 151).

“Projection is not just a matter of using novel utterances, but also of using familiar ones under novel circumstances” (ibid).

“We can conclude that competence involved, not just in using … a free-standing utterance, but in projecting it as a genuine component of compound utterances, cannot be expressed merely by assertibility conditions, but requires some additional element” (p. 153).

“We should notice that the argument we have just considered is formally analogous to two arguments we have seen before. In the first place, it is just the same style of argument which we employed … in order to show that truth conditions were required to account for the contribution by component sentences to the assertibility conditions of compound sentences containing them…. All we have done here is to extend the earlier argument to sub-sentential compounding, an extension made possible by the more detailed consideration of why compounding is important. Second, this argument … is analogous to the ‘syntactic’ arguments of Chomsky…. In each case similar surface forms (phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions respectively) are assigned different deep structures on the basis of their different projective roles…. So it is clear that these expressions would have to be associated with something besides assertibility conditions in our theory of their projection anyway” (pp. 154-155).

“Our explanation of the fact that there are correct phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions for sentences no one has ever used before will be that the use of those sentences is determined by the grammar, … and that any individual’s learning to use the language is his learning to conform to the regularities of projection codified in that grammar” (p. 156).

“We have found that explaining the actual, empirical generation of the sentences of the language, shown by the sorts of projection of one corpus of utterances onto another which actually occur, requires that structural elements underlying phonetic structure be assigned to parallel structural elements underlying the assertibility conditions…. Just as the structure underlying the phonetic descriptions is plausibly identified as syntactic structure, so the corresponding structure underlying assertibility conditions is plausibly identified with semantic structure” (ibid).

“The same argument which gave us objective truth conditions … may thus be extended, within the context of our more detailed account of the empirical project which produces a grammar, to yield a parallel account of the function and origin of objective denotations” (p. 158).

“The case of the brown rabbit with a white foot shows that the denotations associated with the expressions ‘rabbit’ and ‘undetached rabbit-part’ must determine in some way the boundaries which white patches must exhibit in order to be grounds for reporting white rabbits or white undetached rabbit-parts” (ibid).

“But the boundaries which determine what objects or objective features are denoted by the expressions are not apparent boundaries…. Explaining the different patterns of projection of the elements of these pairs requires an objective difference in boundaries around white patches” (p. 159).

“It is important to realize that our grammar does not just seek to account for individual linguistic competence. It seeks to account for the shared projective practices in virtue of which there is a distinction between correct and incorrect uses of sentences no one has ever used before…. The grammar must account for the correct and incorrect potential uses of even quite complicated sentences which the ordinary man would never use” (ibid).

“[D]enotational schemes are part of an empirical explanation of certain social practices. Such explanations must cohere with the empirical explanations we are prepared to offer for other sorts of human conduct…. It is a prime virtue of the account we have offered of the question to which a grammar would be an answer that it shows us we can pick the objects in terms of which we explain projective practices in the same way we pick the objects in terms of which we explain color vision, indigestion, and quasars” (p. 162).

Here he is appealing to empirical explanation, and to something like the positivist notion of the unity of science. I am inclined to go to the opposite extreme, and to argue that genuine explanation is never merely empirical. There are empirical things, and we do want to explain them. There also is an empirical field of experience, but it too belongs to what is to be explained. In themselves empirical things do not explain anything. I think, though, that coherence does not apply only to explanation. There is also an implicit coherence on the level of what is to be explained. That is the sounder basis of the ideal of the unity of science.

In later work he explicitly criticizes empiricism in the philosophy of science, but he continues to be interested in empirical things, as evinced by many of his examples and by the theme of “semantic descent” in A Spirit of Trust.

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).

Reason Relations

“The construction gestured at so far foreshadows an argument for understanding reason relations of consequence and incompatibility as constituting a structure common to representational meaning and to practical use, to truth-making and to justificatory practices, to the objective world talked about and to the activities of talking about it, to what is represented and to the representing of it. That these same reason relations show up from the two otherwise disparate perspectives afforded by (the right kind of) semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies offers some reason to think of those relations as central to language or discourse as such” (Brandom in Hlobil and Brandom, p. 11).

Hlobil and Brandom’s Reasons for Logic presents major new results. In the technical part, Hlobil presents not just one but two very detailed new isomorphisms that unexpectedly seem to unify previously disparate areas of research in a convincing way. I will barely skim the surface of all that is afoot here. My goal is just to work through a few more pages of the motivational part, which also briefly summarizes the whole.

This notion of reason relations is already quite fascinating.

“Such an approach is unusual, and so perhaps surprising in how it discerns rational forms amphibious between these different dimensions” (p. 12).

It is the “amphibious” or hylomorphic character of what is going on here that is so amazing. This is not just something on the horizon offered to aim at as a goal, but an actual concrete accomplishment. This could make it possible to specify in detail what the substantiality of reason will amount to in particular cases. Brandom’s work has clearly taken on a life of its own, and is now being carried forward by others in new ways.

One of the many ideas afoot here is a suggestion that relations come before “things” in the order of explanation. This has been one of my favorite themes throughout the years. It even appears that this amphibious character of reason relations could enable us to say what constitutes objectivity in particular cases, and not merely gesture at it. If so this is huge, from the point of view of perennial human deficits and conflicts. It could be as big a leap for talking animals as the introduction of Platonic dialogue. Of course, we should anticipate that people will still find things to argue about.

Earlier, it was Brandom who convinced me to take Kant and Hegel seriously, and to take analytic philosophy seriously as actual philosophy and not just a technical endeavor. This greatly elevated appraisal, especially of Kant and Hegel, naturally led me to direct attention to Kant and Hegel themselves. In this context, I almost came to think of Brandom primarily as a very innovative expositor of their work. The products of this collaboration in the Research Group on Logical Expressivism that are reported here leave no doubt that there is much more to Brandom’s work than that.

