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).

What We Mean by Meaning

Returning to Brandom’s Spinoza lectures, he has been clarifying his relation to the tradition of American pragmatist philosophy, which is largely mediated by the work of his former teacher and colleague Richard Rorty.

“At the core of the capacious ‘big tent’ tradition Rorty retrospectively rationally reconstructs under the rubric of ‘pragmatism’ is this broadly naturalistic, anthropological-ecological conception of language as an evolving population of discursive practices that is a, indeed the, distinctive feature of the natural history of creatures like us” (Pragmatism and Idealism, p. 41).

Aristotle defines humans as animals that have logos, or meaningful discourse. Hegel says that “language is the Dasein [“existence”, literally “being there”] of spirit”. The pragmatists Pierce and Dewey were interested in Hegel, and notably took a down-to-earth attitude toward his work. Brandom picks up this somewhat loose link to Hegel, and strengthens and sharpens it.

“This is what motivates and justifies [Rorty’s] use of this term [pragmatism] to characterize not only philosophers such as Pierce and Dewey, who embraced it themselves, but others such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, who (sometimes explicitly and emphatically) did not. Rorty sees a stark contrast between this way of thinking about language and the analytic representationalist tradition that runs from Frege, Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus through Carnap and Tarski to his colleague David Lewis. This tradition models language on formal monological logistical calculi, justification on proof of theorems from axioms, and truth conditions on model-theoretic semantics for such artificial languages. What, Rorty asks, does any of that have to do with what users of natural languages do?” (ibid).

Brandom himself speaks of “pragmatism” in this same very broad and yet distinctly philosophical way. Here we get a glimpse of how he arrived at that.

“In taking this line, Rorty rightly understands himself as appealing to the Pierce-Dewey tradition of American pragmatism to amplify and radicalize Quine’s and Sellars’ criticisms of Carnap, and following up on Wittgenstein’s advice for philosophers to look not to the [formal, logical, representational] meaning of expressions, but to their use‘” (ibid).

Brandom more commonly cites Wittgenstein’s other formulation, that “meaning is use”. He clearly does not mean that there is no meaning. He means that meaning as use comes before meaning as representation. This focus on order of explanation as an alternative to reducing one thing to another, or denying one in favor of the other, is one of Brandom’s great contributions.

“Rorty sometimes seems to draw the lesson that we should do pragmatics instead of semantics (which he identifies with appeals to the notions of [logical] 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 dismissal of semantics holus bolus. I think that another genuine strand in Rorty’s thought belongs in this tradition…. [H]ere we see both a subtle interplay and perhaps a residual tension between pragmatist naturalism and an insistence on a Kantian disjunction between norms and causes” (pp. 41-42).

“Rorty inscribes within his Piercean, broadly naturalistic account, a distinction between the social-normative and the nonsocial, so non-normative, merely natural world of vocabulary-less things. The norms that articulate vocabulary use are to be understood functionally, in terms of roles in social practices that include the adoption of normative attitudes. Practitioners adopt such attitudes by taking or treating each other in practice as committed or entitled, responsible or authoritative” (p. 42).

Vocabularies are a characteristic theme of Rorty’s. I take this to resemble my own attitude in examining usages of words — not looking for “the” meaning (as if there could be such a thing), but rather thoughtfully exploring what uses are better or worse, and why.

In contrast to reductionist views, naturalism should be understood in terms broad enough to encompass beings like us who have their being in language and normativity, and thus live mainly in “second nature”.

“In the sort of pragmatics-first order of explanation he recommends, we think of what one is doing in claiming, say, that the frog is on the log, as undertaking a commitment. Doing that is taking up a stance in a normative space, acquiring a distinctive kind of social status. Rorty understands such statuses ultimately in terms of interpersonal practices of justification. In adopting normative stances we make ourselves answerable to each other for doing so. We are liable to be challenged, and obliged to defend the normative statuses we claim. One commitment is treated by community members as providing a reason for another, as providing a justification for it” (pp. 42-43).

