Some ignorances and uncertainties w/r/t Brandom

Alert readers of the blog may have observed that I’ve spent a bit of time over the last fifteen years on the work of Robert Brandom.  In this post I want to give an incredibly quick recapitulation of my take on Brandom, then note some ignorances and uncertainties I still have with respect to Brandom’s work.

So – as I’ve been understanding it, Brandom’s work has several components.  First, Brandom proposes an inferentialist account of semantic content.  That is to say, he takes it that the propositional content of our sentences and thoughts can be fully explained by the inferences or commitments associated with a claim.  For Brandom, there’s no such thing as semantic content that precedes inference; the inferences just are the content.  Controversially, Brandom makes this claim even with respect to apparently paradigmatically non-inferential categories like direct reference.  In this respect, Brandom inverts the ‘classical’ analytic philosophical order of explanation, in which you start with denotation, and then attach logical inferences to denoting terms or phrases; for Brandom, reference drops out of inference rather than analytically preceding it.

Second, Brandom proposes to explain inference in terms of normative pragmatics.  In this respect, Brandom follows and massively expands on the Wittgensteinian project of explaining meaning in terms of use – or semantic content in terms of social practice – or (in Brandom’s vocabulary) normative statuses in terms of normative attribution.  At its heart, then, Brandom’s work is a theory of practice.  Slightly more concretely, the core Brandomian social practices are: 1) attributing and acknowledging commitments; 2) asking for and giving reasons for commitments; 3) a ‘double-bookkeeping’ account of tracking commitments, which distinguishes between ‘de dicto’ and ‘de re’ commitments (what you think you are committed to, versus what I think you are committed to).

Third, and finally, Brandom articulates all this within a complex, broadly Hegelian social theory in which dynamic relations of recognition between social actors form and transform historical communities.

Obviously this is a massively pared-down account of what Brandom is up to.  In the past, on the blog, I have discussed all elements of this account in a lot more detail!  Still, articulated at this level of abstraction I admire and endorse all three elements of Brandom’s philosophy.

Over the last year or so, on the blog, I have also articulated some ways in which I take my own views to depart from Brandom’s.  These departures are as follows:

First, I advocate a more thoroughgoing fallibilism than Brandom appears to advocate, at least in his later work.  In ‘A Spirit of Trust’ (and in some other places) Brandom appears to believe that he can derive metaphysical claims about necessary structural features of noumenal reality (specifically, that reality is modally structured) from his semantics, and advocates a variant of the Aristotelian/Tractarian ‘form’ or ‘picture’ theory of meaning.  I take a more Deweyian, fallibilist line that we simply can’t and shouldn’t make any kind of metaphysical claims about reality.

Second, I advocate a stronger form of normative pluralism than Brandom appears to in the concluding sections of ‘A Spirit of Trust’.  I take it that different communities of recognition can successfully institute different, incompatible norms, and Brandom’s Hegelian conclusions about the formation of a general community of Trust seem to me inadequately responsive to the ethical and political force of such pluralism.  I also have the extremely underdeveloped opinion that if one were to push on this pluralism, one would have to expand Brandom’s account of scorekeeping to accommodate at least one more category of attribution of normative status.  On that entirely undeveloped account, one would need to distinguish between three different forms of attributing normative statuses: what I take it that a social actor thinks they have committed themselves to (de dicto commitments); what I take it that a social actor’s own commitments really commit them to (de re commitments); and what I take it that a social actor’s obligations really are, irrespective of their commitments (unnamed third category of attribution of normative status).  I haven’t thought any of this through properly, but it’s a line of thought that I might conceivably explore further at some future date.

Third, and finally, I depart from Brandom on a matter of emphasis: where Brandom is primarily interested in linguistic practice, I am primarily interested in non-linguistic practice.

So that’s where I stand with respect to Brandom, in broad outline.  Now I want to discuss my ignorances and uncertainties.

I am extremely conscious that, although I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and have obviously spent a lot of time wrestling with Brandom specifically, at base I am relatively ignorant in the discipline of philosophy, and lack a huge amount of relevant background.  This matters for three reasons.

First – it’s just better to know stuff than not to know stuff.  In particular, not reading more widely than I do in philosophy removes a ‘check’ on my impulses and commitments.  To some extent I’m clearly a Brandomian because I happen to have read Brandom – and there are countless philosophers who I haven’t read but, for all I know, might have equally compelling arguments that lead to different conclusions.  My philosophical views at present feel like they’re in something of an equilibrium – after all, it wasn’t pure chance that I found Brandom’s work persuasive; I find Brandom’s work compelling in large part because of the way it addresses and (to my mind) largely resolves problems I was already wrestling with.  But still, it’s worth noting this issue.  

Second – as a good inferentialist, I know that the content of one’s opinions is determined by how those opinions fit into a broader inferential and discursive space.  If I am relatively ignorant of the broader discursive space, then, there’s a relatively strong sense in which I don’t know even the content of my own commitments.  

Third, and finally – communication.  If I want to talk to anyone about Brandom it would help if I know a lot more about the broader philosophical terrain than I do.