“One important criterion of adequacy for both semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies as we understand them is that they offer expressive resources sufficient to provide explanations of the reason relations of arbitrary base vocabularies. They are able to say, each in their own distinctive idiom, both what it means for some sentences to stand to others in relations of implication or incompatibility and why they do…. Our preferred version of semantics offers, in effect, truth-makers for the claims that Γ#A (Γ is incompatible with A) and Γ|~A (Γ implies A) in alethic modal terms of the impossibility of fusions of truth-making states of A, and truth-making states Γ with falsifying states of A, respectively — that is, in terms of how the sentences of Γ and A represent the world to be. Our preferred version of pragmatics specifies how one must use sentences in order thereby to count as practically taking or treating them as standing in relations of implication or incompatibility. It does that in deontic normative terms of constellations of commitments to accept and reject the claimables they express being improper, inappropriate, or ‘out of bounds’ ” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Because both of these kinds of metavocabulary appeal to conceptual resources beyond those intrinsic to the base vocabularies of which they are the metavocabularies, and do so in service not just of characterizing the reason relations of those base vocabularies but of explaining them, the sorts of semantic and pragmatic metavocabulary we consider can be denominated ‘extrinsic-explanatory’ rational metavocabularies” (pp. 12-13).

“In addition to extrinsic-explanatory rational metavocabularies, there are also intrinsic-explicative ones. This latter kind of metavocabulary for reason relations restricts itself to the conceptual resources supplied by the base vocabularies whose reason relations it characterizes, and is used to make explicit those reason relations and the conceptual contents they articulate, rather than to explain why they are as they are, or what it is for them to be what they are. The principal phenomenon we initially seek to understand in these terms is logic. The first way logical vocabulary differs from the semantic and pragmatic metavocabularies considered so far is that it is an intrinsic, rather than an extrinsic metavocabulary for codifying reason relations. The rules by which logical vocabulary is introduced to extend any arbitrary nonlogical base vocabulary appeal to nothing more than the reason relations sentences of the base vocabulary stand in to one another” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

“Gentzen’s basic innovation was to treat reason relations, paradigmatically implications, as objects, called ‘sequents’, that can be referred to and manipulated, and their metainferential relations made explicit in a mathematical metavocabulary. The sequent-calculus metavocabulary can be thought of as applying to an arbitrary nonlogical base vocabulary…. This sequent-calculus metavocabulary allows for efficient expression of the reason relations that hold in any base vocabulary, including metainferential relations. But it is essentially just a notation, requiring no substantial additional conceptual resources beyond what is provided by the base vocabulary whose nonlogical implications and incompatibilities it specifies explicitly.”

“Perhaps surprisingly, the spare sequent-calculus notation… turns out to be sufficient to formulate rules for adding logical vocabulary to any arbitrary base vocabulary, and (most importantly), computing the reason relations of the extended vocabulary from those of the base…. The idea is first to extend the lexicon of the base vocabulary, by syntactic rules that specify that the base lexicon is included in the logically extended lexicon, and that if A and B are sentences in the extended lexicon, then so are [A implies B, A and B, and A or B]…. The complete logically extended vocabulary… can then be computed from the base vocabulary. We say that a corresponding logically extended vocabulary can be elaborated from any arbitrary base vocabulary. Implications and incompatibilities (and metainferences involving them) that hold in every logical extension of a base vocabulary, no matter what base vocabulary it is elaborated from, can then be said to hold in virtue of logic alone” (pp. 13-14).

“The sequent-calculus vocabulary is accordingly a rational metavocabulary — a vocabulary for specifying the reason relations of some other vocabulary — that has the special feature that it permits the elaboration of arbitrary base vocabularies over lexicons that extend the lexicons of the base vocabularies by adding logically complex sentences formed by combining the sentences of the base vocabulary with logical operators. Rules for those operators formulated in the sequent-calculus vocabulary conservatively extend the reason relations of the base vocabulary, in the sense that the implications and incompatibilties that hold among logically atomic sentences in the logically extended vocabulary are just those that already held among them in the base vocabulary. And the connective rules formulated in the sequent-calculus vocabulary do this while appealing to no resources outside of those provided already by the reason relations of the base vocabularies” (p. 15, emphasis added).

“”That is, sequent-calculus metavocabularies are intrinsic rational metavocabularies…. And they elaborate all the reason relations of the extended vocabulary solely from the reason relations of the base vocabulary…. When the reason relations of the logically extended vocabulary are suitably elaborated from those of a base vocabulary, it becomes possible for the first time to say explicitly, in the extended vocabulary, what implications and incompatibilities hold in that base, and also in its logical extension” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The constellation of the sequent calculus metavocabulary and the logical vocabulary it introduces stands in an intrinsic-explicative relation to the reason relations of any base vocabulary whatsoever…. The rules of the logics we propose can be shown to be expressively complete in a strong sense…. [A]lmost all extant logics either presuppose that the base vocabularies they extend satisfy strong global structural constraints — paradigmatically the monotonicity and transitivity at the core of traditional understandings of specifically logical consequence as a kind of closure operator — or retroactively impose some such global structure, thereby failing to be conservative over some substructural base vocabularies. While we believe that specifically logical consequence does have a global closure structure (and that logical consistency is monotonic), we argue that this is not in general true of nonlogical reason relations” (p. 16, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Implication Spaces

An Isomorphism

“The present point is that if the claim that it is possible to identify a rational structure common to what is expressed in pragmatic and semantic metavocabularies could be made out in detail, it would cast light on issues of much wider philosophical significance. For we can look at the relations between what is expressed in normative pragmatic and representational semantic metavocabularies in another way: as articulating the relations between the activities of talking and thinking, and what is being talked or thought about. This is the intentional nexus between subjects and objects, between mind and the world, knowers and the known.” (Brandom in Hlobil and Brandom, Reasons for Logic, p. 8).

Brandom uses the term intentionality in a non-psychological sense that he elsewhere attributes to Kant. We are implicitly in what I think of as Aristotelian-Hegelian territory, where a Cartesian-style division into Subject and Object is not assumed. Brandom’s low-key summary of what to me are the rather dramatic stakes in this issue focuses on the American pragmatists, whom he discussed in the recent Pragmatism and Idealism lectures.

