Pragmatism, rationalism, habits, decisions

Ok – in this post I want to make some very basic points about the relationship between habits and decisions, against the overly-elaborate backdrop of a discussion of the relation between pragmatism and rationalism in Brandom.  First comes a discussion of pragmatism and rationalism, then a discussion of habits and decisions.  I think this is all pretty basic stuff, but working through basic stuff is a lot of what the blog is for, so here it is.

One of the central productive tensions of Brandom’s work is the relationship between his pragmatism and his rationalism.  Very roughly speaking (and I’ve done enough detail-work on Brandom on the blog that I’m giving myself permission to write very loosely indeed here) the pragmatist order of explanation is to start with practices – or dispositions to act – and to explain other categories (like those of reason) in those terms.  This seems to stand in tension with a rationalism which gives pride of place to reason.  In his discussion of ‘regulism’ in Making It Explicit, Brandom discusses the paradoxes and infinite regresses that result when we pursue a certain rationalist emphasis on rules and reasons – we need, Brandom argues (following Wittgenstein) to have a way to follow a rule ‘blindly’, or we can’t make sense of rule-following at all.  Yet it is easy to tip from this kind of emphasis on the tacit dimension of rule-following, to a fuller rejection of the role of reasons in our normative lives.

A somewhat random example of the latter problem (selected by me, not by Brandom) would, in my view, be Michael Polanyi.  I see Polanyi’s work on the social structure of scientific research communities as extremely important and insightful – but in his more ‘psychological’ writings on “the tacit dimension” of thought, Polanyi takes a step too far for my tastes into an anti-rationalist space.  In that work (again summarising very loosely), Polanyi argues that: 1) there must be a tacit, non-explicitated dimension to our intellectual practices; 2) this tacit dimension is ineradicable; 3) something something something; 4) some sort of mystical-sounding conclusions.  One of the challenges Brandom faces is to maintain his emphasis on pragmatism and the tacit dimensions of rule-following, without ending up in this kind of basically anti-rationalist theoretical space.

Brandom achieves this by an extremely simple mechanism.  He argues that there must always be backgrounded, tacit, implicit dimensions to our intellectual practice, but none of those dimensions are necessarily or intrinsically implicit or tacit.  That is to say: any norm implicit in practice can in principle be made explicit.  Nothing is out of bounds for the process of explicitation – and once the rule implicit in a practice has been made explicit, it is then open to contestation and debate within the discursive space of reasons.  The fact that at any given moment we must have lots of backgrounded, implicit, non-contested dispositions doesn’t mean that there is some ineradicable element of our practice that cannot be explicitated – it just means that we can’t explicitate everything all at once.  Rather, we work like Neurath’s sailors: any given element of our background practices can be foregrounded at any moment, and over time we can cover a huge amount of terrain in this way, subjecting vast amounts of implicit practice to rational contestation and debate – we just can’t do it all simultaneously.

It goes without saying that there’s vastly more to Brandom’s apparatus than this – but this very simple procedure is, I think, the core of how Brandom reconciles his pragmatism and his rationalism.  Our reason is supported by a vast mass of implicit commitments, unexamined within practice; but over time and as a rational, discursive community, we can in principle expose any and all of those practices to the light of rational debate.  There is no fundamental or ineradicable “tacit dimension” – only a necessary practical one.

Ok – so I endorse all of this.  But then, I want to say, something similar applies to decision principles in the sphere of practical reasoning.  Rational choice theory sort of assumes that every action taken is an explicit decision in which all possible options are known and evaluated.  Of course we all know that in practice most, or at least many, of our actions are taken out of habit – dispositions to act have developed within us, over the years, and they guide our actions.  So what is the relation between background dispositions and (practically, instrumentally) rational decision-making?

I think the relation is the same as the relation between rules that are implicit in practice and rules that are explicit as stated commitments.  Our decision-making has to exist against a background of countless actions that are not ‘decided upon’, but are simply taken out of habit or disposition.  But that doesn’t mean that any given disposition-action cannot become the focus of decision-making – in principle any action or disposition can become a matter for active, considered decision.  Of course there are complexities here – but I think this is a useful (albeit, yes, sort of obvious and basic) way of thinking about the relationship between habit and decision-making.

Of course, from an ‘external’, behaviourist perspective, it’s all disposition – one of the claims of at least one strand of pragmatism is that it’s dispositions all the way down.  But of course there’s a difference between the complex dispositions involved in the game of asking for and giving reasons, versus the dispositions involved in the backgrounded practices that are acted upon without being (at that moment) the subject-matter of that game.  And from a more ‘subjectivist’ perspective, I think we can all acknowledge the difference between actions taken out of habit, versus actions taken after rational reflection and consideration.

