What Meaning Is

Brandom has characterized the focus of his interests as the theory of meaning. Recent additions to his website include a fascinating 1980 typescript “Assertion and Conceptual Roles”. This early piece has a programmatic character. It goes even further than the 1976 dissertation in anticipating the leading ideas of his major works. (I will omit the also interesting mathematical-logical formalization that he experiments with here, but steers away from in Making It Explicit and A Spirit of Trust.)

While Brandom is resolutely modern in his identifications, this sort of investigation was pioneered by Aristotle. Meaning and truth are approached in terms of a kind of normative “saying” that is up to us. But the paradigmatic kind of saying is what Aristotle calls “saying something about something”, so it is not entirely up to us. Finally, the paradigmatic use of language is dialogical, imbued with a Socratic ethic of dialogue and free-spirited inquiry. And what we most fundamentally are is dialogical talking animals.

As Brandom puts it in the first sentence, “The paradigmatic linguistic activity is saying that-p, in the sense of asserting, claiming, or stating that-p for some declarative sentence p” (p. 1).

Today “declarative” is also an important if ill-defined concept in the theory of programming languages, where its use has a close relation to the logical use that is given ethical significance here. In that context, it is often glossed as focusing on the what not the how (or the end and not the means), although that is a simplification.

The deep issue underneath both these disparate cases is something like the meaning of meaning. In what follows, I think Brandom makes some real progress in clarifying what is at stake. It has both ethical and formal dimensions.

“Frege shows in the Begriffschrift that the ways in which sentences can occur as significant constituents of other sentences require us to distinguish the content of such an assertion (what is asserted) and the force of the assertion (the asserting of that content). For when a sentence appears as the antecedent of a conditional, it must have something, let us call it the ‘content’, in common with its occurrence as a free-standing assertion, or there would be no justification for detaching the consequent of the conditional when one is prepared to assert its antecedent. On the other hand, the asserting of the conditional does not include the asserting of the antecedent, since the asserter of the conditional might well take the former to be true and the latter to be false. It is a criterion of adequacy for any account of either of these features of declarative discourse that it be compatible with some correct account of the other” (ibid).

I had not realized that the Fregean distinction of Sinn (sense or force) and Bedeutung (reference) arose in this context of reference relations between parts of compound sentences. It seems likely that this point attributed to Frege was a source for Michael Dummet’s work on compound sentences in which one part refers to another, which Brandom had made significant use of a few years earlier, in the dissertation. Dummet was a leading Frege scholar.

It strikes me also that in a formal context, this inter-reference between components of compound sentences could serve as an inductively definable and thus paradox-free version of “self” reference. In a more discursive, less formal context, it recalls Kantian-Hegelian “reflection” and other interesting weakenings of strict identity like Hegel’s “speculative” identity or Ricoeur’s “narrative” identity. Instead of a formally strict and thus empty global self-reference, it is a matter of specifiable internal cross-reference.

Further below, Brandom will explicitly connect this with the theme of anaphora or internal back-reference that he later develops at length in Making It Explicit as a way in which identities are constituted out of difference. In the current text he will also relate it to the “prosentential” theory of truth. Prosentences like “that is true” are the sentential analogue of pronouns — they refer to sentences that express definite propositions in the same way that pronouns refer to nouns. Brandom is saying that concrete meaning involves both Fregean sense and Fregean reference.

“Exclusive attention to the practice of asserting precludes understanding the conceptual significance which such linguistic performances express and enable, while the complementary exclusion must cut off semantic theory from its only empirical subject matter, talking as something people do” (ibid).

Standard bottom-up compositional approaches to semantics focus exclusively on the “content”, and not on the related doing.

“[I]t might be tempting to think that such a theory offers special resources for a theory of asserting as representing, classifying, or identifying. It is important to realize that the same considerations which disclose the distinction of force and content expose such advantages as spurious” (ibid).

“There is no reason to suppose that the semantic representability of all sentences in terms of, say, set-membership statements or identity statements, reflects or is reflected in the explanatory priority of various kinds of linguistic performances” (p. 2).

“It then turns out that giving a rich enough description of the social practices involved in assertion allows us to exhibit semantic contents as complex formal features of performances and compound dispositions to perform according to those practices. In other words, I want to show that it is possible to turn exactly on its head the standard order of explanation canvassed above” (p. 3).

“To specify a social practice is to specify the response which is the constitutive recognition of the appropriateness of performances with respect to that practice…. But in the case of discursive practices, the constitutive responses will in general themselves be performances which are appropriate (in virtue of the responses the community is disposed to make to them) according to some other social practice. The appropriateness of any particular performance will then depend on the appropriateness of a whole set of other performances with similar dependences. Each social practice will definitionally depend upon a set of others” (p. 4).

This notion of practice is thus inherently normative or value-oriented. Brandom compares his holistic view of practices with Quine’s holistic view of the “web of belief”.

“Definitional chains specifying the extension of one practice in terms of its intension, and that intension in terms of another extension, and so on, may loop back on one another. We will say that any system of social practices which does so … is a holistic system…. Such a system of practices cannot be attributed to a community piecemeal, or in an hierarchic fashion, but only all at once.”

The key point about such a holistic system is that there are mutual dependencies between parts or participants.

“It follows that in systems containing essentially holistic practices, the norms of conduct which are codified in such practices are not reducible to facts about objective performances. The appropriateness or inappropriateness of any particular performance with respect to such a practice cannot ultimately be expressed in terms of communal dispositions to respond with objectively characterizable sanctions and rewards…. The norms themselves are entirely constituted by the practices of socially recognizing performances as according or not according with them” (p. 5).

