Recognitive attitudes in self-formation

So in the series of posts recently concluded I outlined three subcomponents of the research programme (or maybe, less self-importantly, just three lines of thought) that I’m pursuing on the philosophical side of the project here.  The basic idea is to adopt the Brandomian-Hegelian neo-pragmatist metatheoretical apparatus, but to seek to extend and modify it in the following three ways:

• First, I want to adopt a much more pluralist understanding of social-political life.  (Synchronically, this means seeing our societies as composed of many diverse subcommunities with different visions of the good; diachronically, this means rejecting the strong Whiggism of Brandom-Hegel’s theory of history.)
• Second, I want to develop the ‘moral psychological’ dimension of the Brandom-Hegelian apparatus, in particular by connecting it to some of the theoretical resources of psychoanalysis.
• Third, I want to focus much more on power, and in particular coercive power.

I think the main thing I now need to do, in connection to all these sub-projects, is a huge amount of reading.  There is so much published thought in these areas.  I need to spend a lot of time doing nothing but read other people who have thought about these themes.  I therefore expect and hope to do less posting on here for a while.  Even I have some limit to the value I think can be derived from writing out of ignorance.

But of course I’ll still post sometimes to try to ‘work things through’.  In this post, then, I want to make some very basic remarks about the implications of the Brandomian-Hegel apparatus, as I’m interpreting it, specifically for self-formation.  I guess this post falls within the “moral psychology” sub-component of the overall research programme.  Again, let me stress that this is all very basic – but so it goes.

Let’s return then to the apparatus developed in Chapter 9 of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ – ‘The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition: The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes’.  In this chapter, among other things, Brandom gives a schematic and simplified account of the formation of recognitive networks between social actors.  On this account, any given social actor can choose to recognise (or not) any given other social actor.  Out of those uni-directional recognitive relations we can then construct a complex graph of an entire community’s recognitive structure.

I want to start by making a point that I’ve already made in passing, but that maybe merits slightly more emphasis.  That is: to the extent that we adopt this simple model of recognitive relations – to the extent, that is, that we treat social actors as unitary entities, and don’t worry about divisions within the self – we are, in this model, clearly within the space of linear algebra.  Any recognitive network that can be constructed on the principles of this model can be represented as a matrix; changes within the recognitive network can be modelled as transformations of the matrix.  It’s therefore only a slight exaggeration to say that Brandom’s analytic Hegelianism can turn accounts of the historical transformation of Geist into problems in linear algebra or graph theory.

I’m obviously not suggesting that Brandom is unaware of this: this is why he describes his account in Chapter 9 of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ as an “algebra of normativity”.  And I don’t intend to do anything with this observation yet – quite apart from anything else, my mathematical skills in this area are very weak; this is one of the many things I am meant to be working on in the background.  Still, I want to bear this in mind for the possible future point at which I try to connect all this philosophical apparatus to formal modelling approaches.

Putting this aside, though, and thinking just in good old qualitative philosophical terms, I want to focus on a few things.

First up: one of the things we are doing when we recognise someone is treating them as an authority to whom we could in principle defer in some domain.  I want to exercise a little caution here – in comments on an earlier post Christopher Eddy has argued (if I am remembering and/or summarising correctly) that in framing recognitive relations this way I am over-emphasising recognition as deference to authority, and under-emphasising the extent to which recognition is about seeing someone as entitled to engage in challenges within Brandom’s default-challenge-response model.  Chris may have a point there.  Even so, I want to claim that treating another social actor as an authority to whom we may in principle defer is a core dimension of the Brandomian-Hegelian account of recognitive relations.  Brandom’s preferred example when making this argument is chess: in choosing a recognitive community who I see as entitled to assess the quality of my chess, I am deferring to the judgement of that community.  It is up to me who I recognise as a legitimate assessor of my chess skill – whether I am interested in the judgement only of grandmasters, or international masters, or good club players, etc.; but having made that judgement – that recognitive act – I am then deferring to the authority, in this domain, of those people I have chosen to recognise.  Another good example is a linguistic community – when I shift from speaking or writing in one language to speaking or writing in another, I am shifting the recognitive community that I take to have authority to assess and correct my usage.