“The American Pragmatists inherited from the German Idealists — who in turn inherited it from Romantic critics of the Enlightenment — the idea that the Cartesian tradition failed structurally, making itself a patsy for skepticism, by attempting to define subjects and objects independently of one another, and then later on facing the problem of how to bolt together things understood as having wholly disparate natures…. The better strategy, they thought, was to start with a conception of intentionality as successful cognition (and action)…. One way to work out such a strategy begins with the thought that there is a kind of structure common to what normative pragmatic metavocabularies make it possible to say about the practices of discursive subjects using declarative sentences to manifest practical attitudes and undertake commitments, on the one hand, and what representational semantic metavocabularies make it possible to say about the modal relations among matter-of-factual states of the world those sentences come to represent by being so used, on the other” (ibid).

Here he references the classic pragmatist emphasis on “successful” thought and action. But especially since he is about to explicitly invoke an Aristotelian (and Scholastic) connection on the next page, this suggests to me that even a very elementary mainstream notion of pragmatism could be recast as evincing a kind of Aristotelian teleological concern with ends and that-for-the-sake-of-which, but in language that hides this angle and is suited to survive in the climate of uncomprehending modern antipathy to Aristotle. The main difference is that Aristotle says much more clearly that the ends that matter are those that are sought for their own sake, and not as means to other ends.

I used to think that logical and linguistic pragmatics as a field of study had nothing in particular to do with pragmatism as a view of the world. Brandom’s recent writings provocatively suggest that there is indeed a connection.

The emphasis on structure is also significant. Although Brandom does not identify with it as I did especially in my youth, French so-called structuralism and poststructuralism represent another major strand of non-Cartesian, non-subject-centered thought in the 20th century. Brandom’s usage seems closer to mathematical structuralism, and perhaps to the structural functionalism of the sociologist Talcott Parsons and the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget that attracted Jürgen Habermas, whom Brandom has called a personal hero.

“For the worldly version of the relations that articulate the structure we are calling ‘conceptual’ are relations of necessity and impossibility whose existence owes nothing to the activities of discursive practitioners. They are objective relations, specified in the alethic modal vocabulary used to state laws of nature, and more generally to specify subjunctively robust relations” (pp. 8-9).

Brandom has consistently highlighted the significance of modality and modal logic for formulating what he likes to call subjunctive robustness. Next he invokes non-Cartesian strands within analytic philosophy.

“We take the view we develop to be a way of understanding what Frege means when he says ‘A fact is a thought that is true’. It is also one way of understanding the Tractarian [early Wittgenstein] claim that the world is the totality of facts…. John McDowell (1996) explores the same sort of conceptual realist view in Mind and World under the slogan ‘The conceptual has no outer boundary’.”

While I am highly sympathetic to the non-Cartesian ambitions here, I think that facts alone are too shallow a basis to constitute a world. I am not a Wittgenstein scholar, but I think he later moved away from this attempt to ground everything on atomic facts. But what else is needed is something like the subjunctive robustness or modal aspect of things that Brandom dwells upon. This emerges naturally as we move from world-as-totality-of-fact to the idea of a world constituted from implications and distinctions (the latter being my preferred way of thinking about what Brandom calls incompatibilities).

“These are deep waters. These pronouncements by great philosophers are mentioned to indicate that the stakes are high for the enterprise of explicating any form of conceptual realism. Here is a sketch of how we go about it. One of the key arguments we appeal to in filling in this neo-Aristotelian metalinguistic bimodal conceptual realism is a technical result…. Greg Restall and David Ripley have worked out what they call a ‘bilateral’ normative pragmatic understanding of the turnstile that marks implication relations in multisuccedent sequent calculi [which looks approximately like |~ and means that if all formulae on the left (often represented as a context capital gamma Γ) are true, then at least one formula on the right is true.]…. The Restall-Ripley bilateral normative pragmatic metavocabulary turns out to be related in surprising ways to what we take to be the most sophisticated contemporary heir of Tarskian model theory and later intensional semantics in terms of possible worlds (Lewis, out of Kripke, out of Carnap), namely Kit Fine’s truth-maker semantic framework…. The representational content of declarative sentences is then understood in terms of assignments to them of sets of states as truth-makers and falsifiers. Global structural conditions on modally partitioned state spaces (for instance requiring that all the mereological parts of possible states be possible) interact with conditions on assignments of truth-makers and falsifiers (for instance forbidding the truth-makers and falsifiers of logically atomic sentences to be overlapping sets).”

Sequent calculi are proof-theoretic notations due to Gerhard Gentzen in the 1930s. They generalize Gentzen’s system of natural deduction. In sequent calculi, every line is a conditional or sequent, rather than an unconditional assertion. In effect, the primitive terms are implications. This is a formal analogue of Brandom’s idea that the common structure of the world and of thought is at root constituted out of implications (and distinctions) rather than simple facts. Hlobil and Brandom’s book shows that it is general enough to support radically nonmonotonic and nontransitive cases.

“We show below that if one defines semantic consequence in just the right way, a powerful, fruitful, and detailed isomorphism can be constructed relating truth-maker modal semantic metavocabularies and bilateral normative pragmatic vocabularies” (pp. 9-10).

Serious logicians mainly study the properties of different logical systems, or logics, and develop new ones. Alternate logics have hugely proliferated since the first half of the 20th century. He is alluding to the fact that many differently detailed notions of logical consequence have been proposed. What is the “right” one depends in part on its conditions of use.

An isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping that works bidirectionally. The existence of an isomorphism — like the one mentioned further below between algebra and geometry, or the one Brandom is talking about immediately below, between semantics and pragmatics — is an extremely nonrandom, rare occurrence, and therefore is often taken to be deeply significant.

“Assertion and denial line up with truth and falsity, combinations of commitments (to accept and reject) in a position line up with fusion of truth-making and falsifying states, and normative out-of-boundness (preclusion of entitlement to the commitments incurred by those assertions and denials) of a compound practical position lines up with the modal impossibility of such a fusion state.”

“When Spinoza looked back on the relations between algebraic equations and geometric shapes on which Descartes modeled mind-world relations, he saw that the key feature distinguishing that new, more abstract notion of representation from earlier atomistic resemblance-based conceptions is the existence of a global isomorphism between the algebraic and geometrical vocabularies. Spinoza’s slogan for the holistic insight that animated the representational revolution was ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (Spinoza, Ethics II, Prop. vii). The isomorphism between normative pragmatic and alethic representational metavocabularies turns out to make possible in our setting a precise, tractable, and productive specification of that shared rational ‘order and connection’. We think this is a good way to rationally reconstruct some central aspects of Aristotelian (and Scholastic) intelligible forms. This isomorphism is the core of our version of bimodal (deontic/alethic) metalinguistic conceptual realism” (p. 11).