“Facts about objective performances” have a monological character. In technical contexts this can be of great value. But ethical and general life contexts have an inherently dialogical or mutual character.

“A community ought to be thought of as socially synthesized by mutual recognition of its members, since a plausible sufficient condition of A‘s being a member of some community is that the other members of that community take him to be such…. This simple Hegelian model of the synthesis of social entities by mutual recognition of individuals has the advantage that it preserves the basic distinction between the individual’s contribution to his membership in a group and the contribution of the other members” (p. 6, emphasis added).

Here we have the first appearance of the great theme of mutual recognition in Brandom’s work. Brandom has dug deeply into this particular aspect of Hegel, making very substantial contributions of his own. In ethics, mutual recognition has roots in Aristotelian philia (friendship or love) and the so-called golden rule (do and do not do to others as you would have them do and not do to you). Brandom sees that Hegel treats mutual recognition not only as an ethical ideal but also as a fundamental explanatory principle.

“The crucial point is that the reflexive recognition (as social self-recognition) be an achievement requiring the symmetry of being recognized in a particular respect by those whom I recognize in that respect, and presupposing that my recognitions will be transitive…. A community is then any set P which is closed under transitive recognition…. [N]o one member is omniscient or infallible about such membership…, nor is it required that everyone recognize everyone else in the community” (p. 7).

The symmetry of recognizing and being recognized leads to the idea that authority and responsibility ought to be symmetrically balanced. This has tremendous implications.

“Asserting that-p is, among other things, to explicitly authorize certain inferences…. Saying this much does not yet say what the constitutive recognition of this authorizing consists in…. Our account of the authorizing of inferences will draw upon the second major feature of the social role of assertion” (ibid).

The idea of understanding acts of assertion principally in terms of an inferential constitution of meaning is transformative. Others have suggested or implied something like this, but Brandom expresses it with more clarity and thoroughness than anyone.

Reasoning is not a merely technical activity. The constitution of meaning has fundamental ethical significance.

“This second feature is noted by Searle when he says that an assertion (among other things) ‘counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs’. Leaving aside the representationalist expansion of the content ascribed, we can see in the use of the term ‘undertaking’ the recognition of a dimension of responsibility in assertion, coordinate with the previously indicated dimension of authority. In asserting that-p one is committing oneself in some sense to the claim that-p. What sort of responsibility is involved? The leading idea of the present account is that it is justificatory responsibility which one undertakes by an assertion. Justification and assertion will be exhibited as essentially holistic social practices belonging to the same system of practices, internally related to one another. So the recognitive response-type which is the intension of the social practice of assertion must include recognition of the assertor as responsible for justifying his assertoric performance under suitable circumstances…. Authority in this sense consists in the social recognition of a practice as authorizing others” (pp. 9-10).

“What is essential is that the relation between the intensions and the extensions of a family of social practices underwrite a relation of what we may call (extending the usual sense) anaphoric reference between various performances. The term ‘anaphoric’ is used to indicate that this ‘referential’ relation is internal to a system of social practices, where one performance refers to another as one word refers to another in A: ‘Pynchon wrote the book’ B: ‘But has he tried to read it?’, where the pronouns anaphorically refer to the antecedent terms ‘Pynchon’ and ‘the book’. No relation between discursive and non-discursive items is supposed. A prime use of this expressive resource of anaphoric reference to typed utterings is exhibited just below, as a feature of demands for justification” (p. 12).

In Making It Explicit, Brandom uses linguistic anaphora to explain the constitution of objects as objects. Here he gives it an even broader role. Anaphora or back-referencing is the birth of substance, solidity, and modality in meaning. Again the ethical dimension comes to the fore. Assertion as lived concerns neither naked Parmenidean being nor pure objective facts.

“The key to our attempt to offer sufficient conditions for assertion by specifying a class of systems of social practices is the relation of justification which a set of assertions can have to another assertion…. Both the dimension of authority and the dimension of responsibility will be explicated in terms of the recognition of justification. Each of the different types of assertion which play a role in the systems we will examine, free-standing assertions, assertions which are the results of inferences authorized by other assertions, and assertions which are part of the justification which another asserting made its asserter responsible for, each of these types of assertion incurs a justificatory responsibility itself and authorizes further inferences. The relevant responsibility is to produce (what would be recognized as) an appropriate justification, if one is demanded…. The utterance of a conventional request for justification addressed to a foregoing assertion is to be always appropriate, and not itself in need of justification. The cognitive significance of the linguistic practices we describe stems from this universal appropriateness of demands for further justification (as Sellars takes the ‘rational’ structure of scientific practice to consist in its being a ‘self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once’…. An utterance in the conventional style of assertions (utterances which undertake justificatory responsibilities and issue inference licenses whose contents vary as the content of the assertion vary) will constitutively be recognized as possessing that authority only so long as the conditional responsibility to justify if queried has not been shirked…. No more for this distinction than elsewhere in the social practice story need we appeal to intentions or beliefs of performers” (pp. 12-13).

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, other variants of this ethics of dialogue or dialogical ethics have been developed by Plato, Gadamer, and Habermas.

“For just as inference passes the authority of assertion one way along the anaphoric chain, it also passes the justificatory responsibility incurred the other way along that chain” (p. 14).

“The extended responsibility induced by the presentation of a justification is defeasible by the performance of a counter-justification, comprising further assertions…. The categories of justificatory and counter-justificatory performances are not disjoint” (p. 17).

“Each of these conditions codifies some aspect of our ordinary practices of giving and asking for reasons” (p. 18).

“[A] set of basic and extended repertoires related by an accessibility relation will be called a conceptual idiom…. It is in terms of these still rather particularized structures that we will define assertional contents or conceptual roles” (pp. 18-19).

