Tag: Representationalism

A Triangular Relation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Models of Action

My first significant issue with Habermas has to do with the reductive way in which he recurringly speaks about “teleological action” as, in effect, any old pursuit of an objective, and thus as to be understood in terms of modern instrumental reason. This puts the primary focus on immediate objectives, whereas for Aristotle, immediate objectives only minimally count as ends. The more proper ends for Aristotle are things sought “for themselves”, and not as part of any utilitarian calculation of means. Aristotelian teleology in its primary sense is not about the mere pursuit of objectives, but relates primarily to those ultimate values that are sought for themselves.

I think that in fact Habermas does not intend a serious reference to Aristotle here. This “Aristotle” resembles the same cardboard stereotype we see cited in discussions of early modern logic.

“Since Aristotle [sic], the concept of teleological action has been at the center of the philosophical theory of action. The actor attains an end or brings about the occurrence of a desired state by choosing means that have promise of being successful in the given situation and applying them in a suitable manner. The central concept is that of a decision among alternative courses of action, with a view to the realization of an end, guided by maxims, and based on an interpretation of the situation” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 85, emphasis in original).

(In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes on the contrary that choice is a consequence of deliberation, not an original or ultimately arbitrary decision. What Habermas says gives partial recognition to this. I call it partial because he still calls decision rather than deliberation the “central concept”, whereas Aristotle clearly gives more weight to the deliberation.)

“This model is often interpreted in utilitarian terms; the actor is supposed to choose and calculate means and ends from the standpoint of maximizing utility or expectations of utility. It is this model of action that lies behind decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches in economics, sociology, and social psychology” (ibid).

Clearly, this is very far removed from Aristotelian teleology. Habermas discusses “normative” and “dramaturgical” models of action along with this “teleological” kind that really corresponds to utilitarian calculation. The “normative” kind also has a rather reductive flavor. But all three of these models are really just stage-setting for a contrast with the communicative reason that Habermas wants to recommend, and treats as primary.

“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” (p. 275, emphasis added).

In general, an expansive rather than narrow approach to the meaning of what is shareably said is more valuable and more relevant than speculation about subjective motivations.

“The organon model of Karl Bühler is representative of this communication-theoretic line of inquiry…. This meaning-theoretic line of development of the organon model leads us away from the objectivistic conception of processes of reaching understanding as information flows between senders and receivers and in the direction of the formal-pragmatic concept of interaction among speaking and acting subjects, interaction that is mediated through acts of reaching understanding” (p. 276).

So far I’ve been keeping aside how this talk about action should be related to a more Aristotelian notion of act, like that developed by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Without a doubt “acts of reaching understanding” come closer to this than any of the other action models Habermas discusses.

Habermas notes that the leading mid-20th century logical empiricist Rudolph Carnap, who approached representational semantics at the less atomistic level of propositions taken as true, almost entirely ignored the pragmatics of language, treating it as basically irrational.

“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…. With Carnap’s logical syntax and the basic assumptions of reference 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. On this view, the pragmatics of language is not determined by a general system of rules in such a way that it could be opened up to conceptual analysis like syntax and semantics” (ibid).

“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 Dummett 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” (ibid).

As usual, I prefer to be very modest about claims to “science”. What Habermas calls a formal science, I would call interpretive work. In the German tradition, Wissenschaft has a broader sense than common English usage of “science”. Habermas has himself written elsewhere about the centrality of a notion of interpretation.

“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 for 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 still presupposes that what knowledge is and what truth is are unproblematic. It really only replaces simplistic word-representationalism with a much richer sentence-representationalism. Sentence-representationalism is just as referential as word-representationalism, just more abstract. Habermas’s use of “true” here strikes me as referential in the same way. It just is not naively referential.

“The limits of this approach become visible as soon as the different modes of using sentences are brought under formal consideration. Frege had already distinguished between the assertoric or interrogative force of assertions or questions and the structure of the propositional sentences employed in these utterances. Along the line from the later Wittgenstein through Austin and 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. 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” (p. 277).

This account of speech acts seems like a nice, careful, balanced judgment.

“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).

He doesn’t quite say it, but I think the kind of pragmatics developed by Habermas and Brandom provides a much better account of what meaning really is than standard representational semantics.

“Bühler’s theory of language functions could be connected with the methods and insights of the analytic theory of meaning and be made the centerpiece of a theory of communicative action oriented to reaching understanding if we could generalize the concept of validity beyond the truth of propositions and identify validity conditions no longer only on the semantic level of sentences but on the pragmatic level of utterances” (ibid, emphasis added).

I suspect that in some places where Habermas speaks of validity claims, Brandom would invoke normativity or commitments instead. Habermas seems to work with a narrow notion of normativity that mainly characterizes law and Kantian deontology, but he partly makes up for it by giving what I would call a “normative” aspect to his broad notion of validity. I deemphasize any differences between “ethics”, “morality”, and “normativity”, but Habermas thinks it is important to distinguish them.

“For this purpose the paradigm change in philosophy that was introduced by J. L. Austin [speech act theory] … 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…. It is not merely a question of admitting other modes of language use on an equal footing with the assertoric; we have to establish validity claims and world-relations for them as was done for the assertoric mode. It is with this in mind that I have proposed that we do not set illocutionary role over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive of it as the component that specifies which validity claims a speaker is raising in his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what…. The corresponding validity claims of truth, rightness, and sincerity can the serve as guiding threads (pp. 277-278).