Brandom has been a consistent critic of standard versions of representationalism, but he has always been careful not to reject too much. The more affirmative reference to representation and Tarskian model theory here specifically involves not just any representation but an inferentialist semantics that undoes many conventional assumptions. Apparently there is a formal result to the effect that inferentialist semantics can be expressed not only in terms derived from Gentzen’s proof theory, but also in terms of an evolved variant of Tarski’s model theory in which the things represented are implications.

Next in this series: Quick Note on Proof Theory

The Role of Reasons

In a brand-new book co-authored with logician Ulf Hlobil — Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Conceptual Roles (2025) — Robert Brandom introduces results from the Research Group on Logical Expressivism, which is inspired by a major strand of his work. Logical expressivism is a highly innovative approach that takes the primary purpose of formal logic to be not the proving of truths, but a kind of making explicit of all kinds of real-world reasoning that are carried out in natural language.

The book introduces quite a number of big ideas — among them logical expressivism, reason relations, implication spaces, conceptual roles, and important new technical results that highlight the importance of nonmonotonic logic and substructural logic. Established Brandomian themes such as normativity and its relation to modality, inferentialism, material inference, and the close connection between semantics and pragmatics also show up here in new light. Brandom has written the more philosophical chapters, and Hlobil the more technical ones.

One interesting surprise is that Brandom explicitly calls the new approach “neo-Aristotelian”. This “neo-Aristotlian metalinguistic bimodal conceptual realism” will be “hylomorphic in a recognizably Aristotelian sense. For it identifies a kind of rational form that is understood as common to thoughts and things…. [T]he relations of consequence and incompatibility that show up in different guises in a whole constellation of intimately interrelated metavocabularies… are those that in the end underwrite practices of reasoning, by determining what is a reason for and against what” (p. 9, emphasis in original).

This is well short of the more full-blooded re-visioning of an open Aristotelianism that I have been suggesting here, but within its scope it does seem genuinely Aristotelian to me — particularly the idea that there are forms common to thought, things, language, and practices of reasoning. This is a nice vindication of the “Aristotle and Brandom” theme with which I began this blog almost six years ago.

“[T]he strategy of addressing philosophy’s perennial concern with the nature of understanding or reason in general by investigating language…. has been developed in two quite different directions…. The first, dominant, better worked out tradition focused on logic, and later, also formal semantics, as perspicuous mathematical metalanguages…. The other tradition focused rather on language as a kind of social practice” (p. 1, emphasis in original).

Brandom has always been interested in both of these. At the beginning of his career he worked on logic, but for most of his maturity he has tended to favor the pragmatic side. Here at one point he ends up suggesting that they may be equally important. The book presents new results in mathematical logic that help bridge the gap.

“Where the formalist tradition is oriented by a conception of understanding and reasons as codified in artificial logical calculi and semantic metalanguages, the pragmatist tradition looks instead directly to natural languages, thought of as social practices and forms of life. In place of the exclusively monological character of reasoning as deriving, modeled on proof, characteristic of the other tradition, understanding shows up in this tradition as a social achievement, and reasoning as essentially dialogical: a matter of discursive practices of giving and asking for reasons, defending and challenging claims that amount to taking up positions in a contestable, public, normative space” (p. 2).

“The two traditions ought by rights to be understood as focusing on different aspects of language: roughly, on the meanings of linguistic expressions, and on their use. In suitably broad senses, we might understand semantics as the study of meaning, and pragmatics as the study of use or discursive practices and abilities. So understood, semantics (even a semantics inspired by and paradigmatically applicable to logic) and pragmatics show up as complementary theoretical endeavors. The goal should be to synthesize semantic and pragmatic theories…. Perhaps the combination of those thoughts recommends rather a more balanced view that eschews claims of explanatory priority in favor of understanding each aspect as in principle intelligible only in terms of its relation to the other” (pp. 2-3, emphasis in original).

“The lesson that emerges, we will argue, is a kind of discursive or linguistic rationalism. Language becomes visible as at base the medium of reasons, and reasoning as the beating heart of language. On the side of pragmatics, the fundamental speech act is that of making claims. The basic speech act of making claims, asserting, is to be understood in terms of practices of defending and challenging those claims, by making other claims that have the practical significance of giving reasons for and against them. Understanding claiming this way provides a path to understanding the claimable contents expressed by declarative sentences in terms of the role they play in relations of being a reason for or against — what we will call ‘reason relations” (p. 3, emphasis in original).

He continues, “On the side of semantics, worldly represented states show up as what determines the reason relations of consequence and incompatibility that the sentences whose truth-makers and falsifiers they are stand in to one another: their roles in reason relations. By understanding the common topic that semantic and pragmatic metalanguages articulate aspects of, not just under the vague rubric of ‘language’, but more specifically as the implicit reason relations that distinguish discursive practices as such, we can better understand not only the relations between the meaning and the use of linguistic expressions, but also the relations between truth (the central concept of traditional semantics) and justification (the central concept of pragmatics, according to linguistic rationalism), in the form of practices of defending claims by giving reasons for them and challenging claims by giving reasons against them” (pp. 3-4, emphasis in original).

“At the core of this book, then, is the rationalist explanatory strategy of understanding the nature of language in terms of what we will call ‘reason relations’. As addressed here, that is a genus with two principal species: implication and incompatibility. They correspond to being a reason for and being a reason against” (p.4).

“A closely related term of art is ‘vocabulary’. We use it in a technical sense, to mean a lexicon or set of declarative sentences, together with an implication relation and an incompatibility relation defined on those sentences. To begin with, we can think of an implication relation as holding between a set of sentences that are its premises and a single sentence that is a conclusion that follows from, is a consequence of, or is implied by those premises. An incompatibility relation holds between a set of premises and a further sentence that those premises exclude, or rule out, or are incompatible with” (p. 5).