Next in this series: Conditionals and Conceptual Roles

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

From Tragedy to Dialogue

The historical development of philosophy follows a different trajectory from that of human ethical culture as a whole. Philosophical development tends to have what Nietzsche called an untimely character. In their ethics and meta-ethics, Plato and Aristotle for example are far ahead of the nostalgia for heroic values that was still typical of classical Greek culture as a whole. In the culture as a whole, the highest expression of traditional values was tragedy, expressed both intimately in the poetic word and publicly as a performative spectacle. At the same time, traditional values were already challenged by the corrosive and alienating effects of proto-modernity in the ethical individualism and subjectivism of the Sophists. This impasse between tradition and individualism is still typical of modern culture as a whole today, even though Plato and Aristotle already showed the way out of it, through rational discourse in a context of mutual regard.

Brandom in A Spirit of Trust (2019) provocatively suggests that to limit our ethical responsibility to what we do intentionally is to perpetuate the alienation brought about by individualism and subjectivism. The solution to this dilemma, he says, is not to return to the traditional views that treated right and wrong simply as objective social facts or as commands given to us by society or by the gods, but rather to view what Aristotle would call unwilling actions and the unintentional consequences of the actions of each as the joint responsibility of everyone in the universal community of rational beings.

The broadly traditional view, according to Brandom, is that we are individually responsible for the totality of our objectively ascribable deeds, regardless of circumstances and regardless of what we intended. Oedipus in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles must accept guilt and punishment for unwittingly having killed one who turned out to be his father, and for having married one who turned out to be his mother, after his parents had left him in the wilderness at birth because of a prophecy that he would bring them ruin. Oedipus is exiled from the city — a punishment regarded as worse than death — and deliberately blinds himself out of remorse, showing that he too accepts the verdict. From this point of view, even great humans are but pawns of fate, but we are nonetheless objectively responsible for the objective status of our objective deeds, whatever it may be.

The modern view is that responsibility is “subjective” rather than objective. We are individually responsible only for what we deliberately choose and intend, and no one at all is responsible for what happens by accident or unintentionally. But a great deal of what happens overall is accidental or unintentional.

Brandom reads Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology as providing the first real alternative to both the traditional view and this modern view. Hegel’s view is what Brandom calls “postmodern”, not in the pop culture sense of so-called postmodernism, but in the sense of providing a serious alternative to both traditional and modern views, which is what motivates the “Postmodern” in the masthead under which I write here.

For Brandom, Hegel’s achievement as expressed in the theory of mutual recognition is unprecedented. I think that mutual recognition is already implicit in the form of Platonic dialogue — rational discourse in a context of mutual regard — and begins to be made explicit when Aristotle treats forms of friendship and love that emphasize mutuality and recognition of the other as one of the two pinnacles of ethical development, along with wisdom.

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Brandom on Habermas

“Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 280).

I’m reviving a draft that earlier I put aside, in favor of first saying something about Habermas based on his own writings.

Habermas contrasts what he calls communicative reason with the instrumental reason that is oriented toward utility. Communicative reason aims at consensus on meanings and validity claims. Brandom recounts that when he was a brand-new assistant professor, his senior colleague Richard Rorty was more excited by Habermas’s early work Knowledge and Human Interests than by the publication of Rorty’s own Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Habermas preceded Brandom in combining influences from German Idealism, American pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. He was one of the first to bridge the gap between Continental and analytic philosophy. Like Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, he is a strong defender of modernity, which he understands in terms of Enlightenment values of reason, freedom, and equality. He has also been very involved with questions of democratic politics. His work emphasizes what Aristotle would call our status as talking animals, and the discursive character of reason. He combines a Kantian concern for ethical universality, rules, and deontology or moral necessity, with strong concern for intersubjectivity and the possible sharing of meaning.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas aims for what he calls a “formal” pragmatics and semantics, and his ethics seem to have a somewhat formal character as well.

For Habermas, there are three equally primordial kinds of meaning-critical validity: propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity of expression. He gives a specialized sense to “illocutionary” speech acts, as closely aligned with his idea of communicative reason. Speakers make validity claims in order to reach understanding. In making assertions, we implicitly guarantee that we can provide good reasons for them, and allow that hearers are free to either accept or reject what we said. This aspect is very close to Brandom.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas seems to have no idea of explaining propositional truth in terms of normativity. More conventionally, he treats truth and normativity as parallel concerns. This seems to go along with his more formal emphasis.

Habermas has an old-fashioned, stereotypical view of Hegel. In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, in passing he literally refers to Hegel as reviving the One of Plotinus. But Brandom credits Habermas as having first given him eyes to see the highly original ideas that he now sees in Hegel.

Brandom sees Habermas as applying detailed linguistic analysis from analytic philosophy to questions of social criticism: “A central pillar of [Habermas’s edifice] is his transposition of the issue raised by the unmaskers of ideology into a thoroughly linguistic key” (Brandom, “Towards Reconciling Two Heroes: Habermas and Hegel”, p. 32, emphasis in original).

“The appraisal and legitimation of social practices and institutions has become in the modern era a wholly discursive affair. That entails that unmasking an ideology is a metadiscursive matter of diagnosing systematic distortions in discursive structures: deformations of communicative action. These will have, to be sure, broadly pragmatic as well as narrowly semantic manifestations. But it is principally to the language we speak, the concepts we use, and the social-practical context in which we do so that we must look to understand distinctively modern forms of unfreedom, as well as for the tools to combat them” (ibid).

“If understanding the relations between reason and ideology is one of the principal philosophical tasks of our age, then there is indeed a case to be made for a suitably broadened (especially along the pragmatic dimension) philosophy of language as ‘first philosophy'” (ibid).