In Christian theology, logos is primarily representational, but I contend that this is not at all true of logos in Plato and Aristotle, where it always has connotations of reason, reasoning, or discourse. On the other hand, Habermas does not believe in “substantive” reason. He argues for an exclusively procedural communicative reason, in which the procedural aspect has strong affinities with modern procedural notions of justice. For my part, I cleave to a Platonic emphasis on mixed forms, and would like to undo any sharp distinction between substantive and procedural reason.

(And at a sort of halfway point between pure representation and discursive reasoning, Euclid uses logos for what we know as ratio in mathematics. It is historically interesting that logos and ratio have closely related meanings in two senses — representational and inferential — and not just one. Euclid’s theory of ratio and proportion is a historically important paradigm for exact reasoning that is effectively independent of Plato and Aristotle, though later. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, reason in Euclid is more formal and much less discursive. Hobbes and other early moderns looked to Euclid as a model.)

In Austin’s terminology, “locution” is what is said and meant, “illocution” is what is done in a speech act, and “perlocution” is what happens as a result. Like Brandom, Habermas treats saying as a kind of doing, and therefore stresses the illocutionary aspect. Habermas has just reminded us that empiricism treats illocution only as an irrational force, and not as something that could be rationally understood. This applies as well to the neo-Kantian sociology of Weber.

“Weber begins by introducing ‘meaning’ as a basic concept of action theory and with its help distinguishes actions from observable behavior…. 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. At this first switchpoint Weber parts company with a theory of communicative action. What counts as fundamental is not the interpersonal relation between at least two speaking and acting subjects — a relation that refers back to reaching understanding in language — but the purposive activity of a solitary acting subject” (p. 279).

Habermas is saying that even in Weber’s sociology, the neo-Kantian individual subject remains originally isolated, as in the “Cartesian” stereotype. It only acquires social significance after being individually constituted.

“Thus Weber starts from a teleological [sic] model of action, and specifies ‘subjective meaning’ as a (precommunicative) action intention…. Since Weber starts from a monologically conceived model of action, the concept of ‘social action’ cannot be introduced by way of explicating the concept of meaning…. On the other hand, … Weber stresses that the action orientations of participants have to be reciprocally related to one another” (p. 280).

But “Weber does not start from 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 a existing situation and the truth of the empirical assumptions that underlie the maxim or the plan of action — that is, the subjective belief about a purposive-rational organization of means” (p. 281).

“I shall speak of communicative action whenever the actions of the agents involved are coordinated not through egocentric calculations of success but through acts of reaching understanding” (pp. 285-286).

“Processes of reaching understanding aim at an agreement that meets the conditions of rationally motivated assent [Zustimmung] to the content of an utterance. A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party…. 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).

“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 each other. Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (ibid, emphasis added).

“Without doubt, there are countless cases [where] one subject inconspicuously harnesses another for his own purposes, that is, induces him to behave in a desired way by manipulatively employing linguistic means and thereby instrumentalizes him for his own success. Such examples 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” (p. 288).

“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” (ibid).

Communicative reason is primary for Habermas in a way much analogous to the way Brandom says we really have “normativity all the way down”. Brandom recalls the figure of speech “turtles all the way down”. This was supposed to be the answer of some primitive to the question that if the world is on the back of a great turtle, what does the turtle stand on? The answer was, supposedly, “It’s turtles all the way down”, which humorously undermines the status of the purportedly foundational world-turtle.

“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 [sic] 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” (p. 289, emphasis in original).

In a situation where the meaning of what is said is constitutive, we have something like what Aristotle called an entelechy. This is the purest form of Aristotelian teleology, applicable to the values that are sought purely for themselves and not for any egocentric reason. Habermas in effect wants to say that communicative reason is closely related to entelechy, though he would not use that term. I would go further, and relate it to the pure entelechy and contemplation that Aristotle associates with the first cause and with the goal of human life.

Brandom on Rorty on Justification

Brandom suggests that we direct our attention to the doings involved in our attitudes toward truth. He has been both sympathetically and critically reviewing the work of his former teacher and colleague Richard Rorty.

He says his own earlier book Making It Explicit “offers Rorty two ways in which his justification-first pragmatic approach to truth might be improved, consonant with his own pragmatist scruples. First, instead of thinking of truth Pierce-wise, in terms of consensus, we can think about it in social-perspectival terms of the pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions. The idea is to think about what practitioners are doing in taking someone to know something” (Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 44-45).

“To take someone to know something one must do three things. To begin with, one attributes a belief. In the normative vocabulary I have been using to codify Rorty’s views, this is attributing a distinctive kind of normative status: a discursive commitment. Next, one takes that stance or status to be justified…. What one is doing in taking that justified commitment one attributes to be, in addition, true should not be understood as attributing to it some further property (which would most naturally be understood in representationalist terms). Rather, what one must do to take it to be true is to endorse it oneself” (p. 45).

As Kant said about existence, truth is not a property of things. Rather, I would say it is a measure of the integrity of our valuations. I think truth-related statuses are inseparable from ultimately ethical processes of valuation that are involved in any discourse or dialogue with others that seriously and in good faith aims at truth.