Ok. Now generalise this model to more or less everything.  The claim of the Brandomian-Hegelian apparatus is that absolutely everything normative in our lives is socially constituted via a complex system of which recognitive relations are a core component.  Any time I make a judgement about anything, that judgement bears somewhere ‘within’ it (however implicitly) the constitution of a recognitive community whose judgements are the standard by which I take it my own judgement can legitimately be assessed.  More even than that: this implicit recognitive community constitutes the very meaning of any semantic content whatsoever, because meaning itself is socially constituted on Brandom-Hegel’s account.  To judge, to act, to be normative creatures at all – any and all of this always posits a recognitive community to whom one is in principle prepared to defer in the determination and assessment of the content of that judgement or that act.

Now, the preceding paragraph of course needs to be caveated. Among other things, it needs to be emphasised that the recognitive community in question can in principle be an entirely hypothetical community – one constituted in my imagination. When Condorcet very movingly writes at the end of his ‘Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’ that the philosopher “unites himself in imagination with man restored to his rights, delivered from oppression, and proceeding with rapid strides in the path of happiness”… in writing in this way, Condorcet is constituting a recognitive community, even if it is a community the members of which mostly do not yet exist, and may never. The fact that our imaginations can constitute presently-non-existent recognitive communities is (I want to argue – though I am not arguing in this post) a condition of possibility of self-formation. And this fact in turn is why the ‘crude’ graph-theoretic model of recognitive communities involving unitary selves is ultimately inadequate to our problem space. All these caveats are important – but I don’t want to focus on them now. Instead, I want to focus on a very basic question:

What’s the recognitive community?  Ok – when it comes to something like playing chess, the recognitive community is presumably some value of “other chess players”; when it comes to speaking a language the recognitive community is some value of “other speakers of that language.”  But what about broader, more difficult-to-pin-down things – things like “how to act in this fraught life”?  What is the appropriate recognitive community for our lives in general?  If such a question even makes sense?

In the final, ‘maximalist’ sections of ‘A Spirit of Trust’, Brandom-Hegel proposes a startling answer to this kind of question: everyone.  Brandom-Hegel concludes the argument of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ by apparently arguing that our recognitive community should be of the greatest possible size, and that in expanding our recognitive community in this way, we should aspire to a form of collective mutual recognition in which we each take responsibility for the acts of all.  In this way, Brandom-Hegel argues, we can form a community characterised by Trust – the ‘We’ that is ‘I’ and the ‘I’ that is ‘We’.

But what does it actually mean to extend our recognitive community in this kind of maximalist way?  One way of interpreting this recognitive maximalism is as an expression of the left-liberal political project of extending political recognition as expansively as possible.  From this perspective, the problem with many historical (and contemporary!) forms of political organisation and civil society is that many would-be members of that society are not recognised as full legitimate participants in that society: women, religious and ethnic minorities, lower classes or castes – these people do not get to properly participate in the political recognitive community.  From this left-liberal perspective, expanding our community of recognition to its maximum extent is a politically and ethically desirable form of civil society enfranchisement.

Presumably, however, we do not want to extend all forms of recognition to all members of our maximally extended community.  If I am trying to speak a language, I do not want to recognise everyone in the world as possessing the authority to judge my usage; I only want to recognise those who are proficient in the language.  If I am interested in some scientific question, I am likely to want to recognise the authority of scientific experts in the field over the authority of random crackpots.  (Here of course all the caveats I articulated in my posts on the philosophy of science apply, but I take myself to have relatively thoroughly covered that ground and I don’t want to relitigate it all.)  I take it that these are relatively uncontroversial examples of, as it were, legitimately asymmetrical and selective recognitive structures.

But doesn’t this also generalise?  When it comes, for example, to moral judgements, isn’t it commonplace to treat some social actors as good people whose opinions we value, and others as bad people whose opinions we disregard?  Is there anything wrong with this?  It doesn’t seem to me that there is.  The kind of maximalist recognition that we might (on left liberal grounds) want to extend to the entire global (or, if we get particularly ambitious, cosmic) community, doesn’t seem to me to have really any bearing on any of the other recognitive decisions that we make in our day-to-day lives.  We are constantly being selective about who we recognise in which domain.  And – I want to claim – given the incredible diversity of human beliefs and values, there is literally no other possible way for us to comport ourselves.  We have to be wildly selective in the recognitive links we personally constitute, because otherwise we end up with total incoherence.  There is a cacophony of incompatible judgements out there in the social world; we make sense of our world by selecting some judgements over others.  The motor of the Hegelian-Brandomian narrative is Brandom-Hegel’s version of the Kantian ‘synthetic unity of apperception’ – that is to say, our standing obligation to attempt to bring some measure of coherence to our judgements by eliminating incompatible commitments, to the extent that we are able.  And this process has its social-recognitive analogue – it has to have this analogue, because the Brandomian-Hegelian account sees recognitive relations as partly constitutive of the judgements that we are attempting to synthesise and unify.  We must not only abandon incompatible commitments; as part of this process, we must abandon incompatible recognitive relations.  When two external authorities contradict each other, we have a standing obligation to attempt to tweak our recognitive relations in a way that reduces the inconsistency in our own commitments (commitments in this case derived from deference to those authorities) to manageable proportions. 