He continues, “By calling them (declarative) ‘sentences’ we just mean that they are what in the first instance stand to one another in reason relations of implication and incompatibility…. In virtue of standing to one another in reason relations of implication and incompatibility, what thereby count as declarative sentences express conceptual contents. Those contents can be thought of as the functional roles the sentences play in constellations of implications and incompatibilities” (ibid).

“According to this order of explanation, the key question is: what do we mean by talk of reason relations of implication and incompatibility? In virtue of what does something deserve to count as a consequence or incompatibility relation?” (ibid).

“The idea is to identify reason relations in terms of the various vocabularies that can be used to specify them. Because these are vocabularies for talking about (the reason relations of) other vocabularies, they are metavocabularies. Because it is in particular the reason relations of base vocabularies that they address, we can call them rational metavocabularies” (pp. 5-6, emphasis in original).

“Semantic metavocabularies explain reason relations of implication and incompatibility by specifying what the sentences that stand in those relations mean, in the sense of how the world must be for what they say to be true. The sentences stand to one another in relations of implication and incompatibility because the objective states of affairs that are their semantic truth conditions stand to one another in modally robust relations of necessitation and noncompossibility” (p. 6).

“Pragmatic vocabularies explain what is expressed by reason relations of base vocabularies by saying what features of the discursive practice of using those sentences it is, in virtue of which practitioners count as practically taking or treating the sentences as standing to one another in relations of implication and incompatibility. Pragmatic metavocabularies make it possible to say what it is that language users do in virtue of which they are properly to be understood as practically taking or treating some sentences as implying others in the sense of taking assertion or acceptance of the premises as providing reasons for asserting or accepting the conclusions, and practically taking or treating some sentences as incompatible with others in the sense of taking assertion or acceptance of the premises as providing reasons against asserting or accepting the conclusions. Reason relations show up from the expressive perspective provided by pragmatic metavocabularies as normative standards for assessment of the correctness of rational defenses of and challenges to claims, made by offering other claims as reasons for or reasons against those claims” (p. 6).

“As we will see later in much more detail, to do their job properly, semantic metavocabularies must use alethic modal vocabulary to make claims about what states and combinations of states of the world the base vocabulary talks about are and are not possible. To do their job properly, pragmatic metavocabularies must use deontic normative vocabulary to make claims about what acts, practical attitudes, and combinations of them are and are not appropriate, and what other acts and attitudes would and would not entitle an interlocutor to them. What can be said in alethic modal terms is substantially and importantly different from what can be said in deontic normative terms. The one concerns features of the objective world, the other features of the practice of discursive subjects. These are the two poles of the intentional nexus that links knowers and the known, minds and the world they understand and act in, representings and what is represented. We want to understand both kinds of thing, and the important relations between them” (p. 7).

“Alethic” is from the Greek aletheia, for truth. The parallelism or isomorphism between the “alethic modal” notion of measuring the subjunctive robustness of assertions, and a “deontic normative” Kantian articulation of the compelling or necessary character of ethical conclusions, which Brandom has long stressed, is very substantially elaborated in the new book.

“In the terms used above to introduce the idea of reason relations we propose to understand the alethic modal semantic metavocabulary and the deontic normative pragmatic metavocabulary as offering different (meta)conceptual perspectives on a common object: the incompatibility of what is expressed by the declarative sentence p and what is expressed by the declarative sentence q. Corresponding claims apply to reason relations of consequence or implication” (pp. 7-8, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: An Isomorphism

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).

Aristotelian Illocution

I’ve recently been writing about the use Habermas makes of Austin’s notion of illocution and illocutionary speech acts. Illocution refers to the various kinds of purely linguistic or “performative” doing — to acts or purposes that are accomplished entirely within the use of language.

Aristotle’s famous definition of what it is to be a human, which is traditionally rendered “rational animal”, is equally well translated as “talking animal”, or animal that uses language. He calls this distinctively human activity “saying”. Saying for Aristotle is never a mere event or occurrence. It always has what contemporary philosophers would call a normative sense. In fact, what mainly counts as a saying for Aristotle is precisely what Habermas would call an illocutionary act.

Although Wittgenstein famously claimed that “meaning is use”, pragmatics or inquiry specifically into language use generally received little attention in 20th-century philosophy of language, while it made great advances in the technical study of logical syntax and representational semantics. A pragmatist minority, however, urged an alternative “pragmatics first” or “use first” approach to language. This has been taken up most prominently in recent times by Habermas and Brandom.

The current topic takes me back to the original goals of this blog. The idea was to develop in an expanding spiral, starting from personal reflections and an extremely informal exploration of how Aristotle and Brandom could be inter-articulated. I wanted to show that this could be both interesting and serious, and that it was not the quixotic task it might sound like. Nowadays the scope is broader, and I more often start by commenting on some text or other, which helps provide focus. Anyway, with the current topic, it feels like I just completed another expanding lap. This time it is an unexpected strong connection between Aristotle and Habermas.

I want to seriously suggest that Aristotelian “saying”, in what Aristotle would call its proper sense, refers to what Habermas would call an illocutionary act. Conversely, a Habermasian illocutionary act can be identified with the proper or strong sense of Aristotelian saying.

Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution both refer to expressions or articulations of meaning, rather than to events of producing sounds or characters.

Nothing is more fundamental than inquiry into meaning. At the same time, there is more to meaning than representational semantics. Sociality, insofar as it is achieved, is founded on shared understanding that depends on articulation in language. Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution name the intrinsic normative dimension of natural language use. Unlike artificial formal languages, the understanding of natural languages is inseparable from the taking of positions on questions of normative interpretation and judgment.

Illocution

Habermas wants to promote a notion of communicative rationality as “uncurtailed communication”, an orientation toward developing shared understanding. He even calls shared understanding the telos of human speech, in something close to an Aristotelian sense, although he generally uses “teleology” only in a negative way, as a mere utilitarian calculation of the means to realize empirical self-interest. But I find the ethical sense that he gives to communication to be very admirable.

“The positivization, legalization, and formalization of law mean that the validity of law can no longer feed off the taken-for-granted authority of moral traditions but requires an autonomous foundation, that is, a foundation that is not only relative to given ends. Moral consciousness can satisfy such a requirement only at the postconventional level. It is here that there first emerges the idea that legal norms are in principle open to criticism and in need of justification” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

He speaks here of the postconventional and posttraditional in law and ethics, as he elsewhere speaks of the postmetaphysical and the postsecular.