“[P]ragmatists about truth owe an explanation of uses of ‘true’ that occur as components of more complicated assertibles. When I say ‘If what the representationalist says in the passage at the top of page 17 is true, then pragmatism is in trouble,’ I have not endorsed or agreed to the offending remark. Redundancy and disquotationalist approaches to truth-talk extend to these unasserted, embedded uses, as well as the free-standing endorsement-indicating ones. The most sophisticated and technically adequate theory of this sort, in my view, is anaphoric, prosentential accounts, according to which sentences such as ‘that is true’ inherit their content from their anaphoric antecedents” (p. 46).

Brandom recalls Rorty’s support for Brandom’s Making It Explicit. At the same time, he generously credits Rorty as his own most direct inspiration.

“Rorty enthusiastically embraced both these ways of filling in his account of how pragmatists should think about truth” (ibid).

“By focusing to begin with on justification, rather than truth, Rorty not only opens up a path from pragmatics to semantics (theorizing about use to theorizing about meaning), but also carves out a distinctively normative space within the broadly naturalistic Piercean pragmatist picture…. In this way, Rorty turns the axial Kantian distinction between normative questions… and objective factual ones… back on Kant’s most basic semantic concept: representation. He does so by combining another Kantian idea with the Hegelian understanding of normative statuses as ultimately social statuses. Rorty fully endorses and exploits Kant’s distillation of the Enlightenment lesson, that what distinguishes rational authority (normative constraint) from mere compulsion (causal constraint) is liability to criticism, in the sense of answerability to demands for reasons…. In this sense, we can only answer to each other: to those who give and demand reasons” (pp. 47-48).

“By insisting on the essentially social character of the rational, critical, and justificatory practices within which performances acquire genuine normative significance, Rorty knowingly takes a giant leap toward a Hegelian understanding of that Kantian distinction” (p. 48).

Ethics has an inherent social dimension because it is mainly about what is right in relations with others. Obedience to any authority other than good reasons — or to any authority that is taken to be unilateral — is not an ethical relation but a power relation.

“What arouses passion, I think, is the consequent rejection of the very idea of objective reality…. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that he rejects representationalist semantic models on behalf of the ideals of reason, freedom, and democracy. For Rorty does so on behalf of a humanized, nonrepresentational conception of rationality as consisting of responsiveness to reasons providing norms governing our practice…. But when he further construes giving and asking for reasons, assessing evidence, justifications, and explanations, as all ultimately and ineluctably a matter of politics…– the gauntlet has been thrown down and the battle joined” (p. 49).

I think there is actually an Aristotelian basis for this connection of ethics with politics. Politics is ethics writ large. This latter formulation also recalls Plato’s metaphor of the soul as a city in the Republic.

“The foes of the original Enlightenment could not understand how anyone who denied the authority of God to determine right and wrong concerning actions, independently of human attitudes, could nonetheless be a good person, concerned about acting as one ought. The foes of Rorty’s projected second Enlightenment cannot understand how anyone who denies the authority of objective facts to determine right and wrong beliefs, independently of human attitudes, could nonetheless recognize a distinction between better and worse arguments: genuine reasons for and against claims” (p. 51).

Here Brandom speaks of the traditional notion of unilateral authority, not his own highly original account of the symmetrical relations between authority and responsibility or answerability, which allows us to say that all authority is constituted by participation in reciprocal ethical relations of rational answerability and responsibility to others.

“Rorty takes it that it follows from social pragmatism about norms in this sense that nothing nonhuman can exercise authority over us, that we cannot be responsible to any nonhuman authority. His reason, I think, is that discursive authority and responsibility are rational authority and responsibility — in the sense of being normative statuses that matter for practices of giving and asking for reasons. What doesn’t make a difference for those practices is semantically inert and epistemically irrelevant” (p. 54).

Again, “pragmatism” here does not refer to the coarse popular notion that implies a lack of principle, but to a philosophical view about the order of explanation that treats human practice and doing as constitutive of the representations we speak about.

“We should acknowledge the authority only of what we can critically interrogate as to its reasons. Only what can fulfill its critical rational responsibility to give reasons justifying the exercise of that authority should count as having genuine authority. He concludes that only parties to our conversations, only participants in our practices, can have normative statuses. In the end, the only authority we ought to recognize is each other: those to whom we owe reasons for our commitments and those who owe such justifying reasons to us for exercises of their authority. Rational authority involves a correlative justificatory responsibility. To attribute such normative statuses to anything that can’t talk is to fetishize…. [I]t is precisely his devotion to reason and its essential critical function in making normative statuses genuinely binding — the great Enlightenment discovery — that drives this whole line of thought. He is trying to think through rigorously what reason is and what it requires of us” (p. 55).

“At the base of this argument is a new principle, which builds on but goes beyond social pragmatism about normative statuses. Its slogan is ‘No (genuine) authority without (rational) responsibility.’ I think there is something deeply right about it” (ibid).

I too think there is something deeply right about this.

Brandom goes on to explain the genesis of objectivity from normativity,

“Once implicitly normative social practices are up and running, derivative sorts of normative statuses, parasitic on the basic ones that characterize discursive practitioners, become possible. It is true that, as social pragmatism about norms has it, it is only in virtue of playing a suitable role in social practices that anything acquires specifically normative significance…. But in the context of discursive practices that include the kinds of authority characteristic of us as a reason-giving-and-assessing participants, those interlocutors can confer other, parasitic sorts of normative significance on things that are not themselves capable of giving and asking for reasons” (pp. 57-58).