Now, thinking about things in this (yes, again, I acknowledge, very basic) way is also illuminating (at least for me) concerning what’s going on in some other theoretical traditions.  Consider Bourdieu’s sociological category of ‘habitus’, which at least has some strong family resemblances to pragmatist ideas of socially-inculcated tacit dispositions.  Or consider what Aristotelians are talking about, when they talk about the inculcation of character.  Both of these theoretical traditions are interested in the social formation of the tacit dispositions of the self.  The (broadly Brandomian) approach I want to endorse has no problem with this kind of talk.  But – as pragmatists who are also rationalists – we want to be wary if this kind of talk starts implying that there are ineradicably tacit dimensions to our dispositions.  As rationalists, we think that dispositions can be explicitated into rules, which can then be subject to rational debate.  From this perspective, the opposition in some moral philosophy between an emphasis on rules and an emphasis on character is something of a false opposition – each approach is simply emphasising one pole of the complex relationship between explicit rules and background dispositions. 

A pragmatist rationalism, then, argues that there is no disposition that cannot in principle be made the subject of rational debate.  There is then an additional fork in the road: to what extent can rational debate then reflect back on the disposition, transforming it?  In individual, psychological terms, this question can be asked as follows: how fixed are our characters?  Is explicitating our dispositions a mechanism for the ready transformation of those dispositions?  Or is it simply a route to a form of self-knowledge that does not in fact do anything much to transform the self?  If we think dispositions can be transformed, how does that work?  Is knowledge enough?  If not, what else is needed?

These are, I think, interesting questions!  But for now my main goal is just to get some acknowledgement of the importance of dispositions (rather than decisions) into my toy model of the structure of the psyche.  The toy model I proposed in my document on non-transitive preferences was a rational choice model ‘all the way down’.  Of course this is silly, if it is understood as the idea that every level of action is following an explicit decision rule.  (This would be a sort of action-theoretic, instrumental reason version of ‘regulism’.)  It is not quite so silly, though, if we understand many of our actions in terms of dispositions and habits, rather than decision rules – but also take a ‘rationalist’ approach to the understanding of human dispositions as always in principle analysable via the ‘explicitation’ of decision principles.

In any case, all of this is very hand-wavy – but this is where I’m at for now in thinking about these issues.

Two forms of moral scepticism

In the last post in this series I articulated in perhaps a slightly more coherent way than previously my reasons for rejecting the ‘Kant-Rousseau’ model of autonomy.  This rejection has some potentially unwelcome consequences, though.  In this post I want to speak briefly to a couple of them.

The first unwelcome consequence of the approach I’m recommending is that it seems to limit the degree of individual autonomy we can plausibly claim for ourselves.  On the Kant-Rousseau model we are, first and foremost, autonomous creatures: your norms are your norms – you have chosen them, as an individual.  On the approach I’m recommending, by contrast, a good case can be made that we cannot achieve ‘real’ or full autonomy: our normative commitments – and therefore our normative selves – are chosen, in part, by our social milieu; we are enmeshed in a normative environment from which we cannot fully differentiate ourselves as individuals.

Of course, if you’re one of a range of different kinds of philosophical communitarian, this is a positive feature of the approach I’m recommending, not a negative one.  From this communitarian perspective, to reject the Kant-Rousseau model of autonomy is to reject a pernicious ideology that conceals our real nature from ourselves.  Our real nature is as community creatures; our selves cannot in fact be separated from community; it is an illusion of bourgeois individualism to think that autonomy is either achievable or desirable.  From this perspective, then, the metatheoretical approach I’m recommending should be seen as an invitation to reject the alienating illusions of bourgeois individualism, and re-embrace the communal character of our human natures.

As I’ve said on the blog before, more or less in passing, my stance on this is roughly as follows: I acknowledge that the ‘communitarians’ are right about the non-tenability of the Kant-Rousseau model of autonomy at a metatheoretical level, but I don’t accept that this deals any kind of devastating blow to autonomy – or to other forms of ‘bourgeois individualism’ – as a political or social ideal.  I don’t see why we can’t ground ‘first order’ political-ethical individualist commitments within a metatheoretical framework that rejects the philosophically ‘foundational’ role of the Kant-Rousseau autonomy model.  Obviously I’ve not done anything much to cash out – or even really elaborate – that position, but that’s my stance, for what little it’s worth.  Maybe I’ll come back to this one day.