Every assertion we make has some kind of ethical consequences.

“The meaning expressed by using some bit of vocabulary is to be understood in terms of the role it plays in these practices of giving and practically assessing reasons: what its application provides reasons for and against, and what provides reasons for and against its application. All there is to confer meaning on our noises is the role they play in our taking up, challenging, and defending the stances taken up by applying them…. Understanding meaning or semantic content in terms of inferential roles read off of justificatory practices is a way of implementing the pragmatics-first order of explanation without giving up on semantics” (p. 43).

Ethics and hermeneutics come before epistemology. This is not to say that a theory of knowledge is impossible, but only that it should not be foundationalist. We never begin a philosophical account of things with certainty, but rather with questions and practices of questioning. The highest kind of certainty we can have is still only a “moral” certainty, not an absolute one.

“Rorty thinks such a pragmatist explanatory strategy can underwrite unobjectionable kinds of truth-talk. We just have to restrict ourselves to properties of truth that can be cashed out in pragmatic terms of what we are doing in taking or treating something as true” (ibid).

I don’t really see this as a restriction. There are ultimately ethical truths of reason and reasoning and emotional reasonableness that can be brought to light by Socratic dialogue, and there is poetic truth. Spiritual truth I take to be one or the other of these, or both. Neither of these is an authoritarian representational Truth with a capital T that I personally claim to know, but never mind how.

“Once the meanings are fixed, it is of course nonsense to think the community can in general make true whatever sentences it likes simply by taking or treating them as true. But our words do not mean what they mean apart from which sentences involving them we actually take to be true” (p. 44).

Pragmatism and the Enlightenment

Brandom adds some more background in support of Rorty’s claim that American pragmatism represents a kind of second Enlightenment.

“The motor of the first Enlightenment was the rise of the new natural science — in particular, the mathematized physics of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton…. Because their thought was principally oriented by this project, all of the canonical philosophers from Descartes through Kant can sensibly be seen as at base philosophers of science” (Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 18-19).

“The physical science they were inspired by and interpreters of put forward mathematical theories in the form of impersonal, immutable principles formulating universal, eternal, necessary laws. Enlightenment empiricism sought to ground all our knowledge in self-contained, self-intimating sensory episodes whose brute occurrence is the most basic kind of knowing. Just how the natural light of reason could extract secure and certain knowledge of things as law-governed from those deliverances of fallible perception was a perennial puzzle” (p. 19).

To put it bluntly, the empiricist theory of knowledge lacks the resources to explain the results of modern mathematicized science. The emperor has no clothes.

“Even had Hume succeeded in his aspiration to become ‘the Newton of the mind’ by perfecting Locke’s theoretical efforts to understand the psychological processes of understanding in terms of the mechanisms of association and abstraction, the issue of how the subject of that science was to be found among the furniture of the universe described by the real Newton would have survived untouched, as an apparently intractable embarrassment” (ibid).

“The founding genius of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, was, like the original Enlightenment philosophes, above all, a philosopher of science…. He was impressed by the broadly selectional forms of explanation that he presciently saw as common to Darwinian evolutionary biology, at the level of species, and the latest psychological theories of learning, at the level of individual organisms. And he was impressed by the new forms of statistical explanation that were both essential to the new physical science of thermodynamics and becoming increasingly central to the new social sciences of the late nineteenth century” (pp. 19-20).

“Accounts that appeal to natural selection in biology, or to supervised selection in learning, or to statistical likelihood (whether in physics or sociology or economics), show how observed order can arise, contingently, but explicably, out of an irregular background of variation…. Pierce saw this as nothing less than a new form of intelligibility. Understanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a concrete, situated narrative of local, contingent, mutable, practical, reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats. Pierce speculatively generalized this model to a vision in which even the most fundamental laws of physics are understood as contingently emerging by selectional processes from primordial indeterminateness. No less than the behavior of biological organisms, those laws are to be understood as adaptational habits, each of which is in a statistical sense relatively stable and robust in the environment provided by the rest” (pp. 20-21).