“So the three principles I have excavated as the basis of Rorty’s argument, when properly understood, leave room for the possibility that our discursive practices can confer on objective things and occurrences the normative significance of serving as standards for assessment of the correctness of what count as representings of them just in virtue of being in that sense responsible for their correctness to how it objectively is with what thereby counts as represented by them. That is conferring on representeds a distinctive kind of authority over representings….The important point remains that nonhuman beings can have only the authority we grant them…. [A]uthority must be granted to, practically taken to reside in and be exercised by, the things themselves” (p. 59-60).

With Brandom’s symmetrical view of authority, objectivity is something emergent rather than something pre-existent. Objectivity as something emergent is not affected by Rorty’s critique of assumptions about objective reality.

“Explaining how that possibility — which I have argued is left open in principle by the three principles on which Rorty’s representationalism-as-fetishism argument against the very idea of objective reality is based — can actually be realized is a tall order and a hard job” (p. 60).

In Brandom’s view, this is why we need Hegel.

“I think Hegel offers just such an account…. In my second lecture I will explain how I think Hegel’s story about the institution of normative representational relations goes. In the end, I want to claim, Rorty did not follow his line of thought all the way through to its proper conclusion because he (following Dewey) did not sufficiently appreciate the thorough-going nature of Hegel’s historicism, and the remarkable and distinctive conception of specifically recollective rationality it articulates” (pp. 60-61).

Brandom on Reason and Authority

Brandom respectfully takes issue with his teacher Richard Rorty’s claim that all talk about an ultimate objective reality — or objective truth — should be rejected as authoritarian. He uses Hegel to answer Rorty.

“Authoritarianism is an attitude toward the relation between normative statuses and critical practices of giving and asking for reasons. It consists in practically or theoretically taking it that there can be genuine authority without a corresponding critical responsibility to give reasons entitling one to that authority” (Robert Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation, p. 63, emphasis in original).

“Rorty takes it that Kant was right to draw from his distillation of the insights of the Enlightenment the lesson that genuine norms essentially involve liability to rational criticism, to demands for reasons justifying and legitimating claims to authority…. Seeing norms as instituted (solely) by power relations… (‘might makes right’) is authoritarianism” (p. 64).

As I have pointed out, Plato and Leibniz anticipated Kant and Hegel in explicitly rejecting this kind of authoritarianism. Gwenaëlle Aubry has extensively documented the lengths to which Aristotle went to avoid grounding normativity in power.

Brandom notes that Rorty goes on to argue that “The idea that inanimate objects and objective states of affairs can exercise representational authority over the beliefs of those who can engage in critical rational challenges and defenses is a remnant of fetishistic authoritarianism” (p. 65).

Brandom rejects this last claim, as do I (see Things in Themselves; Essence and Explanation).

He says, “I argue for two claims. The first is that the considerations and commitments that shape the final, anti-authoritarian argument of Rorty’s… are among the central concerns Hegel addresses in his Phenomenology. The second is that Hegel there assembles and deploys conceptual resources that suffice to disarm Rorty’s anti-authoritarian arguments against the legitimacy and ultimate intelligibility of the concept of representation” (pp. 65-66).

“I think Rorty accepts the first point, and that is largely why he saw Hegel (at least, in a Deweyan, suitably naturalized form) as representing a way forward for philosophy…. But I do not think he was ever in a position to appreciate the second point (p. 66).

“Hegel takes over from Kant the insight that what distinguishes us sapient, discursive beings from the merely natural ones is the normative character of the space in which we live, and move, and have our being. Geist [spirit or ethical culture], Hegel’s focal concept — what the [Phenomenology] is a phenomenology of — is the whole comprising all of our implicitly norm-governed performances, practices, and institutions, the explicit theoretical expressions of them that constitute our normative self-consciousness, and everything that those normative practices and institutions make possible” (pp. 67-68). 

“We are what things can be something for, which is to say that we are conscious beings. Hegel understands the origins of this capacity to lie in our nature as organic, desiring beings…. For something is food for the hungry animal who eats it, but is actually food… only if it in fact satisfies hunger. Hegel takes this possibility of practically experiencing error… to be the organic origin of consciousness” (p. 68-69; see also For Itself).

“We are, further, essentially self-conscious beings. That is, what we are for ourselves is an essential component of what we are in ourselves” (p. 69; see also Consciousness and Identity).

The qualifier “essential component of” is extremely important. To simply equate what we are in ourselves with what we are for ourselves would be subjectivism.

“As I am characterizing Hegel’s thought, his idea is that social pragmatism about norms is the master idea of modernity, and the Enlightenment is the explicit theoretical consciousness of this change of practical attitude. Rorty, Dewey, and Hegel are at one on this point, different as their expressions of it might seem” (pp. 72-73).

Brandom connects Hegel’s ethical ideas about mutual recognition with John Dewey’s characteristic concern for democratic values, as discussed by Rorty. The mere phrase “social pragmatism” sounds a bit shallow, but at this point Brandom has already given his own capsule history of pragmatism and described Dewey’s social and political concerns, so he is using it as a sort of extreme shorthand.