In this post, though, I want to focus on a second apparent unwelcome consequence of the approach I’m recommending: a form of moral or normative scepticism.

Here I want to make a very basic point, and differentiate between two different things that can be meant by “moral scepticism” – or by “scepticism” in general.  Scepticism about X can mean scepticism about the existence of X, or it can mean scepticism about the accessibility or knowability of X.  In epistemological scepticism about the ‘external world’, these options would correspond to, on the one hand, scepticism about the existence of the ‘external world’ (some kind of Berkeleyan idealism), and, on the other hand, scepticism about the ultimate knowability of the ‘external world’ (some kind of Kantian idea that the noumenal realm of the in-itself is not knowable, and our knowledge relates to the phenomenal realm alone).

The forms of normative scepticism that I’ve been addressing myself to on the blog to date almost entirely fall in the first category – scepticism about the existence of norms (“nihilism”).  I regard myself, whether rightly or wrongly, as having addressed that form of scepticism, at least to my own satisfaction, and it is largely going into the “done and dusted” bucket, for purposes of blogging.  The second form of ‘normative scepticism’ is, however, very different.  This isn’t scepticism about the existence of norms, but scepticism about the knowability of norms.

If you’re a ‘strong realist’ about norms, it’s clear enough that this is a kind of scepticism you have to wrestle with.  Norms exist ‘out there’ somewhere, and the moral-epistemological question is: how can we know what they are?  Let’s say you have a religious metaphysical standpoint in which norms are connected to the divine in some way.  (Again, I am maximally ignorant of theology and intend to remain so – there is more than enough to read without dipping into the theological literature – so this is all going to be very half-baked, but so it goes.)  In some kinds of religious metaphysics, it’s obvious why there might be a worry that you just don’t know what the right norms are: the gods know, but you do not.  At its sceptical extreme, there’s the worry that it might be impossible to know what the right norms are – maybe the divine understanding of the good is beyond the limited human self’s capacity to grasp.  Or maybe we are barred from knowing the good by our fallen natures, or by the malicious workings of malign supernatural forces, etc. etc.

If you have a ‘social constructionist’ understanding of normativity, it seems like this kind of thing isn’t going to be a problem.  Of course we know what the norms are – we made the norms.  Roughly speaking, then, it seems that the form of moral scepticism appropriate to social constructivism is nihilism, while the form of moral scepticism appropriate to strong and/or religiously-inflected normative realism is epistemic scepticism about the accessibility of those norms.

This loose line of reasoning is reinforced by the Kant-Rousseau idea that we are only bound by norms we have acknowledged.  Intuitively, on this approach, there’s no fundamental epistemic problem concerning what those norms are.

One of the things Brandom is doing (in both MIE and ASOT) is showing how much room there is for epistemic uncertainty about our norms even within this (‘Kant-Rousseau’) model.  For Brandom, we acknowledge binding norms as individuals, but we cannot determine the content of those norms as individuals – that determination of content is a social process.  We may, therefore, be ignorant of the content of the norms by which we have bound ourselves.  This possibility of ignorance of the content of our own commitments is then the ‘lever’ that opens Making It Explicit’s formal concept of objectivity: the standing possibility of a gap between what we think we are committed to and what we actually are committed to permits us to always formally differentiate our norms from any given set of normative attitudes at all.

Fine.  But this model still sharply limits the degree to which we could ‘lack contact’ with the relevant norms: we must in some sense acknowledge the norms that bind us, or they don’t bind us in the first place.

Now – what if we move away from this ‘Kant-Rousseau’ position, and adopt a metatheoretical stance whereby norms can be successfully instituted by people other than those upon whom the norms are (genuinely) binding?  On the approach I’m following here, we might have ‘first order’ normative reasons to believe that this scenario will not normally obtain – but there is no metatheoretical reason to rule it out.  In this framework, we can in principle rightly see a norm as binding upon someone, even if the person in question does not in any sense acknowledge that norm.  (Here, then, we need to talk about “obligations”, not “commitments”, since no commitment has been undertaken but the norm in question still binds.)