My late father would have appreciated this tribute to the importance of Pierce, in the face of Dewey and Rorty’s neglect. While writing his dissertation on Pierce in the 1950s, he was denied access to various manuscripts by the executors of the Pierce archive at Harvard. He speculated that the executors, who were very concerned to make Pierce “fit in” with the narrow orthodoxy that dominated American academic philosophy at the time, were suppressing evidence of Pierce’s broader interests. Years later, it turned out he was right.

Many writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries treat a new appreciation for process and the emergence of new forms as characteristic of modernity. Of course, they were preceded in this by Hegel. (And if we read Aristotle on his own terms, rather than in ways beholden to later religious traditions, then behind Hegel stands Aristotle as a philosopher of process and emergence.)

“On the pragmatist understanding, … knower and known are alike explicable by appeal to the same general mechanisms that bring order out of chaos, settled habit from random variation: the statistical selective structure shard by processes of evolution and of learning. That selectional structure ties together all the members of a great continuum of being stretching from the processes by which physical regularities emerge, through those by which the organic evolves locally and temporarily stable forms, through the learning processes by which the animate acquire locally and temporarily adaptive habits, to the intelligence of the untutored common sense of ordinary language users, and ultimately to the methodology of the scientific theorist — which is just the explicit, systematic refinement of the implicit, unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures characteristic of everyday practical life…. This unified vision stands at the center of the classical American pragmatists’ second Enlightenment” (pp. 24-25).

The selectional structure Brandom speaks of here is not necessarily normative. Darwinian natural selection in terms of utility and practical success is its main inspiration. But it does already go beyond a narrowly mechanical view of causality.

“This happy concord and consilience between the distinctively pragmatist versions of naturalism in ontology and empiricism in epistemology stands in stark contrast, not only to the prior traditional British empiricism of the Enlightenment, but also to the subsequent twentieth-century logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. The reductive physicalist version of naturalism and the reductive phenomenalist version of empiricism they inclined to endorse were exceptionally difficult to reconcile with each other. Hume had already shown how difficult it is to provide suitable empiricist credentials for the way in which mathematical laws supporting subjunctive reasoning — the crowning glory of Newtonian physics — outran observable regularities, not only epistemically, but semantically. Adding the powerful methods of modern logic to articulate the phenomenal deliverances of sense did not alter this fundamental mismatch. A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of natural 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” (p. 25).

Without hyperbole, Brandom points out the conflict between mechanist and phenomenalist strategies for explanation.

He exalts the original Enlightenment in the following terms.

“The Enlightenment marks the ending of humanity’s self-imposed tutelage, the achievement of our majority and maturity, for the first time taking adult responsibility for our own character and destiny. It is our emancipation from submission to the alien, nonhuman-because-superhuman authority of Old Nobodaddy in matters of practical conduct. Henceforth we should deem it incompatible with our human dignity to understand ourselves as subject to any laws other than those we have in one way or another laid down for ourselves. No longer should our ideas about what is right and good be understood as having to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority” (p. 27).

“Old Nobodaddy” is a reference to the poetry of William Blake.

(I like to tell a similar story about the birth of ethical reason with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For me, it is Plato and Aristotle (humanity’s greatest teachers, in Hegel’s words) who are the original sources of this “adulthood” of humanity that Brandom so eloquently commends. They certainly did not take what is right and good to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority. Most of the leading lights of the Enlightenment were more timid by comparison. But Brandom also does not acknowledge the ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to solve Kantian problems, pointed out so well by Robert Pippin. Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom all show little interest in pre-modern philosophy. Even the great have weaknesses.)

“The first Enlightenment, as Rorty construed it, concerned our emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters: issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be. The envisaged second Enlightenment is to apply this basic lesson to our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical, cognitive matters” (p. 28, emphasis in original).