“Kant had the idea (and Hegel follows him down this path) that a post-theological conception of distinctively moral reasons could be built out of the idea that (to put the point in [Brandom’s] terms rather than [Kant’s]) certain principles of conduct make explicit, in the form of rules, normative commitments that are implicit in our engaging in discursive practices at all — simply in our talking and thinking, judging and acting intentionally” (p. 33).

It seems reasonable to apply the term “post-theological” to Brandom’s account of normativity. I think that for Kant though, it is better to speak simply of morality and ethics as having a basis that is independent from theology.

What Habermas calls universal pragmatics seems to refer to the elaboration of these meta-level commitments that are implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all. These include principles like the responsibility to be able to explain why we assert what we do, if we are asked; that the better argument should not be overruled; that everyone potentially affected by something should have a voice with regard to it; and so on. Similar principles were earlier articulated by Gadamer in his work on the ethical significance of Platonic dialogue. Brandom acknowledges a major debt to Habermas, and in Tales of the Mighty Dead he references Gadamer as the 20th-century standard-bearer for hermeneutics.

“One of the central ideas that binds the various German Idealists together is that the implicit structural pragmatic commitments that form the necessary background against which any semantically significant ground-level commitments (whether cognitive or practical) can be undertaken form in principle the basis for a philosophical ethics and a corresponding politics. It has been one of Habermas’s tasks in our own time to transpose that thought into a linguistic key, and to develop it in the light of the results of philosophy’s more than century-long fascination with language. This is his discourse ethics, and his idea for founding political theory on an account of the nature of communicative action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brandom and Habermas both stand out from the mainstream in arguing that pragmatics or language use takes precedence over semantics. But where Habermas calls for formal pragmatics and formal (verificationist rather than model-theoretic) semantics, Brandom develops a normative pragmatics and a material-inferential semantics.

“The route that Habermas establishes from a theory of communicative action in general to political theory turns on the assertion within that base theory of a necessary and essential connection between discursive meaningfulness and the making of validity claims that must under various circumstances be redeemed, vindicated, or justified in order to achieve their effect. The distinctive kind of authority speech acts claim comes with a correlative justificatory responsibility. The idea is that the notion of ‘meaning’ that is a principal topic of semantics cannot be understood apart from practices of justifying, of asking for and offering justifications or reasons, which are a principal topic of pragmatics” (p. 35, emphasis in original).

“Habermas has shown how much can be done with these two ideas: Thinking of discursive practice in terms of a distinctive kind of normative practical significance characteristic of speech acts as such, and thinking of semantics methodologically as a kind of explanatory auxiliary in the service of an account of the proprieties of the use of linguistic expressions, which is pragmatics” (ibid).

These are two ideas of Habermas that Brandom strongly endorses. Brandom turns to his own theses about Kant and Hegel, which put normativity and ethical inquiry at the root of an account of knowledge and truth.

“Kant’s deepest and most original idea is that what distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. ‘Responsibility’, ‘commitment’, ‘endorsement’, ‘authority’—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (pp. 35-36).

Perhaps Kant’s greatest lesson is this questioning of naive notions of self, “subject”, and consciousness. This stands in sharp contrast to the one-sided readings of Kant as making “the” turn to “the” subject. This vital point has been obscured by the neo-Kantian and other commentators who aimed to make Kant as compatible as possible with empiricism and early 20th-century philosophy of science.

I am broadly sympathetic to Macintyre’s critique of deontology and rule-based ethics, but I think Hegel already showed the way out of this, and did it in a better way. This issue should be approached in terms of something like Robert Pippin’s highlighting of the simultaneous Aristotelian and Kantian elements in Hegel, rather than in terms of the theistically modified medieval Aristotelianism that Macintyre advocates.

Brandom summarizes, “Our freedom for Kant consists in our authority to make ourselves responsible for judgments and actions (thinkings and doings). This is a normative characterization of freedom” (p. 36).

One of Brandom’s most valuable contributions has been the explanation of Kantian freedom in a way that is not only not voluntaristic, but also does not attach freedom ontologically to “the” subject. Brandom is at one with Habermas and Gadamer in distinguishing what I call ethical reason from modern-style causal explanation.

Reason arises “freely” in a normative and reflective interpretive context. It is not caused to conclude as it does by any physical cause. Neither does it trace to a supernatural cause.

“Rationality in this sense does not consist in knowers and agents generally, or even often, having good reasons for what they believe and do. It consists rather just in being in the space of reasons, in the sense that knowers and agents count as such insofar as they exercise their normative authority to bind themselves by norms, undertake discursive commitments and responsibilities, and so make themselves liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. In particular, they are liable to assessment as to the goodness of their reasons for exercising their authority as they do, for taking on those specific commitments and responsibilities. Whatever the actual causal antecedents of their judgings and intentional doings, Kantian knowers and agents are obliged (committed) to have reasons for their judgments and actions” (ibid).

Brandom stresses Hegel’s ideal of the symmetry of authority and responsibility.

“Hegel takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility (what show up in the Phenomenology as ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’) are socially instituted statuses. The attitudes and practices that institute them are recognitive attitudes and practices: taking or treating each other in practice as authoritative and responsible. Further, authority and responsibility are co-ordinate statuses. Authority and responsibility come together. (There is no independence that does not incorporate a moment of dependence — essentially, and not just accidentally.) For the context in which such statuses are non-defectively instituted is one of reciprocal or mutual recognition. Each attempted exercise of authority is at the same time implicitly a petitioning for recognition of it as valid, legitimate, or warranted, as one the author is entitled to. And that is to say that attempting to exercise authority is always also making oneself responsible to those one recognizes as authorized (entitled, perhaps obliged) to validate it by recognizing it in turn” (pp. 36-37).