“These posttraditional basic concepts of law and morality are first developed and systematized in modern natural law theories. The model for justifying legal norms is an uncoerced agreement, arrived at by those affected, in the role of contractual partners who are in principle free and equal” (p. 261).

I really was not at all familiar with the early modern “natural law” tradition when I first encountered Brandom’s significant references to it. Here we reach another limitation that Habermas finds in Weber.

“Weber stresses precisely the structural properties connected with the formalism of a law that is systematized by specialists and with the positivity of norms that are enacted. He emphasizes the structural features I have elucidated as the positivity, legalism, and formality of law. But he neglects the moment of a need for rational justification; he excludes from the concept of modern law precisely the conceptions of rational justification that arose with modern theories of natural law in the seventeenth century…. It is in this way that Weber assimilates the law to an organizational means applied in a purposive-rational manner, detaches the rationalization of law from the moral-practical complex of rationality, and reduces it to a rationalization of means-ends relations” (p. 262).

This remark by Habermas seems to have large consequences. He points to an important principle of rational justification in the natural law tradition that goes beyond means-ends calculations, and criticizes Weber for deemphasizing it.

“Rational natural law, in its different versions from Hobbes and Locke through Rousseau and Kant to Hegel, … rests on a rational principle of justification and is, in terms of moral-practical rationalization, further advanced than the Protestant ethic, which is still founded on religion. Nevertheless, Weber does not hold it to be purely and simply an element of modern law. He wants to separate it carefully ‘from revealed, as well as from enacted and from traditional law’. Thus he constructs an antithesis between modern law in the strict sense, which rests only on the principle of enactment, and the not yet completely ‘formal’ law of modern natural law theories which rests upon principles of grounding (however rational). In his view, modern law is to be understood in a positivistic sense, as law that is enacted by decision and fully disconnected from rational agreement, from ideas of grounding in general, however formal they might be.” (p. 263, emphasis in original).

I did not realize that Weber had a decisionist theory of modern law. “Decisionist” views of law and politics, as Habermas points out, fundamentally appeal to authority rather than to meaning or reason. In my view, this means they ought to be shunned by anyone who cares about meaning or reasonableness.

“This argument is confusing because it combines, in an opaque manner, an immanent critique of the deficient radicalism of natural law conceptions of grounding that are not yet sufficiently formal with a transcendent critique of the need for principles of justification at all and clothes both in the guise of a criticism of the naturalistic fallacy. One might certainly raise the objection that the concept of natural rights still had strong metaphysical connotations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, with the model of a contract through which all legal associates, after rationally weighing their interests, regulate their common life as free and equal partners, modern natural law theorists were the first to meet the demand for a procedural grounding of law, that is, for a justification by principles whose validity could in turn be criticized. To this extent, ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ do not stand in this context for some metaphysical contents or other; rather, they circumscribe formal conditions which an agreement must satisfy if it is to have legitimating force, that is, if it is to be rational. Weber again confuses the formal properties of a postconventional level of justification with particular substantive values (p. 264).

“[A]ssuming that legitimacy is a necessary condition for the continued existence of every type of political domination, how can a legal domination whose legality is based on a law that is viewed in purely decisionistic terms (that is, a law that devalues all grounding in principle) be legitimated at all?” (pp. 264-265, emphasis in original).

Habermas has a marvelously sharp critique of attempts to separate law and politics from requirements for rational ethical justification. He distinguishes two very different kinds of “proceduralist” views of law. One is reductively empiricist and collapses the distinction between is and ought. At best it orients toward a kind of conformity or obedience. The other aims to ground “procedure” in rational ethics, conditions of dialogue, and what Habermas calls ideal speech situations.

“Legitimation through procedure does not mean here going back to formal conditions for the moral-practical justification of legal norms; it means rather keeping to procedural prescriptions in administering, applying, and enacting law. Legitimacy rests then on ‘belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’. It remains unclear how the belief in legality is supposed to summon up the force of legitimation if legality means only conformity with an actually existing legal order, and if this order, as arbitrarily enacted law, is not in turn open to practical-moral justification. The belief in legality can produce legitimacy only if we already presuppose the legitimacy of the legal order that lays down what is legal. There is no way out of this circle…. The transitions between ‘agreed upon’ and ‘imposed’ order are fluid” (p. 265, emphasis added).

Empirical, factual conformity to law is no guarantee of moral rightness. The Nazi regime in Germany, for example, had a factual conformity to law, thanks in part to the apologetics of Carl Schmitt. This can hardly be taken to legitimate it.

“Notwithstanding these fluid transitions, the two sources of legitimacy on which the belief in legality depends can certainly be distinguished analytically: rationally motivated agreement versus the imposition of a powerful will” (p. 266).

Here he puts it very clearly. Legal/political “impositionism” is a kind of voluntarism. Like all voluntarism, it elevates arbitrary will above reason. This effectively destroys the space in which ethical reason could flourish, by eliminating the possibility of questioning whatever is imposed.

Habermas is very clear that there is a sharp opposition between any kind of authoritative “imposition” and agreement based on reasons. I find this highly commendable. Unlike Brandom, he does not get caught up in apologizing for the elements of impositionism that can also be found in the natural law tradition.

(Brandom even takes this so far as to retrospectively claim a historically progressive role for theological voluntarism. I think Brandom is a truly great philosopher overall, but on this particular issue Habermas seems to do much better. Brandom is quite right that the natural law theorists like Pufendorf introduced new ideas of holding authority to certain standards of reasonableness. But he takes the voluntarist element in Pufendorf to be an essential ingredient, rather than an unresolved inconsistency. Indeed everyone seems to call Pufendorf a political voluntarist. But my brief examination of Pufendorf did not find him emphasizing the justification of arbitrary actions, which is the sin qua non of voluntarism. Quite the contrary, his avowed emphasis seemed to be on reasonable standards. Pufendorf wrote during the age of absolute monarchies, when any advocate of limitations on the monarch’s prerogative had to write cautiously.)

“Belief in the legality of a procedure cannot per se — that is, in virtue of positive enactment — produce legitimacy” (ibid).

Legality is a mere fact. Rightness is an ideal.