So: the synthetic unity of apperception, applied to our commitments, has a social analogue: our constant making and remaking of our recognitive relations, such that our necessary deference to authority does not result in intolerably inconsistent obligations.  And this is one of the major motors, within Brandom-Hegel’s account, of social transformation.  My claim is that this metatheoretical apparatus more or less necessarily commits us – provided we make an incredibly slimline additional empirical assumption of high social diversity – to sharply limited recognitive communities in almost all substantive domains.  And the roiling ongoing obligation to attempt to make our recognitive relations more or less cohere is an engine for the transformation of our community structures: exclusions and sanctions; schisms and combinations; social groups constantly making and remaking themselves, and (sometimes!) settling into something like recognitive equilibrium states, at least for a time.

These community transformations are also transformations of the self.  Our interiority is socially constituted – this is a core result of the philosophical apparatus I’m endorsing here.  As our community changes, so do we change.  But also, we internally change our relation to our community.  As we go about our day-to-day lives, we detect inconsistencies in our commitments, and in an effort to reconcile them we constantly subtly shift our recognitive attitudes.  Such-and-such a person A said X; but I have on better authority (from B) that Not-X; therefore I’m going to downgrade my assessment of A’s credibility – I will recognise their authority in this domain less in the future.  Such waxing and waning of authority is the stuff of social life; but it is also the way in which our interiority is formed.  Whose judgements we value, and why – this is also changing.  And as we change who we trust, who we believe, who we defer to, who we respect, who we admire, who we love – as all this changes, we ourselves change; our core commitments change; the values that make us who we are change.

Freudian psychoanalysis has an account of the formation of the self in childhood via this kind of process.  For psychoanalysis, the self is formed via parental attachment.  We take our parents’ judgements as our own; we internalise them; we carry around little models of our parents within our heads; and this initial division of the self via the introjection of another – this division is how the self itself (which must be internally divided to normatively function) is constituted.  But then, on the psychoanalytic account, we must separate ourselves from parental attachment; other attachments intrude into the internal psychic economy, and the lifelong drama of rival attachments playing themselves out on the stage of the psyche begins.  I am claiming that this psychoanalytic account is an alternative perspective on the phenomenon that Brandom-Hegel calls the synthetic unity of apperception’s attempt to reconcile socially-constituted commitments.

Freud, of course, brings with him vast ideological baggage associated with a particular vision of the bourgeois ‘nuclear’ family; there is no reason to take the more concrete details of the Freudian account very seriously.  (How would many of the details of the Freudian account even make any sense at all in the very many cultures that engage in communal child-rearing, for example?)  From my point of view, this isn’t the point – the point is a more meta-theoretical one.  I’m trying to claim two (principal) things.  First: the interiority of the self is shaped by the recognitive attitudes one adopts.  Second: it doesn’t make any real sense to see us as obliged to adopt maximalist or expansive recognitive relations along almost all dimensions of recognition.

Instead, I would advise a picture more like the following.  We begin with very specific recognitive relations.  Then the process of experience – both in the sense of the introduction of new relations, and the emergence of inconsistencies among our relations – leads us to begin to modify our recognitive relations.  This is a lifelong process, and it functions like a recognitive-normative version of ‘Neurath’s boat’.  We never attain a normative standpoint that can ‘ground’ our judgements in a manner external to those relations.  Rather, we are constantly remaking our recognitive relations based on the judgements we have derived from our current set of recognitive relations.  Each new set of recognitive relations gives us new judgements, and new inconsistencies between those judgements.  And so we beat on, making and remaking our own relation to the communities we aspire to belong to.  There is no reason to think that this process trends towards more expansive recognitive relations along most (possibly along any) recognitive dimensions.  The logic of this process will be specific to the recognitive space we happen to inhabit, and its own dynamics.  I advise, then, the abandonment of any maximalist community of Trust as a plausible endpoint for this process – certainly when it comes to any very substantive political or ethical commitments.  Humanity is just too normatively diverse to expect such an outcome.  Instead the questions we face are more ‘retail business’ – what recognitive attitudes should we adopt here and now – and why?