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

Illocution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legality is a mere fact. Rightness is an ideal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to cheer when I read things like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the beginning of wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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

Uncurtailed Communication

Habermas has said that reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech. While deeply involved in the theory of empirical social science, he wants to look at language beyond its status as an empirical phenomenon, to the expansive ethical possibilities of “uncurtailed communication”. This is closely bound up with his idea of communicative action as representing the kind of ideal speech situation that I have summarized as “dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition“. Uncurtailed communication would be a full-blooded realization of the Enlightenment values of freedom and equality. At the same time, it gives freedom and equality a more specific reference, by developing intersubjectivity at the micro level of concrete interactions between people.

“Even the strategic model of action can be understood in such a way that the participants’ actions, directed through egocentric calculations of utility and coordinated through interest situations, are mediated through speech acts. In the cases of normatively regulated and dramaturgical action we even have to suppose a consensus formation among participants that is in principle of a linguistic nature. Nevertheless, in these three models of action language is conceived one-sidedly in different respects” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 94).

Again we should note that he is using the terms “normative” and “teleological” in different senses than I have been developing here. This homonymy need not be an issue, provided that we keep each meaning distinct.

“The teleological [sic] model of action takes language as one of several media through which speakers oriented to their own success can influence one another in order to bring opponents to form or to grasp beliefs and intentions that are in the speakers’ own interest. This concept of language — developed from the limit case of indirect communication aimed at getting someone to form a belief, an intention, or the like — is, for instance, basic to intentionalist semantics. The normative model of action presupposes language as a medium that transmits cultural values and carries a consensus that is merely reproduced with each additional act of understanding. This culturalist concept of language is widespread in cultural anthropology and content-oriented linguistics. The dramaturgical model of action presupposes language as a medium of self-presentation; the cognitive significance of the propositional components are thereby played down in favor of the expressive functions of speech acts. Language is assimilated to stylistic and aesthetic forms of expression” (p. 95, emphasis in original).

The “teleological” and “normative” models that he criticizes both treat language and values as inert, while the dramaturgical one focuses on immediate presentation. The notion of intentionality that Habermas uses here is not the very innovative one that Brandom attributes to Kant, but a more standard, empiricist one.

He clarifies what he means by “formal pragmatics”, linking it to the notion of uncurtailed communication. This quality of being uncurtailed relates not only to a micro-level realization of freedom and equality, but also to the addressing of all three of Popper’s “worlds”.

“Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation. This interpretive concept of language lies behind the various efforts to develop a formal pragmatics” (p. 95, emphasis in original).

I really like this point about “uncurtailed” communication. It has important consequences for personal life too.

“The one-sidedness of the first three concepts of language can be seen in the fact that the corresponding types of communication singled out by them prove to be limit cases of communicative action…. In each case only one function of language is thematized: the release of perlocutionary effects, the establishment of interpersonal relations, and the expression of subjective experiences. By contrast, the communicative model of action, which defines the traditions of social science connected with Mead’s symbolic interactionism, Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, Austin’s theory of speech acts, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, takes all the functions of language equally into consideration” (ibid).

“In order to avoid mislocating the concept of communicative action from the start, I would like to characterize the level of complexity of speech acts that simultaneously express a propositional content, the offer of an interpersonal relationship, and the intention of the speaker” (p. 96, emphasis added).

Habermas wants to define or discover communicative action as involving all three of Popper’s worlds. The mislocation he speaks of reminds me of some silly debates about whether Aristotle’s Categories is about language or about the world, as if these were two mutually exclusive possibilities, when there is clear textual evidence that Aristotle aims at both.

“In the course of the analysis it will become evident how much this concept owes to investigations in the philosophy of language stemming from Wittgenstein. Precisely for this reason it might be well to point out that the concept of following a rule with which analytic philosophy begins does not go far enough. If one grasps linguistic conventions only from the perspective of rule following, and explains them by means of a concept of intentions based on rule consciousness, one loses that aspect of the threefold relation to the world of communicative agents that is important for me” (ibid).