“Correspondingly, an attempt to make oneself responsible, even in judgment and intentional action, is authorizing others to hold one responsible. Hegel’s fundamental idea [is] that self-conscious individual subjects and their communities (“social substance”) are alike synthesized by reciprocal recognition. This is Hegel’s way of making sense of the connection between meaningful speech acts and validity claims, between discursive authority and discursive responsibility that is at the center of Habermas’s account of communicative action and discursive practice. Seen the other way around, Habermas’s theory of communicative action is his account of the practices Hegel talks about under the heading of ‘reciprocal recognition’” (p. 37, emphasis added).

Once again, the very act of making an assertion at all already authorizes others to question it, and to hold us responsible for it. This point is common to Brandom, Habermas, and Gadamer.

“Hegelian Geist [spirit] is the normative realm of all our normatively articulated performances, practices, and institutions, and everything that makes them possible and that they make possible” (ibid). “It is socially instituted by reciprocal recognition… That normative discursive realm in which we live, and move, and have our being is itself instituted by recognitive relations that are constitutively mutual, reciprocal, and symmetric” (ibid).

Hegel’s Geist is ethical and cultural, not metaphysical or mystical.

“In particular cases, asymmetric recognitive relations are intelligible” (ibid). “But these are in principle derivative cases, parasitic on the universal normative medium of discursive practices” (ibid).

“Denizens of this realm, the speakers and agents who are the only candidates for exhibiting more specialized, derivative, institutional normative statuses, are, once again, rational in the normative sense of exercising rational authority and taking on rational responsibility — being permanently liable to distinctive kinds of assessment and appraisal — rather than in the descriptive sense that addresses how good they are at doing what they are responsible for doing or vindicating the sorts of authority they claim” (ibid).

Brandom expresses his debt to Habermas.

“When it is described in these terms, I hope it is clear that Habermas is the foremost contemporary theorist of Hegelian Geist, the one who has taught us the most about its fine structure, the theorist who has best found an idiom for making explicit the commitments that are implicit in our being discursive normative creatures” (ibid).

Habermas himself seems to take the Young Hegelians’ hostile caricatures of Hegel as the last word on the subject. The 19th-century Right and Left Hegelians give opposite values to what are in fact broadly similar misunderstandings of Hegel.

“One issue arises from what I take to be a misreading of Hegel that is evident in some recent German interpretations that understand Hegelian Geist as a kind of divine mind, a social subject that is self-conscious in something like a Cartesian sense. It is a development of the right-wing Hegelian picture of the Absolute as a kind of super-individual thinker (an interpretation propounded already by Hegel’s student Gabler). This reading was very influential for the British Idealist admirers of Hegel, and remains part of the popular conception of Hegel’s thought among non-philosophers. Some of Henrich’s students (Kramer, Düsing) seem to have drawn the conclusion from his brilliant reading of Fichte that Hegel must take as a central theme the self-reflective structure of individual self-consciousness. But one of Hegel’s decisive insights is expressed in his non-mentalistic, indeed non-psychological, normative conception of self-consciousness as a social achievement that takes place largely outside the skull of the particular organism who becomes a self-conscious individual by entering into recognitive relations with others whose practical attitudes are equally essential to the institution of that status. (Already in the 1920’s the neo-Kantian Hartmann had emphasized that ‘The founding intuition of German Idealism is: “The Absolute is reason. It is not consciousness”‘. ) This Hegel is Habermasian; the Hegel who is a ‘philosopher of consciousness’ in the sense of Fichte’s or Schelling’s ‘absolute subjectivity’ is not” (p. 38).

This is a really key point that is still often lost sight of today: “reason, not consciousness”.

“Hegel does think that there can be a fully adequate, final set of logical, metasemantic, metaphysical concepts — the organ of a distinctive kind of philosophical self-consciousness that permits us to say and think what it is we are doing when we say or think anything about ourselves and our world. But he does not think that bringing those concept-determining activities and structures out into the daylight of explicitness — achieving the alarmingly titled state of “Absolute Knowing” that both the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic aim to produce — settles what ground-level concepts we ought to have, or the conceptual commitments, theoretical and practical, that we ought to adopt. Inquiry and deliberation must go on as before, with the sole difference that now we know what it is we are doing when we inquire and deliberate” (ibid, emphasis added).

Inquiry and deliberation must go on as before. There is no magic, no sleight of hand.

“All that [Hegel] thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings” (p. 39).

“There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic [truth-oriented] sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions” (p. 40, emphasis in original).

Consider the trajectory of a life, or the evaluation of its Aristotelian “happiness”.

“That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about” (ibid).

That is to say, contrary to a few confusing remarks by Kant, the freedom relevant to ethics is not to be understood in terms of a special kind of causality.

“Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute knowing'” (ibid, emphasis in original).

We are the agents of reason in history. This has nothing to do with infallibility, but rather with our status as participants in dialogue.

“Of course, no retrospective story one tells can succeed in rationalizing all of the actual contingent applications of determinate concepts that it inherits. (That is what in the final form of reciprocal recognition, we must confess, and trust that subsequent judges/concept-appliers can forgive us for, by finding the line we drew between what could and what could not be rationalized as itself the valid expression of a prior norm.) And no such story is final, because the norms it discerns must inevitably, when correctly applied, lead to incompatible commitments, which can only be reconciled by attributing different contents to the concepts” (ibid).

Brandom argues for the very strong position that no historically achieved concrete truth is permanently stable. This has a liberating potential. It means that every received truth and every authority must be subject to questioning.