“My overall contention here is that because Rorty’s grasp of the social and historical articulation of normativity that Hegel discovers remains at a highly abstract and programmatic level, he does not understand how the more detailed structure Hegel discerns provides the resources to respond to Rorty’s anti-authoritarian critique of the ultimate intelligibility of representational norms. The rational criticizability of normative statuses can be seen to be built into them when we appreciate the social and historical fine structure of the process by which they are instituted by normative attitudes” (p. 73, emphasis added).

Brandom in effect argues that mutual recognition in Hegel is not only ethical, but that it also conditions knowledge and first philosophy.

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey. 

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. 

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example. 

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant. 

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed. 

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist. 

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism. 

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Shine and Reflection

Hegel introduces reflection in by contrasting it with immediacy and simple being.

“The truth of being is essence.”

“Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is a mediated knowledge, for it is not to be found with and in essence immediately, but starts off from an other, from being, and has a prior way to make, the way that leads over and beyond being or that rather penetrates into it. Only insofar as knowledge recollects itself into itself out of immediate being, does it find essence through this mediation” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book II, p. 337).

Knowledge “does not stop at the immediate”. The perspective of “Being” for Hegel is a mere starting point that turns out to be unsustainable on its own terms. Being by itself is not sufficient to make anything intelligible. Essence on the other hand begins to give us truth.

He goes on to say what essence is, in terms of reflection. This is initially introduced in rather classic Hegelese:

“For essence is an infinite self-contained movement which determines its immediacy as negativity and its negativity as immediacy, and is thus the shining of itself within itself. In this, in its self-movement, essence is reflection” (p. 345).

Each part of this actually makes sense, if you think in terms of reflection from the start and treat immediacy as derivative, which is just what Hegel ends up recommending here. Reflection is Hegel’s model for “good” infinity.

The metaphorical “shining” above is wordplay on Schein, Hegel’s term for a kind of appearance, which di Giovanni renders as “shine”. Kant had spoken of the Schein or illusion produced by pure reason outside the realm of experience. As an appearance-like thing, shine is contrasted with essence. For Hegel, essence is to be found nowhere else than within shine, but the articulation of essence involves a selectivity, distinction, and elaboration within shine that the logic of being (based as it is on a principle of indifference) is unable to support.

“Shine is the same as what reflection is; but it is reflection as immediate. For this shine which is internalized and therefore alienated from its immediacy, the German has a word from an alien language, ‘Reflexion’.”

“Essence is reflection, the movement of becoming and transition that remains within itself, wherein that which is distinguished is determined simply and solely as the negative itself” (ibid).

Hegel introduces talk about “the negative” as a reminder that higher thought requires moving beyond pre-given or “fixed” concepts. This “negative” has virtually nothing to do with classical negation in formal logic.

“In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other” (ibid).

Being is supposed to be a stable foundation, but for Hegel any true stability of intelligibility cannot come from a foundation in mere fixity. At this level, any determinateness and any intelligibility really depend not on being as such, but on relation and relatedness that is external to the supposed foundation.

He continues, “Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only in self-referring” (ibid).

Here he explicitly connects negativity with reflection and self-reference, vocabulary I find far more illuminating.

Reflective judgment works in part by a sort of hall of mirrors effect, in which the back-and-forth of reflection effectively moots the question of which was the original of the images. All that remains is a new level of variegated and articulated whole. Hegel is saying something like essence is the equilibrium resulting from the back-and-forth of reflection. This is how intelligibility originates. Relations are prior to any notion of being that is not utterly indeterminate.

The following passage, read slowly and carefully, elaborates this identification of the Hegelian negative with self-reference and reflection. It portrays reflection as bootstrapping itself.

“The self-reference of the negative is therefore its turning back on itself; it is immediacy as the sublating of the negative, but immediacy simply and solely as this reference or as turning back from a one, and hence as self-sublating of immediacy. — This is positedness, immediacy purely as determinateness or self-reflecting. This immediacy, which is only as the turning back of the negative into itself, is the immediacy which constitutes the determinateness of shine, and from which the previous reflective movement seemed to begin. But, far from being able to begin with this immediacy, the latter first is rather as the turning back or as the reflection itself” (p. 347).

He says quite clearly that immediacy is only the semblance of a beginning.

“Immediacy comes on the scene simply and solely as a turning back and is that negative which is the semblance of a beginning, the beginning which the return negates” (ibid).

He explicitly recalls the Kantian background here.

“Reflection is usually taken in a subjective sense as the movement of judgment which transcends an immediately given representation and seeks more universal determinations for it or compares it with such determinations. Kant opposes reflective and determining judgment (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, pp. xxiiiff.). He defines judgment in general as the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if what is given is only a particular, for which it is up to the judgment to find the universal, then the judgment is reflecting. Here, too, reflection is therefore a matter of rising above the immediate to the universal. On the one hand, the immediate is determined as particular only by being thus referred to its universal; for itself, it is only a singular or an immediate existent. But, on the other hand, that to which it is referred, its universal, its rule, principle, law, is in general that which is reflected into itself, which refers itself to itself, is the essence or the essential.”

“But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determinations, but reflection in general. It is clear that the reflection to which Kant assigns the search of the universal for a given particular is likewise only an external reflection which applies itself to the immediate as to something given. — But the concept of absolute reflection, too, is implicit in it. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began; the immediate, therefore, to be a nothingness which is posited in its true being only by the turning back of the reflection from it, by the determining of reflection. Therefore, that which reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but rather its true being” (p. 350).