This is an important qualification to keep in mind. Habermas elsewhere stresses a Kantian emphasis on rules, which is intended to avoid particularism. Here he effectively recognizes that rules are not a sufficient basis for meta-ethical interpretation.

(Earlier, I had expected to move quickly to his discussions of discourse ethics, but I must confess that so far, I find those to be rather narrowly technical. There seems to be richer “ethical” content here in his main work that inspires me to write than in those discussions. But my personal view is that broad meta-ethical inquiry is the actual heart of ethics, and is what ought to constitute first philosophy. I relate this to Brandom’s thesis that meta-ethics is properly “normative all the way down”, and need never reduce ethical conclusions to non-normative ones. I recall also Aristotle’s advice (Nicomachean Ethics book 1) not to seek greater precision in an inquiry than is appropriate to the subject matter.)

“I shall use the term ‘action’ only for those symbolic expressions with which the actor takes up a relation to at least one world. I shall distinguish from actions the bodily movements and operations that are concurrently executed…. In a certain sense, actions are realized through movements of the body, but only in such a way that the actor, in following a technical or social rule, concomitantly executes these movements. Concomitant execution means that the actor intends an action but not the bodily movements with the help of which he realizes it. A bodily movement is an element of an action but not an action” (pp. 96-97, emphasis in original).

Action is not reducible to motion. It involves “relating to a world”. I would also put a caveat on language like “the actor intends”, which reflects neither an innovative account of Aristotelian act like Aubry’s, nor an innovative account of Kantian intentionality like Brandom’s. Habermas rejects what he calls the philosophy of consciousness, but seems to retain a relatively conventional notion of an acting subject.

“Operational rules do not have explanatory power; following them does not mean, as does following rules of action, that the actor is relating to something in the world and is thereby oriented to validity claims connected with action-motivated reasons” (p. 98).

This seems to be a development of Kant’s distinction between being governed by rules and being governed by concepts of rules, which he associates exclusively with free rational beings.

“This should make clear why we cannot analyze communicative utterances in the same way as we do the grammatical sentences with the help of which we carry them out. For the communicative model of action, language is relevant only from the pragmatic viewpoint that speakers, in employing sentences with an orientation to reaching understanding, take up relations to the world, not only directly as in teleological [sic], normatively regulated, or dramaturgical action, but in a reflective way. Speakers integrate the three formal world-concepts, which appear in the other modes of action either singly or in pairs, into a system…. They no longer relate straightaway to something in the objective, social, or subjective worlds; instead they relativize their utterances against the possibility that their validity will be contested by other actors…. A speaker puts forward a criticizable claim in relating with his utterance to at least one ‘world’; he thereby uses the fact that this relation between actor and world is in principle open to objective appraisal in order to call upon his opposite number to take a rationally motivated position” (pp. 98-99, emphasis in original).

Taking up relations to the world in a reflective way is what we’re about here.

“Thus the speaker claims truth for statements or existential presuppositions, rightness for legitimately regulated actions and their normative context, and truthfulness or sincerity for the manifestation of subjective experiences. We can easily recognize therein the three relations of actor to world presupposed by the social scientist in the previously analyzed concepts of action; but in the context of communicative action they are ascribed to the perspective of the speakers and hearers themselves. It is the actors themselves who seek consensus and measure it against truth, rightness, and sincerity, that is, against the ‘fit’ or ‘misfit’ between the speech act, on the one hand, and the three worlds to which the actor takes up relations with his utterance, on the other (pp. 99-100).

This way of formulating the matter seems like it would also be applicable to interpersonal relations, independent of its relevance to social science.

“For both parties the interpretive task consists in incorporating the other’s interpretation of the situation into one’s own in such a way that in the revised version ‘his’ external world and ‘my’ external world can — against the background of ‘our’ lifeworld — be relativized in relation to ‘the’ world, and the divergent situation definitions can be brought to coincide sufficiently. Naturally this does not mean that interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously differentiated assignment. Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative picture of everyday life” (p. 100).

