Starting over

Ok.  So, as I said in the last post, I feel like my ‘Brandom and genealogy’ paper draft serves as a kind of watershed on the blog.  On the one hand, it summarises what I see as my core disagreement with Brandom – his suppression of the problem space of “subjective reductionism”.  On the other hand, it makes clear how under-equipped I am to work through that disagreement, due (in large though by no means exclusive part) to my ignorance of the philosophy of action.

Reconstructing yet again my trajectory on the blog over the years, as I now see it there has always been a major tension between the two halves of my project (philosophical and political-economic).  That tension was not just that these are different disciplinary spaces.  Rather, the core tension has been that my main philosophical interests and influences have been in the interpretive/normative/epistemological space, while the foundations of political economy are, at base, in the philosophy of action.  In terms of the contemporary analytic distinction between two different “directions of fit” between mind and world, my philosophical interests have mainly been focused on the question of mind to world fit, while political economy (focused as it is on purposive action) primarily focuses on issues of world to mind fit.  That tension has been obscured – at least to me – by the fact that my commitments in the epistemology / philosophy of meaning space have always been broadly pragmatist – i.e. they ground epistemology and meaning (including norms) in social practice.  But (I now think) my ‘philosophy of practice’ has never been adequate to the explanatory burden of even my epistemological commitments, let alone any attempt to do serious work in political economy.  As I now see it, this has been a problem of philosophical focus: philosophy of action is where (so to speak) the action is, in thinking philosophically about the relevant dimensions of human behaviour.  

Obviously this is all much too crude a way of putting it – I don’t mean to throw out everything I’ve done on the blog to date – far from it!  Still, I think this way of putting things does capture something.  ‘Biographically’ speaking, for what that’s worth, I think one issue is that my philosophical interests and trajectory have been centrally shaped by the ‘science wars’, which loomed large in my intellectually formative years but have long since been supplanted in the discourse by other culture war hot topics.  Although I have always been on the “epistemological judgements are shaped at a depth level by contingent social practice” side of those ‘wars’, the nature of the terrain meant that epistemology always loomed large.  And I think you can see both this interest and this tension in my choice of PhD topic – I was interested in the economics of scientific knowledge in large part because it used the resources of political economy to look at epistemological issues (though I didn’t really have the resources to tackle these issues as well as I’d like).

Anyway, obviously I don’t think there’s anything wrong with combining the study of these two ‘directions of fit’.  In fact, you ought to do so, by my lights – you don’t want to divorce epistemology from social practice.  Still, I feel like there’s been a big imbalance in the philosophical resources I’ve been bringing to bear, to date: too much epistemology and theory of meaning, etc., too little philosophy of action.

So my intention on the blog going forward is to change tack.  As I see it now, the philosophical side of my project is resolutely within the philosophy of action.  And I think it is just massively easier to see how philosophy of action integrates with political economy and economics, than it is to see how to synthesise political economy with deconstruction, or indeed with most of Brandom’s work.  That’s because political economy or economics is itself fundamentally grounded in the philosophy of action.  Political economy is interested in (in the words of the famous Ferguson quote) “the product of human action but not human design”.  Now this is just one key dimension of political economy.  Political economy is also interested in collective action that does involve key elements of human design – whether state action or firm management or other forms of intentional collective action.  It’s more neutral (though still less specific) to see political economy as interested in the relation between two different levels of human action: micro actions and macro behaviour.  

This distinction is reflected in the basic analytic framework of microeconomics, which can plausibly be seen as built out of two central pillars (this, at any rate, is how Hal Varian puts it at the start of his Microeconomic Analysis textbook).  On the one hand, you have individual actors (let’s say individuals or firms) engaging in optimising behaviour.  On the other hand, you have equilibrium analysis of the interaction between different optimising agents.  Optimisation and equilibrium analysis are highly developed formal toolkits for modelling these two different levels of economic behaviour – the micro-level behaviour of the social actor, and the macro-level aggregate outcomes of the interactions of those social actors.

The point, in any case, is that rational choice optimisation theory is a theory of action.  It is a very controversial theory of action, and a lot of effort is going into debates over this theory of action within contemporary economics – that’s a lot of what the ‘behavioural economics’ would-be revolution is about.  Economists sometimes get prickly when you suggest that these are in some sense philosophical issues – aren’t these at base empirical, scientific problems?  And yes, they are empirical and scientific – but there is a complex interaction between science and philosophy, and problems in action theory are also philosophical issues.  Our philosophical categories are shaped – indeed, sometimes refuted! – by scientific research; but our philosophical categories also shape the paradigms or frameworks within which scientific research is carried out.  To butcher Keynes: mathematical economists, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any philosophical influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct metaphysician. (Of course, if my social-theoretically inflected pragmatist orientation is correct, those metaphysical influences are themselves deeply shaped by social practice – but one step at a time.) So I think it is worth being philosophically informed about this terrain.

In any case, this is how I’m thinking about what I’m trying to do here, as of now.  Two levels of analysis: micro-level analysis of social agents’ actions; macro-level analysis of the emergent results of those actions.  To be philosophically informed about the ‘micro’ level I need to be a philosopher of action – so that’s the task.  In future posts on the blog I expect to put up a lot of very ragged, scrappy note-taking posts, just trying to get to grips with this terrain – I want to flag up front that I expect the quality level to be low in these posts.  But so it goes. My goal is to orient to the intellectual space, however clumsily.