Here we are far indeed from early modern representationalism and its “given” objects, traces of which Hegel still finds in Kant. Yet nothing could be more contrary to this point of view than subjective arbitrariness. The process of the back-and-forth of reflection generates shareable rational objectivity out of practical distinctions of value. And reflection does not live within the confines of one person’s head. Hegel emphasizes the continuity of the inner and the outer, and elsewhere explicitly proposes mutual recognition as the ground not only of ethics but also of knowledge.

Direct and Indirect “Knowledge”

For now, this will be the last installment on Alain de Libera’s Archaeology of the Subject. Though he has promised another four and a half volumes, I’ve reached the end of what has been published so far. Here I’ll briefly summarize the remainder of volume 3 part 1.

After analysis of an anonymous Averroist text of the 1270s that criticizes Aquinas in sharper language than that employed by Siger of Brabant, de Libera briefly discuses substance dualism and the plurality of substantial forms in the later Augustinian tradition. He documents the beginnings of the shift toward modern usages of “subject” and “object” in the 13th century. He notes the large difference in connotation between Aristotelian ousia and Latin substantia, glossing ousia as what something is in its depth. (I’ve been continuing to use “substance”, with Aristotle’s own gloss from the Metaphysics of “what it was to have been” a thing.)

He then turns to a long and delicately nuanced review of Aquinas’ compromise between Aristotle and Augustine on the soul’s knowledge of itself. The title of this chapter in French is a pun: by homonymy, it suggests “The Subject Supposed to Know Itself”, but literally, it is “The Subject Supposed to Have Itself”.

At summary level, Aristotle holds that all self-knowledge is indirect, while Augustine holds that the soul directly knows itself through its essence. But de Libera points out that there are elements of directness in Aristotle, and elements of indirectness in Augustine. He emphasizes that “knowledge” is said in many ways, from mere undifferentiated awareness to the strong knowledge that was called “science”. If we want to discuss claims about self-knowledge, we need to distinguish what kind of “knowledge” we are talking about.

In the final chapter, de Libera again mentions the Franciscan Peter Olivi, who in the 13th century criticized the representationalism of the medieval theory of “species” in the name of direct realism. Olivi also further sharpened Augustine’s claims that the soul directly knows itself by its essence. According to de Libera, while Olivi was far less influential than Aquinas, it was the interaction of their legacies that ultimately led to the modern notion of the human subject as agent and ego. Toward the end, de Libera again mentions the 18th century Scottish philosopher of common sense Thomas Reid, who was completely unaware of medieval Augustinian criticisms of representationalism, and re-invented direct realism.

Once again, we have to be careful about too easy assumptions regarding “isms”. Here, it turns out that both advocates of representationalism and advocates of direct realism may make strong appeals to immediacy and presence. The difference is that in modern terms, representationalists appeal to the alleged immediacy of mental representations, whereas direct realists appeal to the alleged immediacy of external objects. I read Aristotle as acknowledging a modest role for immediacy in common sense apprehensions, but as rejecting the idea that immediacy has any kind of privileged status in knowledge. I read Kant, Hegel, Brandom, and Ricoeur among others as strongly supporting this Aristotelian view.

Earlier, de Libera had noted a common Franciscan criticism that for both Aristotle and Aquinas, all self-knowledge is inferential. These days, I would take that as a compliment. In my youth, I uncritically absorbed a large bias toward immediacy myself. Immediacy was supposed to give a truth hidden by ordinary alienation. But in more recent years, I have become sympathetic to Brandom’s thesis that all apparently immediate knowledge is just that — apparently immediate, and that a kind of inference actually is the most primitive source of knowledge.

Berkeley on Perception

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is most famous for his provocative claim that material objects don’t really exist. Positively, he claimed that “to be is to be perceived”. Berkeley took as a starting point the view of Descartes and Locke that perceptions are “ideas” in the mind, but took issue with the further assumption of Descartes and Locke that ideas nonetheless also “represent” things that exist independent of the mind. It seems to me that the implicit concept of mind in this kind of usage assumes way too much, but for now I won’t dwell on that.

Berkeley has been the subject of superficial ridicule as a poster child for extreme subjectivism, but that is a caricature. Famously, he is supposed to have maintained, e.g., that a tree falling in the woods and heard by no one makes no sound. As 20th century analytic philosophers have noted, however, even if his positions are ultimately untenable, the quality of his arguments is actually quite high. Apart from the abstract “metaphysical” question of the real existence of external objects, he also generally wanted to vindicate common sense.

Far from denying the existence of any objective reality, what he really wanted to do was articulate an alternate account of objectivity, based on something other than the independent existence of discrete objects. He had two different kinds of responses on the falling tree. One invokes counterfactual conditions; all that is of practical relevance to us are the conditions under which a perception would occur. The other invokes God as a universal witness.

From within the tradition of British empiricism, Berkeley partially anticipates the non-representationalist accounts of objectivity developed by Kant and Hegel, using the resources of a kind of Christian Platonism. Unlike Kant and Hegel, he flatly asserts that what really exists are what he calls spirits, which combine Christian-Platonic attributes with those of minds in a broadly Cartesian-Lockean sense.

A bit like the monads of Leibniz but without the infinite nesting and mutual inclusion Leibniz posited, Berkeley’s spirits are inherently active, and inherently endowed with perception. Spirits have experience that is expressed in purely immanent and immediate — but entirely passive and inert — contentful ideas.