The “non-human authority” in this latter case is what Rorty calls Reality with a capital R, which is supposed to be what it is completely independent of human discourse and judgment, and which is nonetheless claimed to be somehow known as such by some humans. This was already an implicit target of Kant’s critique of dogmatism. (And once again, Aristotle discusses being principally in terms of the normative saying of “is”, and everywhere inquires about the natures of real things in ways that cannot be separated from a consideration of discourse, language, and judgment. Our nature is to be animals that are in some degree capable of discourse, which is the origin of second nature.) But Rorty and Brandom are quite right in the sense that the kinds of things that Kant collectively called dogmatism have by no means disappeared from the scene today, even though they have long been called out by name.

Pragmatism vs Foundationalism

In his recent Spinoza lectures, Brandom also summarizes the context of the 20th century Anglo-American analytic philosophy criticized by Rorty.

“In any case, the broadly Hegelian project Rorty was then recommending as an alternative to the degenerating Kantian research program he saw in analytic philosophy did not look to Europe for its inspiration, but to the substantially distinct tradition of classical American pragmatism.”

“Rorty’s remarkable diagnosis of the ills of analytic philosophy as resulting from an uncritical, so undigested, Kantianism is at least equally radical and surprising as the reimagined, redescribed, and revived pragmatism that he developed as a constructive therapeutic response to it. For Kant emphatically was not a hallowed hero of that tradition. Anglophone analytic philosophers thought that the ‘Kant [or] Hegel?’ question simply didn’t apply to them. After all, Russell had read Kant out of the analytic canon alongside Hegel — believing (I think, correctly as it has turned out) that one couldn’t open the door wide enough to let Kant into the canon without Hegel sliding in alongside him before that door could be slammed shut. Both figures were banished, paraded out of town under a banner of shame labeled ‘idealism,’ whose canonical horrible paradigm was the Bradleyan British Idealism of the Absolute” (Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 4-5).

“The dominant self-conception (combatively made explicit by Carnap) was of analytic philosophy as an up-to-date form of empiricism, a specifically logical empiricism, whose improvement on traditional, pre-Kantian, Early Modern British empiricism consisted in the deployment of much more sophisticated logical tools it deployed to structure and bind together essentially the same atoms of preconceptual sensory experience to which the earlier empiricists had appealed” (p. 5, emphasis in original).

Brandom portrays logical empiricism as foundering on the skeptical “trilemma” (circular argument, infinite regress, or appeal to unjustified justifiers) formulated by the Greek Skeptic Agrippa. Foundationalism in the theory of knowledge typically arises from excessive worries about skepticism.

“Attempts to justify empirical knowledge must either move in a circle, embark on an infinite regress, or end by appeal to unjustified justifiers, which must accordingly supply the foundations on which all cognition rests…. The two sorts of regress-stoppers Rorty saw appealed to by epistemological foundationalists were immediate sensory experiences, as ultimate justifiers of premises, and immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts, as ultimate justifiers of inferences. In a telling phrase, he refers to these as two sorts of ‘epistemically privileged representations'” (pp. 5-6).

In order to avoid skepticism, foundationalism makes untenable claims about immediate (noninferential) knowledge, which depend on the assumption that certain representations are specially privileged, so as to be immune to questioning. I have always appreciated Brandom’s exceptional clarity on these issues, and it seems that in this he was preceded by Rorty.

“Rorty takes Kant at his word when Kant says that what he is doing is synthesizing rationalism and empiricism. But Rorty takes it that what logical empiricism made of Kant’s synthesis in the end takes over both sorts of privileged representations: the sensory given from the empiricists, and the rational (logical, inferential, semantic) given from the rationalists…. In this story, Carnap shows up as a neo-Kantian malgré lui [in spite of himself] — though that is not at all how he thought of or presented himself. It is, however, how Rorty’s hero Wilfrid Sellars regarded Carnap. (Perhaps the revenant neo-Kantian spirit of Heinrich Rickert, passed on through his student Bruno Bauch, Frege’s friend and colleague and Carnap’s Doktorvater [academic mentor, literally “doctor father”], was just too strong to be wholly exorcised by the empiricist rites and rituals practiced by the Vienna Circle.)” (pp. 6-7).