If we adopt this approach, then we are confronted by the spectre of a form of moral or normative scepticism that is very close to the problem confronted by strong normative realists.  The problem is this: what if the right norms – the norms we ought to adopt – simply aren’t norms that have been instituted by our community of practice?  We can imagine our way back into the historical past, into societies where norms that we ourselves regard as bedrock weren’t even really on the moral-philosophical table.  We feel (or at least we may feel) that it is possible to pass normative judgement on those societies, from our current normative standpoint.  And yet it’s unclear how a member of those societies is meant to have had access to the social perspective from which such judgement can be passed.  This, of course, raises (‘relativising’) questions of what normative attitudes to take (now) to members of those societies.  But this problem also ‘relativises’ our own normative stance.  We can imagine some other normatively distant society adopting a similar judgemental perspective towards our own current norms.  Imagining the possibility of this perspective can play a similar ‘formal’ role to the role played in Brandom’s account by our standing knowledge of the possibility that our own current sense of the content of our commitments might not be accurate.  But, again, we are here not dealing just with the content of our commitments, but with the question of whether these are even the right commitments – whether our entire normative framework is the right one.

This reflexive perspectival shift therefore opens up a ‘relativisation’ that is stronger than the forms of ‘relativisation’ Brandom’s apparatus addresses.  If we follow the route I am recommending, this ‘relativisation’ does not lead to a relativism that leads in turn to nihilism – that’s not the category of problem we’re dealing with.  Rather, this is a problem of moral epistemology: what if we are completely wrong about the correct normative stance, from top to bottom?  Just as Descartes imagined a scenario in which we know nothing empirically – all our sensory input is deceptive – so this raises the spectre of a scenario in which we know nothing normatively – all our normative judgements and perspectives are fundamentally awry.  This is a ‘secular’ version of a gnostic worry that what we mistakenly believe to be a divine source of normative guidance is actually a malign demiurge, or some such.  Here we’re worrying that our community, which has formed us normatively, is evil through and through, and the right norms have been instituted by a community to which we have no social access.

Of course, Descartes believed he had resolved his sceptical worries by finding a source of judgement within the self to which those worries did not apply.  And, normatively speaking, this is more or less the Kantian strategy.  Kant says – look, we can’t be fundamentally lacking access to the correct source of normative judgement, because the moral law is necessarily implied by the structure of any and all rational creatures.  Provided you are rational (and thus a normative creature at all) you have access to the basic moral law.  This is the Kantian strategy for dealing with the spectre of this kind of worry in moral epistemology – and it’s a strategy that is (very roughly speaking) also adopted by Brandom, as well as by various other figures in this kind of liberal critical-theoretic tradition (e.g. Habermas).

I’m rejecting this strategy.  My rejection operates by analogy with my rejection of the Cartesian solution to epistemological scepticism about the empirical world.  In regular epistemological terms, the stance I recommend has two dimensions.  First, a thoroughgoing fallibilism.  I recommend adopting the idea that what it means to know something is to not know it for sure.  It is baked into our concept of knowledge that it isn’t perfect knowledge.  (If it were known with true certainty, then it wouldn’t be part of the space of legitimate discursive challenge, and therefore wouldn’t be the kind of thing we should treat as having any epistemic authority, either.)  Then (second) the critique of Cartesian scepticism is that it is a hyperbolic scepticism – it regards an impossible level of certainty as the criterion of knowledge as such.  Once this hyperbolic criterion has been dropped, the question becomes not “do we know for sure that we’re not being deceived by a malicious demon?” but rather “is there any reason to think that this is a scenario worth taking very seriously?”  On this more reasonable epistemic standard, Cartesian hyperbolic scepticism goes into the box of “ok, sure, I guess in principle it’s possible, but so what?”  Nevertheless, a salutary awareness that we always might be wrong about anything is important to adopting a set of non-dogmatic epistemic standards in general.

I think something like this applies in the moral-philosophical realm too.  We should reject both the idea that we have some intrinsic built-in moral guidelines associated with being thinking creatures at all and the idea that the absence of such a standard is a reason to adopt a hyperbolic scepticism about all our norms in general.  The possibility that our own moral standards might be seen as monstrous by another community whose norms it would be proper to see as better than ours, if only we had access to them, is a salutary reminder of the importance of moral-philosophical humility, but it is not a reason to treat the normative standards we do have access to with hyperbolic scepticism.  Obviously this is quite a hand-wavy position, but something in this broad moral-philosophical space seems compelling to me.  Like the Brandomian social-perspectival understanding of objectivity via the formal difference between de dicto and de re commitments, this perspective opens a standing uncertainty about our moral stances – but this uncertainty (in fallibilist spirit) is the reason moral commitments have the ability to bind us at all – without this possibility we couldn’t properly treat them as objective.  When we talk about the ‘objectivity’ of moral stances, we mean not that there is a divine will which resides outside the human realm; rather, we mean that it is always possible that there could exist a community from the perspective of which we could properly see our own norms on any given issue as profoundly flawed.