Berkeley wrote an important early work on the theory of vision, arguing that what we really see is immediate phenomena of light and color, rather than inferred “things”. This was an important source for phenomenalism in early 20th century philosophy of science. Like the later phenomenalists, he tried to explain all cognitive error as bad inference from good immediate perception. From this point of view, “ideas” cannot be wrong, because they are purely immediate and purely inert; the possibility of error depends on the actions of finite spirits.

The common tradition of Cartesianism and British empiricism insists that there is a layer of immediate apprehension that is immune to error, and wants to ground knowledge and science by more authentically getting back to that immediate layer. I think Kant and Hegel convincingly showed that everything we experience as immediate actually has a prehistory, so that immediacy itself is only an appearance, and all immediacy that we experience is really what Hegel called mediated immediacy. Mediated immediacy has the same general kind of explanation as what is called “habit” in translations of Aristotle. We “just know” how to ride a bicycle once we have already learned. We don’t have to think about it; we just spontaneously do it. Similarly, I think “immediate” perception involves a complex unconscious application of categories that is affected by large bodies of previous experience.

Thus I want to say that there is no layer of human experience that is immune to error. On the other hand, through reflection and well-rounded judgment, we genuinely but fallibly participate in objectivity. Objectivity is not something that is simply “out there”; it is a real but always finite and relative achievement.

Descartes Revisited

Descartes is among my least favorite of those conventionally termed great philosophers. My treatment to date has been mainly limited to a few dismissive remarks. Here I’d like to add a few “historiographical” points of demarcation.

Insofar as there is general consensus among scholars, Descartes (1598-1650) first and foremost has claim to fame as a very influential promoter of something recognizably close to modern scientific method. He is often credited with the invention of analytic geometry, based on an early recognition of the systematic isomorphism between geometry and algebra. Galileo (1564-1642) had already taken up an approach to natural science based on mathematical analysis, which Descartes enthusiastically adopted. Descartes particularly promoted a methodology based on clear and distinct ideas, which he held to give certain knowledge. He advocated an orderly progression from the simple to the complex.

On a broad social level, Descartes is remembered for promoting the independence of scientific investigation, particularly from the doctrinal concerns of the Catholic Church. But he was also a religious thinker. While confessing in a private letter that he did not literally believe various details of received scripture, he was very engaged with proofs of the existence of God.

Numerous scholars have pointed out that outside the domains of mathematics and natural science, Descartes in many ways remained close to the Latin scholasticism of which he has been commonly regarded as the slayer. In Descartes and the Modern Mind (1952), for example, Albert Balz argued at length that the thought of Thomas Aquinas was an essential precursor to Descartes. I note that Augustine had already emphasized the importance of the interpretive role of reason, even in matters of faith. On Aquinas’ account, God gives us not only revelation, but also the natural light of reason. In Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas addressed questions of philosophy and theology entirely from the point of view of that “natural light”, while aiming to show that the natural light of reason independently leads to many of same truths he attributed to revelation. Descartes makes great use of a similar concept of the natural light of reason.

Both Descartes and Aquinas thought the natural light of reason, properly understood, gives us truths, full stop. I think it gives us invaluable criteria for judgment and interpretation, while always in principle leaving room for discussion about what conclusions should be drawn. I also think the “natural light” itself comes to us in degrees, and is never a simple or unproblematic possession.

A different strand of Latin scholastic thought tended to claim that all human knowledge originates in sensible images, while attributing such a view to Aristotle. (I think this is overly strong, and that Aristotle only meant to defend the pragmatic value of sensation against Platonic skepticism about all deliverances of sense.) Descartes famously argued that sensible images are not the only source of knowledge, and I think that is true, as far as it goes.

Here is where Descartes’ theses about clear and distinct ideas come into play. A methodological discipline based on examining whether our ideas are clear and distinct is an important source of human knowledge. Again, this much I can agree with, but I think clarity and distinctness are relative criteria and not absolutes. As relative criteria, they have been implicitly employed by most if not all serious thinkers. I take such evaluations to have been a major implicit concern of Platonic and Aristotelian dialectic, which in part aims to discern meanings that are more clear and distinct.

Descartes effectively claimed that clarity and distinctness are absolute, decidable properties of ideas. One of the broadly scholastic views he sharply criticized was that our best knowledge of sensible things is only “probable”. Descartes claimed that the results of his methodological analyses were certain, in the same way that mathematical conclusions follow with certainty from their premises. This goes well beyond the claim that there is practical value in such methodology.

Building on arguments of Augustine and Avicenna, he also famously gave great importance to the claim that immediate contents of the mind give evidence of unconditional certainty of the abstract existence of something. The very possibility that I could be deceived implies the abstract existence of an abstract something that could be deceived. Further, if something in any way appears to me to be such and such — even if I am wrong about all the details — independent of all the details, the barest fact of the appearance implies that some appearance generically “exists”.

The “I” that is in this way proven to exist and the appearance that is proven to exist are both extreme abstractions. Even Descartes did not claim that either of these existences by itself gives us any further knowledge. From this basis alone, I could still be entirely mistaken about the kind of being that I am, and about every detail of what appears to me to be the case. In spite of the famous Cartesian doubt, Descartes actually wanted to makes strong claims of certainty and to refute skepticism. Many readers have concluded, though, that he opened the door for a new, more global form of skepticism, because what he clearly establishes as certain seems so utterly lacking in content.