According to Brandom, Rorty criticizes mid-20th century logical empiricism in terms very similar to Brandom’s, except that Brandom is much less inclined to blame Kant.

“But the roots of those foundationalist commitments can be traced back even further, to Descartes. For he assimilated the images delivered by the senses and the thoughts arising in intellect together under the umbrella concept of pensées precisely in virtue of what he saw as their shared epistemic transparency and incorrigibility” (p. 7).

Descartes makes the extravagant assumption that not only that there is one unified subject of all thought, feeling, and sensation in a human, but that it has perfect transparency to itself, and therefore at a certain level cannot be mistaken about itself.

“In rejecting both sensory givenness and meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections, Rorty relies on the arguments of two of Carnap’s most important and insightful admirers and critics: Sellars in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ and Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism, respectively. (These are in any case surely two of the most important philosophical essays of the 1950s.) Tellingly, and with characteristic insight, Rorty finds a common root in their apparently quite different critiques. Sellars and Quine, he sees, both offer ultimately pragmatist arguments, which find the theoretical postulation of such privileged representations to be unable to explain cardinal features of the practices of applying empirical concepts” (ibid, emphasis in original).

These same two essays are recurringly cited by Brandom. I did not know that Rorty preceded him in that.

When Brandom here mentions “meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections”, he is referring back to what he earlier called “immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts”. (There is a very different sense in which material inference can be seen as simultaneously grounded in, and grounding, concrete meaning and the understanding of meaning, as opposed to formal operations. But in that case, the concrete meaning is something arrived at, not something given or immediately grasped. Meaning is always a question, as Socrates might remind us.)

“Rorty then widens the focus of his own critique by deepening the diagnosis that animates it. The original source of foundationalism in epistemology, he claims, is representationalism in semantics. Thinking of the mind in terms of representation was Descartes’s invention” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Representationalism — the explanation of meaning in terms of reference to (nonlinguistic) objects — still dominates mainstream discussions of semantics. It is associated with a view of truth as a correspondence of claims to a reality that is assumed to be independently accessible. But this is not the only way meaning and truth can be explained. I think that, first and foremost, meaning needs to be explained by relating it to other meaning. Variants of this include dictionaries, the coherence theory of truth, and Brandom’s inferentialism.

The Latin term repraesentatio in fact played a large role in scholastic discourse. The status of sensible and/or intelligible “species” or representations was hotly debated. Scholastic discourse also included quite vigorous and sophisticated debates about nuances of representational semantics, under the rubric of the theory of “supposition”. This refers not to speculation, but rather to something close to the modern notion of reference. Scholastic philosophers even tended to treat questions of knowledge and truth in terms of what we might call questions of referential semantics.

Descartes did not invent thinking about the mind in terms of representation, though he certainly practiced it. Arguably, this goes back even past scholastic theories of species and supposition, to Stoic theories of phantasia. The Stoics also had a somewhat foundationalist outlook. They were the original dogmatic realists in Kant’s sense. But Descartes drew especially vivid conclusions from his claim of the incorrigibility of appearances.

Brandom wants to redeem a positive valuation of Kant from Rorty’s hostility, and he even suggests that Rorty is making a Kantian move without realizing it.

“It is perhaps ironic that in digging down beneath epistemological issues to unearth the semantic presuppositions that shape and enable them, Rorty is following Kant’s example. For Kant’s argument, culminating in the ‘Refutation of Idealism’, was that once we understand how to respond to the threat of semantic skepticism about the intelligibility of the relation between representings and what they represent, there would be no residual issue concerning epistemological skepticism about whether any such relations actually obtained: whether things were ever as we represent them to be” (p. 8, emphasis in original).

Kant was understood by scientifically oriented neo-Kantians as effectively putting epistemology, or the justification of knowledge, before all else. A refreshing aspect of Brandom’s reading of Kant is that he shifts the axis toward questions of meaning and value.