There’s more to say on all of this, and I’ll try to come back to it in the future, but this post is already getting a little long, so I think this will do for now.

Regularism and game theory

In this post I want to contrast Brandom’s apparatus in (especially) ‘Making It Explicit’ with Lewis’s game-theoretic approach to convention (in ‘Convention’).  It’s now quite some time since I read MIE, and I’ll revisit it in detail at some point.  But for now I want to discuss some connections between these two works, as part of my general effort to veer the Brandomian orientation of this blog around towards more political-economic themes.  (Lewis is, of course, a philosopher, not a political economist – but ‘Convention’ is a foundational work in the canon of formal economics.)

Regularism, recall, is the idea that norms can ultimately be identified with regularities of social behaviour.  The regularist move is: norms are socially instituted; we defer to our social milieu for judgements about correct and incorrect practice; how are we to understand the judgement of ‘the social’ to which we are thereby deferring?; maybe we can simply understand it as a regularity of practice.  If everyone in a milieu does such-and-such, they have instituted the norm that such-and-such.

I take it that Lewis’s game-theoretic account of the emergence of conventions as regularities of strategic behaviour, in ‘Convention’, is a paradigmatic example of such an account.  Lewis is interested in ‘coordination games’, in which (I’m being a bit loose here, but this is the general idea) every player benefits if they coordinate their actions successfully with the other players, but coordination is non-trivial: there are multiple available coordination equilibria.  A classic example is the practice of driving on the right (or left) side of the road.  It doesn’t matter which side of the road car users drive on, so long as everyone drives on the same side of the road, but disaster ensues if coordination is not achieved.  

Lewis analyses conventions in these terms.  His ultimate target is linguistic convention, and he’s preoccupied with linguistic convention because of the debates arising out of Quine’s sceptical critique of Carnap’s mobilisation of the concept of analyticity.  This is another example, for what it’s worth, of the way in which Carnap’s project’s influence looms over this entire intellectual tradition in a way that I hadn’t appreciated until recently.  But the point is that Lewis is interested in analysing a particular category of norm – conventions – in terms of strategic regularities within a game-theoretic model.

Now, I want to discuss two Brandomian critiques of this regularist project.

The first is the critique from ‘gerrymandering’.  This critique is basically: what counts as a regularity?  ‘Gerrymandering’ can take place at the level of the actions that ‘count’ towards the regularity: which actions are included in the set of actions analysed will influence one’s understanding of the regularity in question.  But ‘gerrymandering’ can also take place at the level of any given set of actions: because any action can be described under multiple perspectives, it is always possible to construe any given set of actions as compatible with multiple regularities.

Lewis discusses this latter issue in ‘Convention’ – and basically concludes his discussion by saying “yes, this is all true, but let’s not be silly here”.  I think this is a legitimate approach to the problem of gerrymandering for most practical purposes, but it’s not clearly a legitimate approach if the point at issue is sceptical critiques of the very idea of convention.  Brandom, in his discussion of regularism, pushes on this sceptical point about gerrymandering.  Brandom draws (I think correctly) the following conclusion: gerrymandering means that there is always a normatively interpretive element to the specification of any regularity; therefore normativity cannot be reduced to regularities of practice.  You can’t simply explain norms in terms of regularities of practice, because specifying the relevant regularity of practice is already an interpretive (therefore normative) task.

I think this is all correct as far as it goes.  In terms of the ‘two cultures of the social sciences’ distinction, that I discussed a few posts ago, I think this argument shows that you cannot entirely eliminate the ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘interpretive’ approach to social science from the ‘reductionist’ or ‘objectivist’ approach.  Even formal game-theoretic models of the kind Lewis lays out are still ‘interpretive’ and ‘internalist’ in some sense.  In terms of the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy of science, even our apparently ‘reductionist’ theoretical toolkits are always ‘value-laden’.  This blog endorses the broad philosophy of science approach articulated by Helen Longino, and this result seems compatible with that approach, to me.

Ok.  But we should also, in my view, take care not to draw overly strong conclusions from this argument.  The facts that theory is value-laden and that game-theoretic models are interpretive is only a problem with Lewis’s analytic toolkit if we are trying to use that toolkit to bolster a very strong reductionism.  These aren’t objections to the tools; they are only objections to the attempt to use these tools to fully reduce norms to regularities of practice, with no explanatory remainder.