“It is open to us to repackage those kinds of authority and responsibility in accord with the best lessons we can draw from the history and tradition we are able to discern. This is an instance of the fundamental Hegelian lesson about the ultimately social character of normative statuses, which are understood as instituted by recognitive practices and articulated by recognitive relations. This insight marks a fundamental advance over Kant’s understanding of the normativity he rightly saw as constitutive of our sapience. And it is an insight as fundamental to Habermas’s thought as it is to Hegel’s” (p. 41).

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).

Rorty’s Pragmatism

We’re in the middle of Robert Brandom’s recent Spinoza lectures, published as Pragmatism and Idealism (2022). He has been situating the work of his teacher Richard Rorty (and implicitly his own as well) in the context of 20th-century philosophy in the English-speaking world. Rorty aimed to revive the minority tradition of American pragmatism, which historically adopted a number of insights from Kant and Hegel, upon which Brandom aims to further expand. Rorty wanted to question standard received views of experience and representation. Brandom has been contrasting pragmatist views of the philosophy of science with the mid-20th century orthodoxy of logical empiricism.

“[E]xperience is not an input to the process of learning. Experience is the process of learning” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 23, emphasis in original).

“The rationality of science is best epitomized not in the occasion of the theorist’s sudden intellectual glimpse of some aspect of the true structure of reality, but in the process by which the skilled practitioner coaxes usable observations by experimental intervention, crafts theories by inferential postulation and extrapolation, and dynamically works out a more or less stable but always evolving accommodation between the provisional results of these two enterprises. The distinctive pragmatist shift in imagery for the mind is not from mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to flywheel governor” (ibid).

Brandom has also been diagnosing inherent conflicts within the tradition of logical empiricism.

“A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is. Otto Neurath thought that naturalism should prevail, while Moritz Schlick thought that empiricism should. Rudolph Carnap struggled mightily to keep the two wings of the movement from flying off in different directions. In spite of his many pragmatist corrections to and emendations of his hero Carnap, Quine could never bring into harmony his own scientific naturalism and residual empiricist hostility to modality” (pp. 25-26).

It is in this context that Rorty calls for a revival of pragmatism. More than Rorty himself, Brandom brings out the Kantian and Hegelian background of the pragmatist alternative.

“Rorty’s call for a second pragmatist Enlightenment, completing the first, is a Hegelian extrapolation of the original Kantian understanding of the Enlightenment, extending the application of that concept from ethics to encompass also semantics and epistemology. Further on, I will say more about what makes it Hegelian, and what difference that step beyond Kant makes. But first it is worth filling in the argument behind this subsumption of semantic anti-representationalism under the banner of humanistic Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism. In its largest structure, I think it consists of two moves: a Kantian appreciation of the normative character of representational relations, and a Hegelian social pragmatism about normativity in general” (p. 30, emphasis in original).

Here we are at the core of Brandom’s work on Kant and Hegel. It is fascinating to see how much of this he attributes to Rorty. This is a nice capsule account. (I’m still wary of the extremely compressed term “social pragmatism”, which presupposes a much more elaborate understanding like the one he is developing.)

“The first [of the two moves Brandom attributes to Rorty] is part and parcel of Kant’s radical recasting of Descartes’s division of things into minds and bodies in terms of the distinction between norms and causes. Kant reconceives discursive intentionality (apperception or sapience) as a normative phenomenon. What principally distinguishes judgments and intentional actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is their normative status” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This has huge significance. In language compatible with modern notions of cause, discourse around the notion of normativity seems able to express all practical matters of mind or spirit. This was a great problem with which the early moderns mightily struggled.

“Knowers and agents are responsible for how they take things to be and make things to be. Candidate knowings and doings express commitments as to how things are or shall be. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority: the authority to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible. This is the authority to bind oneself by rules in the form of the concepts discursive beings apply in judging and intending. Merely natural creatures are bound by rules in the form of laws of nature. Discursive beings are bound by rules they bind themselves by: concepts they apply, which are rules determining what they have thereby made themselves responsible to and for. Their normative statuses (responsibility, commitments) are instituted by their attitudes of undertaking or acknowledging these commitments” (pp. 30-31, emphasis in original).

Brandom is literally reinventing the notion of authority. This is not some power emanating from a central source, but the authority of all rational beings to undertake commitments and responsibilities just by binding themselves to those commitments and responsibilities. This is a version of Kantian autonomy.

At the same time Brandom appeals to Kant’s provocative, non-representationalist suggestion that concepts should be thought of as a kind of rules.

He continues, “Autonomy is the essence of Kantian rationality. It is a distinctive normative sort of freedom, which Kant develops by turning Rousseau’s definition of freedom — [Rousseau] says ‘obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom’ — into a criterion for genuinely normative bindingness” (p. 31).

The autonomy of reason means that reason is not subordinated to any unquestioned assumptions. Its exercise is free.

I have long puzzled over Kant and Hegel’s enthusiasm for Rousseau, who has usually seemed to me like an anti-rationalist voluntarist, with his emphasis on will rather than reason. I also tend to viscerally reject social contract theory, as a vulgar business-transaction metaphor for considerations that ought to be treated in more comprehensively ethical terms. But this particular formulation does seem to have a more specific relation to Kantian autonomy. “Obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself” implies a strong consistency, which Brandom elsewhere relates to the Kantian meta-goal of unity of apperception. A delicate question that arises here is whether the mythical founding moment of such obedience is taken to be arbitrary, or rather on the contrary is subject to the same conditions of Socratic questioning as everything else.