Brandom strongly supports Rorty’s critique of epistemological foundationalism, but thinks that Rorty throws out the baby with the bath water when he claims that all talk about representation is implicitly authoritarian. Momentarily playing devil’s advocate, he reconstructs Rorty’s “global anti-representationalist” argument as follows.

“The starting point is the Cartesian idea that if we are to understand ourselves as knowing the world by representing it (so that error is to be understood as misrepresentation), there must be some kind of thing that we can know nonrepresentationally — namely, our representings themselves. On pain of an infinite regress, knowledge of representeds mediated by representings of them must involve immediate (that is, nonrepresentational) knowledge of at least some representings. Our nonrepresentational relation to these representings will be epistemically privileged, in the sense of being immune to error. For error is construed exclusively as misrepresentation. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of premises.)”

“Next is the thought that when we ask about our knowledge of the relation between representings and representeds, another potential regress looms if we are obliged to think of this knowledge also in representational terms, that is, as mediated by representings of it. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of inferences.) On this dimension, too, appeal to nonrepresentational access to representational relations seems necessary…. Rorty saw that according to such a picture, the epistemological choice between foundationalism and skepticism is already built deeply into the structure of the semantic representational model” (p. 9).

Brandom recounts that in 1996 discussions with Rorty on the occasion of Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism lecture in Gerona, “We all agreed that if one found oneself obliged to choose between epistemological skepticism and epistemological foundationalism, then somewhere well upstream something had gone badly wrong conceptually” (p. 11).

I wholeheartedly concur with that conclusion. Skepticism (claiming that there is no knowledge) and foundationalism (claiming to systematically ground knowledge in certainty) are both equally implausible, extreme positions.

“For Rorty, a principal virtue of the sort of pragmatism he endorsed that it had no need and no use for the traditional concepts of experience and representation in talking about how vocabularies help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, from a pragmatist point of view, the very distinction between epistemology and semantics becomes unnecessary — a lesson he took himself to have learned from ‘Two Dogmas’…. He sums up his anti-representationalist pragmatism in the pithy slogan: ‘language is for coping, not copying‘” (p. 12).

The kind of experience at issue here is not that which is acquired over a period of time, but the immediate experience that is supposed to be a privileged source of knowledge in empiricism. Brandom recalls John Dewey’s unsuccessful attempt to get the public to change the prevailing notion of “experience” as something immediate.

“Dewey worked tirelessly to give ‘experience’ the processual, interactive, broadly ecological sense of Hegelian ‘Erfahrung,’ rather than the atomic, episodic, self-intimating, epistemically transparent Cartesian sense of ‘Erlebnis’. (Dewey’s is the sense in which, as he says, it is perfectly in order for a job advertisement to specify ‘No experience necessary’. It is not intended to be read in the Cartesian sense, which would invite applications from zombies.) But Dewey signally failed to get the philosophical and generally educated public to shake off the Cartesian associations of the term” (ibid).

Brandom endorses Rorty’s sharp critique of experience talk.

“I was entirely of [Rorty’s] mind as far as the concept of experience is concerned. Outside of explicitly Hegelian contexts, where it figures in his conception of recollective rationality, it is not one of my words…. I agree that the associations and correlated inferential temptations entrained with the term ‘experience’ go too deep, easily to be jettisoned, or even for us to success in habituating ourselves completely to resist. The light of day neither drives out the shadows nor stays the night. We are on the whole better off training ourselves to do without this notion” (pp. 13-14).

But Brandom does not accept Rorty’s “global anti-representationalism”.