In fact, Brandom’s whole project is about the interpretive act of ‘explicitating’ the norms implicit in practice, and thereby specifying the practice itself under one particular description.  And this project is also grounded in Brandom’s critique of ‘regulism’, or Brandom’s broader pragmatism.  Brandom is clear that we do rely on grounding our norms in regularities of practice, as long as all parties agree in practice on the tacit implications of those practices.  The practical problem of ‘gerrymandering’ appears when there is a disagreement over the normative content of those practices, and therefore different interpretive perspectives on the ‘same’ set of practices.  But such disagreements (while they undermine the strong reductionist project of wholly explaining norms in terms of regularities) are themselves reliant on background uncontested norms implicit in currently unproblematic (that is, unchallenged) regularities of practice.  Brandom’s approach is therefore pointing in two directions simultaneously – rejecting strongly reductionist regularism, while still grounding the interpretive disagreements that prompt the gerrymandering problem within a larger context of background regularities of practice.

So Brandom’s larger problem, as I see it, is how to explain these disagreements – the interpretive disagreements that allow the gerrymandering problem to become live even to participants in Lewisian coordination communities – in terms of the social practices that are also generating the regularities in question.  And this problem is what Brandom’s complex scorekeeping apparatus addresses.  Brandom’s core account, as I see it, says: yes, norms are generated by regularities of practice, but the regularities of practice have to themselves include practices capable of both generating and resolving the gerrymandering problem for participants in those practices.

Now, as I see it the distinction between de dicto and de re tracking of entitlements and commitments gives Brandom the resources to explain how social actors within a scorekeeping game can themselves perceive the gerrymandering problem.  The game of asking for and giving reasons then gives those social actors the resources to resolve the gerrymandering problem – to reach an explicit discursive consensus rather than implicit practical consensus around the relevant norm-forming regularities, once any given gerrymandering problem has been rendered problematic by a ‘challenge’ to the ‘default’ background consensus of practical coordination. (Of course, the game of asking for and giving reasons and the practices of scorekeeping are themselves mutually implicated or constitutive, on Brandom’s account, but even so.)

To sum up the post so far, then.  My first point is that Brandom’s critique of regularism shouldn’t be seen as a global challenge to Lewis’s account of convention, which is useful in all kinds of ways.  Rather, it should be seen as a challenge to the attempt to derive a reductionist account of normativity from Lewis’s account.  My second point is that if we want a model of social practice that can deal with the gerrymandering problem, the social practices in question need to incorporate Brandomian scorekeeping.

What does this mean for the relation between Brandom and game theory?  Well, I’m focusing in this post on only one dimension of that relation – the problem of regularism (ignoring, notably, issues around instrumental reason).  But in terms of the problem of regularism, I think it means two things.

First: we need to remember that game-theoretic models of the kind Lewis is articulating are greatly simplified, and can’t themselves fully ground our account of normativity.  I think this is a relatively uncontroversial point – that our models are greatly simplified and do not provide a comprehensive or foundational social ontology is sort of a methodological banality in the modelling literature.  Second, though: Brandom’s own fuller account does provide resources that could themselves potentially be interestingly incorporated into game-theoretic approaches.  What would Lewis’s models of convention look like if they were extended to incorporate scorekeeping? I don’t know. Nor do I know whether such an extension would be useful: another rightly emphasised methodological point in the modelling literature is that greater modelling complexity is not necessarily desirable.  But still, I’d like to explore this possibility, if I can, eventually.

Taking stock – Hume, Brandom, Hegel, game theory

Ok – I realise I write up “taking stock” type posts on here constantly, but a lot of what the blog is for is to organise my thoughts, so I’m afraid I’m going to do it again.

The last post feels, to me, like a significant advance in what I’m trying to think through here.  I feel like I’ve now clarified the main theoretical area in which I’m trying to modify Brandom’s apparatus, and this also finally clarifies how the two parts of my project – Brandomian philosophical pragmatism and institutional political economy – join up.  So, let me give a very high-level overview.

I’ve argued that we can distinguish three major challenges of post-Enlightenment ‘critical theory’ (in a very expansive sense) to the idea of norms or values.  The first is scientific naturalism: if science gives us a full accounting of the furniture of the world, and if norms are not part of that accounting, what becomes of norms in general?  The second is social perspectivalism: if there are many available social perspectives, each with different values, and if there is no clear perspective-transcendent principle for selecting between those perspectives, then what becomes of objective norms?  The third is an account of human motivation in terms of sentiment, utility, and pleasure: if ‘high’ values (the Good) can be explained as psychologically derivative of ‘low’ values (gratification), then what becomes of the (let’s say, for current want of a better word) nobility of norms?