“I think that in his later critique of representationalism in semantics on the basis of a more thoroughgoing and general version of Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism, Rorty follows Hegel in focusing on the rulishness of Kant’s conception of representation. For Hegel reads Kant as offering a normative concept of representation, as a way of filling in his normative conception of intentionality. Kant dug down below Cartesian epistemological concerns about the warrant for our confidence in the success of our representational undertakings to uncover the underlying semantic understanding of representational purport they presuppose” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Despite his emphasis on autonomy, Kant is very much a philosopher of rules and law, who emphasizes the nomos (law or custom) in autonomy. From Hegel’s point of view, this is partly a strength and partly a weakness. Kant sees formalism as a safeguard against arbitrariness, and implicitly expects it to be deployed in a reasonable way. Hegel recognizes this, but also thinks that every formalism will eventually go wrong.

Brandom continues, “Where Descartes takes for granted the representational purport of our thought (construing it as something we immediately know, just by having thoughts at all) — their being, in his phrase, tanquam rem, ‘as if of things’ — Kant asks what it is about our thoughts in virtue of which they so much as seem to represent something else, purport to point beyond themselves to something they are of or about” (pp. 31-32).

Descartes and many others take the contents of thought and their apparent meanings for granted. Kant and Hegel and the pragmatists do not.

“One lesson that Hegel learns from Kant, as I understand him, is that a representing is responsible to what it represents for assessments of its correctness, in a distinctive sense. What is represented exercises authority over what count as representings of it just in virtue of its serving as a standard those representings are responsible to for such assessments of correctness (as representings). This is a radical reconceptualization of the representational relations between representeds and representings as a normative relation of authority and responsibility” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom lays the ground for a response to Rorty’s rejection of the “authority” of Reality with a capital R. For Brandom, genuine authority is not something imposed on us from above, but something in which we too participate from a ground level. And representation is not just a matter of fact, but something we do well or poorly, and thus something subject to normative appraisal.

“Pragmatism in this sense is the claim that normative statuses — paradigmatically responsibility or authority, commitment or entitlement — are always and everywhere features of the role something plays in social practices. Norms are creatures of our practices, instituted by our practical attitudes: how we take or treat things. Apart from their involvement in such practices, there are no normative proprieties, only natural properties” (p. 32, emphasis in original).

Brandom here implicitly associates pragmatism with the Kantian thesis of the primacy of “practical” reason. Kantian practical reason is ethical reason.

Pragmatism has commonly been presented as continuing something like the spirit of the British utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. The utilitarians certainly have ethical concepts of their own, but they are “ethical naturalists” who ultimately explain ethics in terms of utility or pleasure.

Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical reason, especially as radicalized by Brandom, goes in the opposite direction. It makes value judgment the root of all other judgment, including judgment of ordinary facts. Questioning about the good comes before any conclusions about the real or the true in the constitutive order of things. I think Plato and Aristotle would both endorse this.

“This is a social, Hegelian version of a central enlightenment idea. Samuel Pufendorf theorized about what he called the ‘imputation’ of normative characteristics of things: the way they acquire this new sort of normative significance by playing a suitable role in our practices. Social contract theories of political obligation looked for the origin of normative statuses of political authority and responsibility in practical attitudes of contracting and consenting. By contrast to traditional ideas of an objective natural or supernatural order of normative superiority and subordination (the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being), the modern idea is that there were no statuses of authority and responsibility, no superiors and subordinates, until we started taking or treating each other as authoritative and responsible, as entitled to command and obliged to obey” (pp. 32-33, emphasis in original).

Pufendorf played a major role in the development of the notion of a social contract, and early modern secular theories of “natural law”. He was a political voluntarist, and a defender of absolute sovereignty in the tradition of Bodin and Hobbes. But Brandom points out that Pufendorf also sought to explain normative significances in terms of roles in social practice. (Any serious thinker ought to be embarrassed at the prospect of defending sheer arbitrary will, so it is not surprising that voluntaristic political theorists ended up tempering their voluntarism.)

Now we come back to Rorty and Cartesian representationalism.

“The answer [Rorty] eventually came to, starting off with the rough, popular characterization of ‘privacy’ and ending with the substantially more focused notion of ‘incorrigibility’, was in explicitly normative terms. The key, he came to see, is a distinctive kind of first-person authority. Sincere contemporaneous first-person reports count as reports of mental occurrences just in case and insofar as they have a distinctive kind of un-overrideable epistemic authority. We can’t be either wrong about or ignorant of how things sensuously seem to us, or about what we are currently thinking, in the sense that no-one else’s claims about our experience have the social significance of decisive objections to our sincere first-person avowals” (pp. 33-34).

For this, Brandom cites articles by Rorty from 1965 and 1970. Incorrigibility is central to Brandom’s own account of Descartes. At a certain level, the argument does seem to be irrefutable. But it doesn’t seem to do much for knowledge, since what is thereby determined to be in a way incorrigible is just a certain seeming or appearing. I cannot be mistaken about how things seem to me. Everyone is an uncontestable authority on their own subjective feeling, and this has relevance in ethical contexts. But, needless to say, this incorrigibility does not extend to our beliefs about how things actually are. This is an important practical distinction in ethical contexts. You are the incontestable authority on how things seem to you. But the moment you make claims about what is true in the real world, you become responsible to answer questions and doubts about those claims.

Brandom seems to be suggesting that a broadly Cartesian concept of the mental can be retained, provided that we reinterpret it in terms of normativity rather than supposed facts of consciousness.

“Understanding minds in the Cartesian sense accordingly shows up as the task of understanding the nature of that authority. One option is that the authority should be understood as a natural, objective, ontological feature of mental phenomena. But Rorty has learned from the later Wittgenstein to be suspicious of this idea. Normative statuses, he thinks, must ultimately be understood as social statuses. (This is the positive, Hegelian, pragmatist lesson Rorty learns from Dewey.)” (p. 34).