“But by contrast to the concept of experience, it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that things are otherwise with the concept of representation. There are many things that one might mean by ‘anti-representationalism’. When I use the term ‘representationalism’, I mean a particular order of semantic explanation. It starts with a notion of representational content (reference, extension, or truth conditions) and understands proprieties of inference in terms of such already representationally contentful contents. Those contents must accordingly be assumed to be, or made to be, theoretically and explanatorily intelligible antecedently to and independently of the role of representations in inference. ’Representationalism’ in this sense contrasts with inferentialist orders of semantic explanation, which begin with a notion of content understood in terms of its role in reasoning, and proceed from there to explain the representational dimension of discursive content. I recommend and pursue inferentialist rather than representationalist semantic explanations,” (p. 14, emphasis in original).

“But not giving representation a fundamental explanatory role in semantics does not disqualify it from playing any role whatsoever…. [T]here is a big difference between rejecting global representationalism, in the sense of denying that the best semantics for all kinds of expressions assigns them a fundamentally representational role, and being a global anti-representationalist, by insisting that no expressions should be understood semantically to play representational roles” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom makes a very Hegelian kind of point. All-or-nothing, black-and-white distinctions like the forced choice between skepticism and foundationalism can only be defended by a kind of sophistry.

“It seemed to me in Gerona, and still does today, that a suitable pragmatist explanatory strategy, beginning with social practices of using expressions to give and ask for reasons, could unobjectionably both underwrite theoretical attributions of representational content to some locutions and also underwrite the viability and utility of the common-sense distinction between what we are saying or thinking and what we are talking or thinking about” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

Brandom takes the reasonable position that we don’t have to ban all talk about representation in order not to be representationalist. What he wants to get away from is the notion of privileged representation that is supposed to be beyond question.

Philosophical Storytelling

Plato uses a variety of literary devices to convey philosophical meaning — notably the dialogue form itself, but also the Platonic myths, which resemble traditional myths in form, but are deliberately constructed to make a point. In a contemporary context, Robert Brandom practices a kind of historical storytelling about the development of concepts of normativity.

Brandom’s recently published Spinoza lectures help fill out the picture of his own work, by critically reflecting on his teacher Richard Rorty’s relation to the tradition of American pragmatism, as well as to Hegel. The title of the first lecture, “Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment: Reason Against Representation”, well indicates its scope. Brandom is at pains to portray Rorty, “the quintessential anti-essentialist”, as a serious defender of reason.

We see here the apparent origin of Brandom’s preoccupation with the stories that we tell ourselves to anchor and orient our sense of meaning. He purposely gives pride of place to such informal orienting stories, over formal theories that are supposed to straightforwardly represent reality. This is part of his way of carrying forward Hegel’s sharp critique of the idea that concepts are fixed once and for all in representation. Hegel himself talks about the “life” and “liveliness” of things that qualify as genuine concepts in his sense.

(It is an interesting historical paradox that Aristotle — one of the figures with whom the Latin term “essence” is most strongly associated — broadly agrees with modern anti-essentialism. ”Essentialism” as understood in contemporary discourse is partly a later development, and partly a product of bad historiography.)

Brandom says that at the end of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “in a phrase he came not only to reject, but to regret, he prophesied the ‘death of philosophy'” (p. 2). By that Rorty mainly meant the enterprise of 20th century analytic philosophy, but also the Kantian preoccupation with epistemology and strict warrants for belief.

“[T]he new kind of pragmatism with which Rorty proposed to replace that sort of philosophy is evidently and avowedly Hegelian in spirit — albeit inspired by the naturalized (but still social and historical) form of Hegelianism he admired in Dewey and self-consciously emulated in his own work” (ibid).

Brandom continues, “Later, Rorty would applaud the broadly naturalistic, sociological, historicist impulse he saw Hegel as having bequeathed to the nascent nineteenth century, and speculate about how much further we might have gotten by now if at the end of that century Russell and Husserl had not, each in his own way, once again found something for philosophers to be apodeictic about, from their armchairs” (pp. 2-3).