I’ve also argued that Brandom’s apparatus gives us adequate responses to the first two of these challenges.  To a reasonable first approximation Brandom explains the institution of genuine normativity by ‘normative attitudes’ in the sense of discursive practices; these normative attitudes can be analysed as natural features of human behaviour; therefore Brandom’s apparatus reconciles normativity and philosophical naturalism.  (Brandom’s full account, as I’ve discussed at some length before, is of course vastly more complex than this, but I think this is an acceptable summary of the basic approach.)  Moreover, Brandom has a ‘formal’ account of objectivity as a concept that emerges out of an appropriately internally articulated social perspectivalism – this is the masterstroke of Brandom’s ‘double bookkeeping’ scorekeeping account.  So I take it that Brandom has also reconciled objectivity and perspectivalism.  In these two areas, I am relatively straightforwardly and unproblematically a Brandomian.

Along the third dimension of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment challenge to normativity, however, Brandom has almost nothing to say.  Brandom is aggressively (and deliberately or strategically) uninterested in desire, sentiment, utility, and so on and so forth.  This lack of interest is not an oversight – I think it is part of Brandom’s general philosophical approach.  In the domain of epistemology, and building on Sellars’ critique of the ‘myth of the given’, Brandom extricates himself in one leap from the quagmire of traditional empiricist theorisation of the nature of experience, by simply substituting the concept of “reliable differential responsive dispositions” for the concept of “experience”.  In this respect, Brandom is a behaviourist – he simply isn’t interested in theorising the subjectivity of experience, when an account of stimulus-response dispositions will do the same philosophical work for his account of normativity and semantics.  In this respect, Brandom’s apparatus occupies the apparently paradoxical philosophical niche of being a non-subjectivist perspectivalism.

If one thinks of this move in terms of the challenge of the Humean philosophical apparatus [these remarks subject to the same caveats as before about how long it is since I’ve read Hume], Brandom is rejecting in one fell swoop the psychologist understanding of experience that grounds Hume’s empiricism.  This can be seen, indeed, as part of a general move away from psychologist explanations that begins (in the analytic tradition) with Frege’s critique of psychologist understandings of logic, and continues with Sellars’ and Wittgenstein’s critiques of psychologist understandings of apparently mental categories like experience or pain.

But Hume’s psychologising philosophy has two parts: a radical empiricism in epistemology, and an analogous psychologisation of moral philosophy – analysing values in terms of sentiment, utility, etc.  In this respect Hume is a representative of one major trend in the Enlightenment, which also finds expression in (I gather) Helvétius, Bentham, and who knows who else (I am, as always, under-read).  Just as Kantian epistemology is reacting against psychologising theories of knowledge, so Kant’s moral philosophy is reacting against these psychologising theories of moral sentiment.  One way to understand Hegel, I think, is as an effort to synthesise the Kantian transcendental critical response to these psychologising philosophies, with the more ‘down to earth’ insights of those philosophies.  For all the (by my lights) bizarre speculative excesses of the Hegelian project, Hegel is at base a more ‘earthy’ figure than Kant: he is critical of the effort to abstract knowledge away from day-to-day concerns.  He wants to abolish the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal that grounds Kant’s epistemology, and he also wants to abolish (or at least muddy) the distinction between formal, universal duty and base, sentimental satisfaction that grounds Kant’s moral philosophy.  Hegel is ‘bringing desire back in’ to the Kantian understanding of morality.

Brandom is different.  Just as Brandom cuts the Gordian knot of post-Humean empiricism by simply substituting responsive dispositions for experience, so (I want to claim) he likewise cuts the Gordian knot of post-Humean sentiment-based moral philosophy by substituting dispositions to act for (subjective) desire, sentiment, and utility.  However, I think that Brandom’s move in this domain is less carefully thought-through than his Sellarsian rejection of post-Humean empiricism.  (At base, moral philosophy is not very close to the centre of Brandom’s concerns.)  For this reason, I think, he misreads (or at least mis-summarises) Hegel’s wrestling with this problem in terms of a different kind of problem with Enlightenment naturalism.  Hegel is trying to bring ‘subjective’ Humean desire and sentiment back into moral philosophy, after Kant’s attempt to draw an (untenably) hard line between desire and duty.  Brandom, however, reads these passages as wrestling with reductive ‘objective’ scientific naturalism – Brandom is concerned with attitudes in the sense of practices and dispositions, not with attitudes in the sense of desires and sentiments.  By collapsing the latter problematic into the former, I think Brandom misses an important element of the Hegelian project.

