The Role of Reasons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: An Isomorphism

Saying as Ethical Doing

Saying is a distinctive kind of doing. This goes way beyond the physical uttering of words, and beyond the immediate social aspects of speech acts. It involves the much broader process of the ongoing constitution of shared meaning in which we talking animals participate.

Before we are empirical beings, we are ethical beings. Meaning is deeply, essentially involved with valuations. The constitution of values is also an ongoing, shared process that in principle involves all rational beings past, present, and future. Our sayings — both extraordinary and everyday — contribute to the ongoing constitution of the space of reasons of which all rational beings are co-stewards. We are constantly implicitly adjudicating what is a good reason for what.

If immediate speech acts have ethical significance, this is all the more true of our implicit contributions to these ongoing, interrelated processes of constitution of meanings, valuations, and reasons. Everything we say becomes a good or bad precedent for the future.

Aristotle consistently treated “said of” relations in a normative rather than a merely empirical, factual, representational or referential way. Brandom has developed a “normative pragmatics” to systematically address related concerns. Numerous analytic philosophers have recognized the key point that to say anything at all is implicitly to commit oneself to it. As Brandom has emphasized, this typically entails other commitments as well. I would add that every commitment has meaning not only in terms of the pragmatic “force” of what is said, but also as a commitment in the ethical sense.

It is through our practices of commitment and follow-through that our ethical character is also constituted. As Robert Pippin has pointed out that Hegel emphasized in a very Aristotelian way, what we really wanted is best understood starting from what we actually did. In contrasting all this with the much narrower concept of speech acts, I want to return to an emphasis on what is said, but at the same time to take the “said” in as expansive a sense as possible. This is deeply interwoven with all our practical doings, and to be considered from the point of view of its actualization into a kind of objectivity as shared meaning that is no longer just “my” intention.

Judgments

I usually think of judgment as a process of interpretation or a related kind of wisdom, but at least since early modern reformulations of Aristotelian logic, “a” judgment has also traditionally meant a logical proposition, or an assertion of a proposition.

An older, but still post-Aristotelian notion is that what the early moderns called a judgment “A is B” should be understood (on the model of its surface grammar) as the potentially arbitrary predication “A is B”. Such a potentially arbitrary predication by itself does not contain enough information for us to assess whether it is good or bad. The predication model was associated with a non-Aristotelian notion of truth as simple correspondence to supposed fact.

L. M. De Rijk, arguably the 20th century’s leading scholar on medieval Latin logic, developed a very detailed textual argument that the understanding of logical “judgments” in such grammatical terms is actually an unhistorical misreading of Aristotle. In the first volume of his Aristotle: Semantics and Ontology, De Rijk concluded that Aristotle’s own logical or semantic use of “is” or “is not” should be understood not in the traditionally accepted way as a “copula” or binary operator of predication, but rather as a unary operator of assertion on a compound expression — i.e., on the pair (A, B), as opposed to its two elements A and B.

I also want to emphasize that Aristotle himself did not admit simple, potentially arbitrary predications as “judgments”. The special form of Aristotelian propositions makes them express not arbitrary atomic claims as is the case with propositions in the standard modern sense, but two specific ways of compounding subclaims. Aristotle’s two truth-value-forming operations of combination and separation (expressed by “is” and “is not”) limit the scope of what qualifies as a proper Aristotelian “judgment” to cases that are effectively equivalent to what Brandom would call judgments of material consequence or material incompatibility (see Aristotelian Propositions). What the moderns would call Aristotelian “judgments” thus end up more specifically reflecting judgments of what Brandom would call goodness of material inference.

Proper Aristotelian “judgments” thus turn out to express not just arbitrary predications constructed without regard to meaning, but particular kinds of compound claims that can in principle be rationally evaluated for material well-formedness as compound thoughts, based on the actual content of the claims being compounded. (Non-compound claims are just claims, and do not have enough content to be subject to such intrinsic rational evaluation, but as soon as there is some compounding, internal criteria for well-formedness come into play.)

So, fortuitously, modern use of the term “judgment” for these ends up having more substance than it would for arbitrary predications. For Aristotle, truth and falsity only apply to what are actually compound thoughts, because truth and falsity express assessments of material well-formedness, and only compound thoughts can be assessed for such well-formedness. The case for the fundamental role of concerns of normativity rather than simple surface-level predication in Aristotelian truth-valued propositions is further supported by the ways Aristotle uses “said of” relations.

Independent of this sort of better reading of Aristotle, Brandom in the first of his 2007 Woodbridge lectures points out that Kant also strongly rejected the traditional analysis of judgment in terms of predication. Brandom goes on to argue that for Kant, “what makes an act or episode a judging in the first place is just its being subject to the normative demand that it be integrated” [emphasis in original] into a unity of apperception. This holistic, integrative view of Kantian judgment seems to me to be strongly supported by Kant’s discussion of unities of apperception in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as by the broad thrust of the Critique of Judgment.

Thus, a Kantian judgment also has more substance than the standard logical notion, but while an Aristotelian “judgment” gets its substantive, rational character from intra-propositional structure, a Kantian judgment gets it from inter-propositional structure.

Things Said

Saying is a specialized form of doing. When saying and doing are contrasted, what is asserted is a contrast between kinds of doing that have different implications. Proprieties of both saying and doing are matter for material inference.

Implicit consideration of a material-inferential ethical dimension is what distinguishes canonical Aristotelian saying from the mere emission of words. This dimension of ethics of material inference gives more specific content to epistemic conscientiousness.

Saying is also a social act that occurs in a larger social context. This gives it a second ethical dimension, starting from consideration of others and situational appropriateness. (See also Interpretive Charity; Honesty, Kindness; Intellectual Virtue, Love; Mutual Recognition.)