Life with others is a negotiation of shared interpretation. The process can also fail.

Habermas on Intersubjectivity

“The formal-pragmatic approach to meaning theory begins with the question of what it means to understand an utterance — that is, a sentence employed communicatively. Formal semantics makes a conceptual cut between the meaning [Bedeutung] of a sentence and the meaning [Meinung] of the speaker, who, when he uses the sentence in a speech act, can say something other than it literally means” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 297).

His use of the adjective “formal” seems chosen to contrast with “empirical”. Pragmatics comes out looking better than semantics. Unlike Brandom, he does not also invent a new semantics to complement his new pragmatics.

“We understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable. From the standpoint of the speaker, the conditions of acceptability are identical to the conditions for his illocutionary success. Acceptability is not defined here in an objectivistic sense, from the perspective of an observer, but in the performative attitude of a participant in communication. A speech act may be called ‘acceptable’ if it satisfies the conditions that are necessary in order that the hearer be allowed to take a ‘yes’ position on the claim raised by the speaker. These conditions cannot be satisfied one-sidedly, either relative to the speaker or to the hearer. They are rather conditions for the intersubjective recognition of a linguistic claim” (pp. 297-298, emphasis in original).

Brandom treats something very like this intersubjective acceptability as a normative judgment, and refers to a background requirement of mutual recognition.

“Registering a validity claim is not the expression of a contingent will; and responding affirmatively to a validity claim is not merely an empirically motivated decision…. And one who doubts the validity of the underlying norms has to give reasons…. Validity claims are internally connected with reasons and grounds. To this extent, the conditions for the acceptability of directions can be found in the illocutionary meaning of the speech act itself; they do not need to be completed by additional conditions of sanction” (pp. 301-302).

Habermas is saying that validity is necessarily intersubjective. It could not be private.

“In general, no special obligations follow from the meaning of constative speech acts” (pp. 303-304).

“Not all illocutionary acts are constitutive for communicative action, but only those with which speakers connect criticizable validity claims” (p. 305).

“The fact that the intersubjective commonality of a communicatively achieved agreement exists at the levels of normative accord, shared propositional knowledge, and mutual trust in subjective sincerity can be explained in turn through the functions of achieving understanding in language” (p. 308).

“Semantic investigations of descriptive, expressive, and normative sentences, if only they are carried through consistently enough, force us to change the level of analysis. The very analysis of the conditions of the validity of sentences itself compels us to analyze the conditions for the intersubjective recognition of corresponding validity claims” (p. 316).

Here he does gesture in the direction of a more interesting semantics.

“It is part of understanding a sentence that we are capable of recognizing grounds through which the claim that its truth conditions are satisfied could be redeemed” (p. 317, emphasis in original).

This should be recognized as elementary. Understanding an assertion is not only concerned with vocabulary and grammar, but also with grounds and consequences.

“As with the meaning of assertoric sentences, it can also be shown for expressive and normative sentences that semantic analysis pushes beyond itself. The discussion that stems from Wittgenstein’s analysis of first-person sentences makes it clear that the claim connected with expressions is genuinely addressed to others. The intersubjective character of the validity of norms is even clearer” (p. 318).

Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).

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.

Pragmatics of Utterance

The second chapter of Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another concerns speech acts in context. Here we begin to consider reflexive acts of self-designation. Like Brandom, Ricoeur emphasizes that saying is a form of doing. “I” is not an identifying reference, but more resembles terms like “here” and “now”. Linguistically, it is a performative associated with affirmation, promising, and similar actions.

Reflexivity applies to the utterance, rather than to the subject of the utterance. It “is not intrinsically bound up with a self in the strong sense of self-consciousness” (p. 47). Meanwhile, it is not utterances but speakers that refer to things, making reference an action rather than a property.

At a later stage, the performative “I” does after all get assimilated to an identifying reference tied to a body, but Ricoeur thinks it will be necessary to step outside the analysis of language and consider our status as incarnated beings to understand this.

Next in this series: Agentless Action?