“Apodeictic” was a favorite term of Husserl’s, referring to the certain knowledge he believed to be achievable by following his phenomenological method. Russell is considered by many to be the founder of analytic philosophy. A great champion of modern science and a pioneer of mathematical logic, he was hostile to what he called speculation in philosophy. Old mainstream analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology both make foundationalist claims of certain knowledge, and they both owe something to Kant’s distinctive emphasis on the theory of knowledge as coming before a direct account of things. (Although I do not regard Kant as a foundationalist, some of his rhetoric could be read that way). According to Brandom, Rorty presents these 20th century ambitions as a retrograde development compared to Hegel.

Hegel’s great lesson, on Rorty’s Deweyan view according to Brandom, lies in his storytelling. (I would note that Hegel himself also makes claims of strong knowledge, even though he is an anti-foundationalist.) This is fascinating to me, because I have come to know Brandom as emphasizing this kind of storytelling, and I wondered where it came from, because it seemed to only very partially fit Hegel. Where Hegel himself is concerned, I think storytelling is an interesting theme, but (I find myself spontaneously saying) making it the theme throws out way too much of what Hegel is doing.

In the case of Brandom himself, I would not at all say that his main strength is his historical storytelling. It is other aspects of his work that make him a contemporary giant — the inferentialism, the mutual recognition ethics, the developed account of the “historical fine structure” of the genealogy of normativity, and so on. I think Brandom overemphasizes telling a particular story, and at the same time the particular stories he tells are a bit historically shallow. Paul Ricoeur has a much richer meta-level account of the distinctive aspects of narrative as compared to ordinary assertion, and puts less emphasis on particular stories.

I think of the storytelling that Brandom invokes as one way of expressing results of interpretation. I prefer to focus on the process of interpretation, before everything is decided.

“Rorty’s idea of the form of a justification for a recommendation of a way forward always was a redescription of where we have gotten to, motivated by a Whiggish story about how we got there that clearly marks off both the perils already encountered and the progress already achieved along that path. This is the literary genre of which Rorty is an undisputed master” (p. 3, emphasis in original).

The Whigs were a liberal political party in Enlightenment Britain, famous for promoting belief in the linear forward march of historical progress. Brandom contrasts an optimistic “Whiggish” genealogy with what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion, associated with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Ricoeur, though, is far from simply condemning the “suspicious” point of view, and even says it is a necessary complement to the more affirmative approach he wants to emphasize.

Brandom quotes Rorty’s reminiscence of his undergraduate days, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, and Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being gave me a taste for ambitious, swooshy, Geistesgeschichte [cultural history, literally “history of spirit”] that I never lost” (ibid).

I am well familiar with the experience of reading Hegel at the “swooshy” level, and would certainly acknowledge that historical storytelling is a valuable literary device that I too often use to make a point. But H.S. Harris’ monumental Hegel’s Ladder reconstructs the fine grain of Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph, with great success. And albeit at a much higher level, more recently Robert Pippin has even reconstructed what is at stake in the argument of Hegel’s Logic.

Brandom himself impresses me for the exemplary thoroughness of his own detailed arguments, not the quality of his stories. But he clearly has a soft spot for Rortyan stories. Although I tell such stories myself as part of a necessary pedagogy, I’m very concerned on the other hand not to lose the fine grain of the twists and turns and transformations and reversals that make up history. I don’t give my own stories any higher status than Platonic “likely stories”.

Of the three works Rorty mentions in the quote, Hegel’s Phenomenology is among the most important books ever written. By contrast, Whitehead’s Adventures (1933) is a only a minor classic. Lovejoy’s Great Chain (1936) is a shallow popular work of the 20th century that oversimplifies and badly misrepresents the philosophical thought of the middle ages, about which scholarship has vastly improved since it was written. But mentioning the three together suggests that Rorty is taking a lowest common denominator approach, as if the main point of all three were the telling of simplified stories. Lamentably, Brandom too seems to use Lovejoy as his main source for generalizing about the history of philosophy before the time of the Enlightenment.

Incidentally, Brandom’s view of the Enlightenment seems to be largely based on Jerome Scheewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, whereas mine is particularly influenced by Jonathan Israel’s trilogy Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011).

Brandom on Reason and Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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