These are all good reasons to do a lot more reading in philosophy, in my view.  Against these considerations, however, is the following: I’m actually not trying to be a philosopher; I’m trying to be a political economist.  I think it’s extremely clear that it would be easy to spend the rest of my life reading in this philosophical space, while still only scratching the surface of the problems Brandom is tackling.  So there’s a basic practical or pragmatic issue – is reading a huge amount more philosophy the best way to spend the short time I have remaining in this life for intellectual work?

I don’t intend to make a decision on that question in this post.  Instead, I just want to note three further lines of thought here that I may well end up not actually pursuing.

First line of thought: Brandom and virtue theory.  Brandom is, obviously, located within the Kantian tradition of deontological theory.  For Brandom, normativity is about rule-following.  And yet Brandom is also situated within the Wittgensteinian tradition that sees rule-following as necessarily frequently ‘tacit’.  In Wittgenstein’s words, there is a way of following a rule that is not an interpretation – we can follow a rule “blindly”.  It is an open question (which Brandom raises) whether ‘following a rule’ in this tacit, practice-based sense really counts as “following a rule” at all.  Aren’t we here plausibly explaining rules in terms of dispositions of practice, rather than understanding practice as following rules?  And there is another tradition, emerging in part from the work of the later Wittgenstein on rule-following, which draws anti-deontological conclusions from Wittgenstein’s rule-following arguments.  For G.E.M. Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s arguments point in the direction of something like a revitalised virtue ethics, in which our core explanatory normative categories should be dispositions of character, rather than rules.  John McDowell, Brandom’s Pittsburgh colleague, also seems to take Wittgenstein’s rule-following arguments to point in this more Aristotelian direction.  So there would be a line of thought that explores the implications of Brandom’s apparatus in this direction.  Of course, Brandom’s development of Wittgenstein is systematising, rather than ‘quietist’ – more willing than either Anscombe or McDowell to fold Wittgenstein back into a rationalist project centred on the articulation of rules (rather than a less rationalist project focused on practical or characterological dispositions).  Still, it feels like pulling on these connections might be fruitful.

Second, related, line of thought: Brandom and metaethics.  Brandom’s project is, obviously, all about normativity.  However, Brandom’s own primary focus is on semantics; Brandom is interested in normativity first and foremost because he takes an account of normativity to be a precondition of a philosophically adequate account of semantics.  There’s no reason at all, though, why you can’t just pick up Brandom’s account of normativity and apply it to moral philosophy, rather than semantics.  Indeed, in a ‘Spirit of Trust’ this is one of the things Brandom is doing, arguing that Hegel proposes a “semantics with edifying intent”.  So one of the ways to understand Brandom’s project is as an intervention in metaethics: Brandom provides an account of what normativity even is – what we’re talking about when we talk about norms.  And this is the case however we understand the implications of Brandom’s ‘first order’ ethical philosophy (as deontology or, in the perhaps slightly contrarian way just discussed, some form of virtue ethics).  The problem here, for me, is just that I’m very ignorant of metaethics.  Thus, although it seems obvious that Brandom’s work has immediate metaethical implications, when I actually try to think about this I am undermined by the fact that I simply haven’t done my homework in terms of reading metaethics.

The third and final line of thought is one that’s been particularly nagging at me.  This is the relation of Brandom’s work to the broader logicist tradition, of which I am again embarrassingly ignorant.  Here I want to particularly highlight the project focused on the role of metalanguages, that takes its bearings from Carnap.  Brandom tells a story in which the Kantian synthetic a priori categories are reconfigured by Carnap in metalinguistic terms.  Quine and Sellars then both attack different elements of the Carnapian logical empiricist apparatus – Quine with his critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction (on the logicist side), Sellars with his critique of the ‘myth of the given’ (on the empiricist side).  But this attack isn’t a rejection of the Carnapian project as a whole, it’s a development of it – the idea that something like the Kantian distinction between empirical and transcendental categories still aligns with something like the distinction between a language and a metalanguage persists.  Moreover, Brandom’s work is still operating in some sense within this tradition, albeit now attempting to translate the Hegelian critique/development of Kant into this same analytic/logicist idiom.  

Anyway, I’m vaguely aware of this stuff, and I have a very broad brush understanding of the moves made by some of the figures in this tradition – but at base I don’t know what I’m talking about in this space.  And the reason for that, again, is that fundamentally I don’t care at all about this philosophical semantics stuff, and therefore haven’t read much of the tradition.  The analytic logicist project has always struck me as completely bizarre, and I have a hard time making myself get to grips with it (this is the main reason I fled from analytic philosophy in the first place).  Obviously at one level that’s fine – there’s no law that says that I need to spend time with the writings of Carnap, Dummett, and so on.  However, I think at this point I’ve probably reached the limit of how much I can engage with central elements of Brandom’s work without taking the tradition he’s most centrally wrestling with a lot more seriously.

So.  I haven’t made any decisions about whether I’m actually going to try to tackle these deep shortcomings in my knowledge of the philosophical traditions relevant to Brandom.  In the immediate term, I think I’m definitely not going to.  But I wanted to put up this rough map of the limits of my knowledge and understanding – if for no other reason than the usual one of trying to clear space in my head.