“Weber confuses an appeal to the need to justify legal domination — that is, an attempt to go back to the legitimating foundation of rational agreement — with an appeal to particular values” (p. 267).

Habermas is saying that Weber treats criteria of reasonableness in law and politics as inevitably particularist. Habermas sharply rejects this conclusion, as do I.

“Weber forcefully works out the formal properties of modern law, on the basis of which it is suited as a means of organization for subsystems of purposive-rational action. But he restricts the concept of law positivistically to such an extent that he can neglect the moral-practical aspect of rationalization (the principle of justification) and take account only of its cognitive-instrumental aspect (the principle of enactment). Weber considers the advances of modern legal development exclusively from the standpoint of formal rationality, that is, of a value-neutral, means-ends, systematic shaping of spheres of action, which is tailored to the type of strategic action. The rationalization of law is then no longer measured against the inner logic of the moral-practical sphere of value, as is that of ethics and life-conduct; it is directly connected to the progress of knowledge in the cognitive-instrumental sphere of value” (p. 268).

This is to say that despite his commendable neo-Kantian scruples regarding the importance of values, Weber aims to completely withdraw questions of value from law and politics.

“The assumption — which sprang up with legal positivism and was adopted and overextended by social-scientific functionalism — that normative validity claims could be withdrawn, without any noteworthy consequences for the stability of the legal system in the consciousness of the system’s members, is empirically untenable” (p. 269).

I quite agree with Habermas that a policy that is disconnected from all values cannot and does not govern in real life. But it matters a lot whether we criticize the empiricist freedom from values from a point of view of inquiry into reasons, or from a traditionalist point of view that takes reasons for granted, and treats the questioning of authority as improper.

“This leads to a rather ironic consequence for Weber’s diagnosis of the times. He deplores the switch from ethical to purely utilitarian action orientations…. Thus he ought to welcome movements that are directed against parallel tendencies in the law…. [But] Weber regards as detracting from the formal qualities of law not only traditionalist attempts to reideologize it but also progressive efforts to reattach it to procedural requirements for grounding” (ibid).

Apparently, Weber regards the formal positivity of law (the principle of “enactment”) as having more to do with the rationalization of modern society — which he sees in terms of technique — than any substantive inquiry into reasons. Habermas traces this to defects in the way action is understood.

“It is not my intention to pursue a critique of ideology probing the roots of this inconsistency. I am concerned with the immanent reasons for Weber’s inability to carry through his theory of rationalization as it is set up…. First, I want to unearth certain bottlenecks in the concept formation of his action theory…. Second, I would like to show that the ambiguity in the rationalization of law cannot be grasped at all within the limits of a theory of action” (p. 270).

This is extremely important. Meaning is not adequately explainable by the mental intentions of nominal subjects. Along with Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Alain de Libera have pointed out major blockages in the 20th-century “theory of action”. Gwenaëlle Aubry has developed an Aristotelian alternative that I rather like. Brandom has developed a new normative pragmatics and a new inferentialist semantics. He sees Kant as having developed a highly original alternative notion of intentionality that is based on shareable notions of responsibility and commitment, rather than on attributions of private subjective consciousness or belief.

“Intentionalist semantics is based on the counterintuitive idea that understanding the meaning of a symbolic expression X can be traced back to understanding the intention of speaker S…. For a theory of communicative action only those analytic theories of meaning are instructive that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions” (pp. 274-275).

Linguistic expressions have a degree of objectivity, substantiality, or seriousness mainly because they are shareable. About the private intentions and mental states of speakers we can only speculate in the ordinary pejorative, non-Hegelian sense. With what is said on the other hand (at the level of understandable meaning and what Habermas calls validity claims, not that of putative bare fact or event), we can go much further.

“Starting from the pragmatist theory of signs introduced by Pierce and developed by Morris, Carnap made the symbolic complex … accessible to an internal analysis from syntactic and semantic points of view. The bearers of meaning are not isolated signs but elements of a language system, that is, sentences whose form is determined by syntactic rules and whose semantic content is determined by relations to designated objects or states of affairs. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumption of referential semantics, the way was opened to a formal analysis of the representational function of language. On the other hand, Carnap considered the appellative and expressive functions of language as pragmatic aspects that should be left to empirical analysis” (p. 276).

“The theory of meaning was finally established as a formal science only with the step from reference semantics to truth semantics. The semantics founded by Frege and developed through the early Wittgenstein to Davidson and Dummet gives center stage to the relation between sentence and state of affairs, between language and the world. With this ontological turn, semantic theory disengaged itself from the view that the representational function can be clarified on the model of names that designate objects. The meaning of sentences, and the understanding of sentence meanings, cannot be separated from language’s inherent relation to the validity of statements. Speakers and hearers understand the meaning of a sentence when they know under what conditions it is true. Correspondingly, they understand the meaning of a word when they know what contribution it makes to the capacity of truth of a sentence formed with its help. Thus truth semantics developed the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is determined by its truth conditions” (pp. 276-277).

This mini-history of 20th-century philosophy of language is very close to that put forward by Brandom, who calls Habermas one of his heros. (Habermas in turn sympathetically cites Rorty.)

Habermas is enthusiastic about Austin and Searle’s work on speech acts, and points out that this belongs to the more generally neglected area of the pragmatics of language. I think this predates Brandom’s major original work on a normative pragmatics.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration…. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin to Searle, the formal semantics of sentences was extended to speech acts. It is no longer limited to the representational function of language but is open to an unbiased analysis of the multiplicity of illocutionary forces” (p. 277).

Here we touch on Habermas’s version of the critique of representationalism. In its place he suggests that we address a multiplicity of illocutionary forces (taking force in the Fregean linguistic sense, rather than the more common one). Habermas strongly ties Austin’s “illocution” — or the doing involved in speech acts — with conditions and practices for evaluation of what he calls validity claims, as distinct from claims of truth.

“The theory of speech acts marks the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to noncognitive modes of employment. At the same time … it remains tied to the narrow ontological presuppositions of truth-conditional semantics. The theory of meaning can attain the level of integration of the communication theory that Bühler advanced in a programmatic way only if it is able to provide a systematic grounding for the appellative and expressive functions of language (and perhaps also for the ‘poetic’ function related to the linguistic means themselves, as this was developed by Jakobson)” (ibid).