I would hasten to add that unreasonable, excessive skepticism about human knowledge is best refuted by successful achievements of goals in real-life situations. Only a hypocrite could claim to live in the world with no well-founded beliefs whatsoever. The ancient Skeptics were only “skeptical” about theoretical accounts of things, not about practical concerns of everyday life.

By setting the bar too high and aiming at absolute certainty, Descartes actually opened the door for more radically subjectivist views that no one in the ancient world would have taken seriously (and not just because ancient people were naive). At the same time, he was very impatient with “dialectic”, and tended to foreshorten discussions of meaning and interpretation, in favor of claims that certain contents are unequivocally clear and distinct. Thus the ultimate result of his thought oscillates unstably between extremes of “Cartesian” skepticism and dogmatism.

Another point on which Descartes has been very influential is his strong representationalism. For Descartes, strictly speaking we never have practical knowledge of things in the world, only knowledge about contents of our mental representations, insofar as they are clear and distinct. In particular, we only know bodies through our mental representations of them. Rather than consisting in an interpretive stance of a situated being in the world, the Cartesian cogito achieves its purely subjective certainty in a way that is supposed to be peculiarly “outside” the real world altogether.

Unlike the representationalism of Locke, which is grounded in a kind of empirical psychology, that of Descartes is closely bound up with an ontological mind/world dualism more radical than anything Plotinus, Augustine, or Avicenna ever contemplated. For Plotinus, Augustine, and Avicenna, the soul was a very special kind of “something” existing in the real world, even if for Plotinus and Augustine it was not a “subject” in the sense of something underlying something else. For Locke — the other great early modern promoter of representationalism — our mental worlds are ultimately contained within the natural world. For Descartes, there is the world and there is the soul, and never the twain shall meet. The soul has its own mental world where it seems to relate directly only to God, and human knowledge occurs only in that mental world.

It is due to this unprecedentedly radical mind/world dualism of Descartes, I think, that virtually no one — even among his admirers — wants to uphold his metaphysics. This is an extreme example of what Hegel called “alienation”.

Historiography, Inferentialism

Having laid out some preliminaries, I’ve begun to circle back to more questions of historical detail related to the development here, and it seems fitting to summarize the motivations driving these more historical notes. History is all about the details, but in any inquiry, what are actually higher-order questions about methodology ought to inform primary investigations. We never just have data; it always has to be interpreted, and this involves questions about methodology. With history, this often involves critical examination of the applicability of categories that may tend to be taken for granted. Thus, I am adding notes about the application of various categories or concepts in particular historical settings, and about historical details that seem to have larger methodological significance.

I’m looking back at the history of philosophy (and, to some extent, broader cultural developments) from a point of view inspired by the “inferentialism” of Brandom (taking this as a general name for his point of view), as well as by my own ideas for a revitalized Aristotelianism. In Tales of the Mighty Dead and elsewhere, Brandom himself has effectively placed the historical roots of his development in the broad tradition of early modern philosophical rationalism, including the work of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I find standard connotations of the term “rationalism” rather problematic, and want to separate Descartes — of whom I am much more sharply critical than Brandom seems to be — from Spinoza and Leibniz, for whom I find additional reasons to be sympathetic. Brandom has contributed to a new understanding of Kant, and has developed a landmark reading of Hegel. I want to help support the broad thrust of these with historical considerations, while reconnecting them with fresh readings of Aristotle, Plato, and other historical philosophers. With some caveats and in spite of Brandom’s own brief comments, I also want to suggest a possible rapprochement with key insights of 20th century French “structuralism”.

A key point common to most of the tendencies mentioned above is an emphasis on the role of difference in making things intelligible. In the context of philosophical arguments, this means that critical distinctions are as important as positive assertions. Contrasts not only greatly facilitate but largely shape understanding. Brandom himself has developed the contrast between inferentialism and the representationalism of Descartes and Locke. He has made large use of Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of a “Myth of the Given” associated with most varieties of empiricism, and has also referenced the critique of psychologism developed by Frege and others in a logical context.

I have been using the term “mentalism” for a privileging of contents that are supposed to be immediately present to a personal “mind” that is itself conceived mainly in terms of immediate awareness. It seems to me that Descartes and Locke’s version of this was a historically specific combination of all the above notions from which an inferentialism would seek to distinguish itself — representationalism, the Myth of the Given, and psychologism. I have been concerned to point out not only that Cartesian-Lockean mentalism has historically specific antecedents that long predate modernity (going back to Augustine, with some foreshadowing in Plotinus), but also that a proto-inferentialist countertrend is actually even older, going back to Plato and Aristotle’s emphasis on the primacy of reason and reasoned development.

In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom has among many other things expanded on Hegel’s critique of Mastery. I find this to be of tremendous importance for ethics, and consonant with my structuralist sympathies. I have been concerned to point out how extreme claims of mastery are implicit in the various historical kinds of voluntarism, which all want to put some notion of arbitrary will — or authority attributed one-sidedly to such a will — ahead of consideration of what is reasonable and good.

Usual generalization caveats apply to statements about “isms”. In any particular case where the terms seem to apply, we need to look at relevant details, and be alert to the possibility that all aspects of a generalized argument may not apply straightforwardly. (See also Historiography; History of Philosophy.)