“[Rorty thinks] social practices of according such authority to reports changed. Descartes both theoretically reflected and practically encouraged modern practical attitudes of taking or treating sincere first-person reports of contemporaneous mental events as having incorrigible authority. That change in normative attitudes brought into existence a new ontological category of thing: mental episodes as incorrigibly knowable by their possessors” (ibid).

“According to Rorty’s radicalized version of social pragmatism about norms, the very idea of objective things as exercising epistemic authority over our attitudes — underwritten by the semantic idea of representeds serving as normative standards for assessments of the correctness of what count as representings of them just in virtue of being responsible to them for such assessments — is deeply and irremediably confused. All authority is in the end communal authority. Further, as we shall see, the critical function of reason as legitimating norms, as understood by the Enlightenment and made most fully explicit by Kant, teaches that we can only be genuinely responsible to each other, to what we can engage with in conversation, to what we can give justifying reasons to and in turn demand justifying reasons from” (pp. 36-37).

“This radicalization of social pragmatism about norms is now explicitly construed in political terms of freedom and dignity. ’Only in a democratic society which describes itself in pragmatist terms, one can imagine Dewey saying, is the refusal to countenance any authority save that of consensus reached by free inquiry complete'” (p. 37).

“The incipient pragmatist emancipation Rorty is working toward is the substitution of a pragmatics of consensus for the semantics of representation. All we can do is give and ask for reasons with each other. Authority and responsibility are creatures of those discursive practices. We should accordingly reject the idea that our discursive practices answer to, are responsible to, need to acknowledge the authority of, anything outside those practices and the practical attitudes of those who engage in them. The constraint of the objective world should be understood as exclusively causal, not normative. We are normatively constrained only by our reasons” (p. 38, emphasis in original).

“Like his hero Dewey, Rorty never questioned the utility and importance of a basically ecological concept of reality…. This is the stubborn, recalcitrant reality that causally constrains, challenges, frustrates, and rewards our practical undertakings” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Rorty’s critique of representationalism is founded not on denying or ignoring the causal context in which our talk takes place…, but precisely on a hard-headed insistence and focus on that context” (p. 39).

“Rorty sees Dewey as having usefully added an emphasis on the social character of practices that transcend individual learning processes. At this level, the ‘habits’ that are cyclically shaped by ecological-adaptational causal interactions with the environment are in the first instance social practices. Rorty takes it that this broadened social naturalism (a ‘second-nature naturalism’ as per McDowell in Mind and World) is endorsed also by the later Wittgenstein and the Heidegger of Division One of Being and Time. And Rorty himself goes beyond even Dewey, in making common cause with Wittgenstein in further focusing on specifically discursive practices” (p. 40).

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of truth and representation), study use rather than meaning. When talking this way, he is following the later Wittgenstein (who recoils from his semantics-only Tractarian view to a pragmatics-only approach), James, and Dewey, but not Pierce, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. They should be understood as pursuing pragmatics-first, rather than semantics-first explanatory strategies, but not as trading the traditional neglect of pragmatics by the representationalist semantic tradition for a corresponding pragmatist dismissal of semantics holus bolus” (pp. 41-42).

“He does have views about meaning. But he thinks we should understand it in terms of justificatory practices rather than a notion of truth understood in terms of representation” (p. 42).

I for one understand ethical truth in terms of such justificatory practices. I also recognize poetic truth that is neither representational nor justificatory, but nonetheless significant.

Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).

Everyday Belief

In ordinary life we are guided by well-founded beliefs about many things of which, strictly speaking, we do not have knowledge. Our beliefs are still well-founded in the sense that if asked, we can give reasons for them, and plausibly respond to questions about those reasons. We ought to continue to hold those beliefs, unless and until we are confronted with better reasons for a different conclusion.

Brandom would remind us that we have an implicit ethical obligation to keep our beliefs in good repair. We have a responsibility for the consequences of applying our beliefs. We have a responsibility not to hypocritically pretend to hold incompatible beliefs. In general, we have a responsibility to take our explicit and implicit commitments seriously. This entails a willingness to participate in dialogue, to explain our reasons and answer questions about them.

Legal Uses of “Cause”

According to Wikipedia, two main kinds of “cause” are used in (U.S.) legal assessments of liability: cause-in-fact and proximate cause. A cause-in-fact is anything without which something would not have happened. The same event could clearly have multiple causes-in-fact. Cause-in-fact is a necessary but not sufficient condition for proving proximate cause. Proximate causation involves the additional element that the causing event be sufficiently related to the injury for the courts to consider it “the” cause of the injury for purposes of liability. I think it serves effectively as a kind of model for talk about “the” cause of something in general.

The notion of proximate cause seems close to the naive notion of cause that Russell wanted to remind us plays no role in modern science, and at the same time to the intuition of causal efficacy that Whitehead took to be involved in the common-sense apprehension of medium-sized wholes. I have associated both of these with what I have called “causality in the modern sense”. Proximate causes differ from these insofar as the law is only concerned with the proximate causes of particular events or states of affairs, whereas Russell and Whitehead were both concerned with what are taken to be repeatable cases of causal efficacy.

It is important to point out that the notion of proximate cause is explicitly tied to questions of legal liability. In the wake of Kant and Brandom, it should not be surprising to find that more generally, the descriptive “causality in the modern sense” that allows us to reductively talk about “the” cause of something has this close connection to considerations of blame and culpability. Similarly, Aristotle’s “categories” are etymologically kinds of accusations, and Locke spoke of the person as a “forensic” concept.