One of the areas in which Habermas has been criticized has been his avowed commitment to a form of “cognitivism”. But once again, the vocabulary is ambiguous. Cognitivism could mean anything from the view that all judgment is exclusively of a calculating sort, to the view that value judgments depend on interpretation of meaning. Habermas rejects the former, and endorses the latter. He emphasizes that there are also “noncognitive” elements in speech acts.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy of language that was introduced by J. L. Austin … must be radicalized in such a way that the break with the ‘logos characterization of language’, that is, with privileging its representational function, also has consequences for the choice of ontological presuppositions in the theory of language…. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary force over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what” (pp. 277-278).

Illocutionary force is “the component which specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what”. This seems like a nice alternative to subject-centered notions of intentionality.

“With the illocutionary force of an utterance a speaker can motivate a hearer to accept the offer contained in his speech act and thereby accede to a rationally motivated binding (or bonding, Bindung) force” (p. 278).

He criticizes the appeals that Weber and others make to consciousness, as if it were a source. We ought to look at shareable meaning instead. The only thing that makes anything binding is the so-called force of reasons.

“Weber does not rely here on a theory of meaning but on a theory of consciousness. He does not elucidate ‘meaning’ in connection with the model of speech; he does not relate it to the linguistic medium of possible understanding, but to the beliefs and intentions of an acting subject, taken to begin in isolation” (p. 279).

“Weber does not start with the social relationship. He regards as rationalizable only the means-ends relation of teleologically [sic] conceived, monological action. If one adopts this perspective, the only aspects of action open to objective appraisal are the effectiveness of a causal intervention into an existing situation and the truth of the empirical assertions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

Here he enumerates symptoms of what he calls a “monological” (opposite to dialogical) exclusive focus on what I would call a modern interpretation of efficient causality as a basis for explanation. He emphasizes the second-person, “I-Thou” communicative aspect of reason over the more common reduction of everything to first- and third-person (“subjective” and “objective”) points of view. He is arguing that the reason we ought to care about and cultivate has an I-Thou character, first and foremost.

“A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement” (p. 287).

I want to cheer when I read things like this.

“If we were not in a position to refer to the model of speech, we could not even begin to analyze what it means for two subjects to come to an understanding with one another. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech…. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another” (ibid, emphasis added).

I think Plato and Aristotle were very aware of this reciprocity between speech and understanding, but it got largely forgotten later on. Plato centrally stresses open dialogue and questioning as the way to truth. Aristotle develops a whole art of simultaneously addressing linguistic meaning, reality, and ultimate rightness in a balanced way that anticipates many points in Kant and Hegel.

“”[E]xamples of the use of language with an orientation to consequences seem to decrease the value of speech acts as the model for action oriented to reaching understanding.”

Here consequences are understood in a modern causal sense, and not a logical or inferential one. Consequences and truth conditions were the main concern of earlier analytic philosophy. There is an ethical view called “consequentialism” that judges deeds strictly by their outcome, and is closely related to utilitarianism.

“This will turn out not to be the case only if it can be shown that the use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding, giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental use of language in general, are parasitic. In my view, Austin’s distinction between illocutions and perlocutions accomplishes just that” (p. 288, emphasis in original).

This is very important. Second-person communication is more primary than third-person representation. Habermas recalls Austin’s three-way distinction among speech acts.

“Through locutionary acts the speaker addresses states of affairs; he says something. Through illocutionary acts the speaker performs an action in saying something…. Finally, through perlocutionary acts the speaker produces an effect upon the hearer…. The self-sufficiency of the speech act is to be understood in the sense that the communicative intent of the speaker and the illocutionary aim he is pursuing follow from the manifest meaning of what is said. It is otherwise with teleological [sic] actions. We identify their meaning only in connection with the intentions their authors are pursuing and the ends they want to realize. As the meaning of what is said is constitutive for illocutionary acts, the intention of the agent is constitutive for teleological [sic] actions” (pp. 288-289).

The kind of meaning we should care most about links the “manifest” meaning of what is said with the pragmatics of justification. Representational and truth-conditional semantics are logistical tools that should be in service to a broader pragmatic inquiry. Brandom has developed an original inferential semantics, in close connection with a normative pragmatics that he considers ultimately to be more primary.

“What we mean by reaching understanding has to be clarified solely in connection with illocutionary acts” (p. 293).

This follows from his description of the three kinds of speech acts.

“I have called the type of interaction in which all participants harmonize their individual plans of action with one another and thus pursue their illocutionary aims without reservation ‘communicative action’ (p. 294, emphasis in original).

Now he says that the whole huge topic he has been addressing as distinctively communicative action revolves around illocution.

“Thus I count as communicative action those linguistically mediated interactions in which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary aims” (p. 295, emphasis in original).

He glosses this in terms of the “acceptability” of speech acts.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable” (p. 297, emphasis in original).

“A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are conditions rather for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (p. 298, emphasis in original).

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds” (p. 301, emphasis in original).

This is the beginning of wisdom.

“That a speaker means what he says can be made credible only in the consistency of what he does and not through providing grounds” (p. 303).

In an earlier post, we saw that Habermas carefully distinguishes between truth, validity, and sincerity.

“We have distinguished genuine imperatives, with which the speaker connects a claim to power, from speech acts with which the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim” (p. 304).

Claims of authority too are qualitatively different from claims of validity or general reasonableness. In discussions of validity, authority as such has no place. To bring claims of authority into a discussion of reasons, where claims of authority have no place, is a kind of cheating.

“We discover the incompleteness of the literal meaning of expressions only through a sort of problematizing that is not directly under our control. It emerges as a result of problems that appear objectively and have an unsettling effect on our natural worldview. The fundamental background knowledge that must tacitly supplement our knowledge of the acceptability conditions of linguistically standardized expressions if hearers are to be able to understand their literal meanings, has remarkable features: It is an implicit knowledge that cannot be represented in a finite number of propositions; it is a holistically structured knowledge, the basic elements of which intrinsically define one another; and it is a knowledge that does not stand at our disposition, inasmuch as we cannot make it conscious and place it in doubt as we please” (p. 336, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Second-Person Thinking?