Moreover, as I said in the last post, this is the element of the Hegelian project that interests me most.  I am interested in this ‘Humean’ problem space for a range of reasons – but one of them is that this development of a psychologising and ‘deflationary’ theory of moral sentiments is also part and parcel of the development (in the English-language tradition) of political economy.  Hume’s ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ and Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ are part of the same philosophical tendency and moment, and this is all part of the same shift that inaugurates political economy as its own field of study.  The ‘Humean’ understanding of human behaviour or human nature is also political economy’s understanding of human behaviour or human nature.  The entire political-economic tradition that sees humans as driven by incentives, which can be analysed in terms of gratifications or satisfactions, can plausibly be located within this intellectual current.  Utilitarianism, mathematised welfare-maximising decision theory, the marginal revolution – all of this is plausibly downstream of the basic ‘reductionist’ account of human motives and action that sees things like fundamental duties or intrinsic orientation to The Good as less explanatorily important than psychological analysis of gratifications, satisfactions, pleasures, etc.

As I’ve said many times, this is also the tradition I want to locate myself in.  Both mathematised economics and psychoanalysis are (in very different ways) downstream of this basic (‘Humean’) philosophical move.  But (I’m saying) Brandom isn’t much help in navigating this tradition.  Indeed, Brandom basically rules this entire psychologising motivational space out of bounds by his (pragmatist) emphasis on dispositions rather than (on the side of knowledge) experience or (on the side of action) desire and gratification.

In previous posts I’ve articulated some specific ways in which I disagree with Brandom: I reject the conceptual realist metaphysics of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ in favour of a still more thoroughgoing fallibilism; I worry that Brandom’s Hegelian Whiggism leaves insufficient space for normative pluralism; I am inclined to reject the ‘Rousseauian-Kantian’ idea that we can only have obligations that we acknowledge as such – at the very least, I think the arguments for this claim need to be located at the “messy retail business” level of ethical debate rather than at the metatheoretical level; I would prefer greater emphasis on non-linguistic practice than Brandom’s apparatus provides; I am doubtful that Brandom’s hard line between the sapient and the sentient can be drawn in the way he draws it.  These are all ways in which I differ from Brandom, and I expect to keep exploring at least some of these points in future posts on the blog.

However, I think with this ‘Humean’ point I have finally pinned down the most central way in which I want to modify the Brandomian framework.  I want to combine Brandom’s pragmatism with a ‘psychologising’ account of the motives associated with and driving the practices in question.  Qualitatively, I see that account in broadly psychoanalytic terms.  Formally, I think a ‘utility-maximising’ ‘instrumental reason’ framework can be grafted on to Brandom’s pragmatist apparatus, to explain (or at least model) the ways in which Brandomian agents behave in practice.

So this is the project I take myself to be engaged in.  Moreover, modifying or extending the Brandomian apparatus in this way also finally ties this Brandomian line of thought more concretely into the institutional political economy that I am also interested in.

~~

This point (about institutional political economy) can, I think, be summarised more quickly – if only because political economy has now been on the back burner for me for so long that I don’t feel nearly as fluent in writing about it as I am in writing about Brandom.  Here’s the basic point though: economics tends to work with utility-maximising economic agents.  Those agents, however, operate within an institutional framework.  One of the questions that has increasingly preoccupied economic theorists is therefore: how are we to understand that institutional framework?

One obvious way to answer this question (since the twentieth-century explosion in game-theoretic tools) is: in terms of game theory.  Broadly speaking, the “rules of the game” are the institutional environment within which economic agents act.  But then the question becomes: how do those rules of the game get established?

Here, very crudely, there are two ideal-typical paradigms.  One is “coercion” and the other is “cooperation”.  The paradigmatic coercive understanding of the institution of rules is an authoritarian leader or ruling elite imposing rules on society as a whole.  The paradigmatic cooperative understanding of the institution of rules is social contract theory, in which consensus or near-consensus among members of a society establishes the ‘ground level’ rules within which other rules are determined.

The problem, obviously, is that both of these two ideal types are much too simplistic.  In real life, rules emerge from complex processes that have both cooperative and coercive dimensions.  Moreover, full consensus is never achieved – even quite small-scale communities are internally heterogeneous.  What we need to understand is how the “rules of the game” that do structure a social space can emerge as structuring that social space even despite and through that heterogeneity.

Now, there are lots of political-economic theorists wrestling with this problem space – and although I’ve read a fair bit of political economy, there’s a lot more I need to read, so I’m not making any serious claims about the shortcomings of the tradition as a whole.  Still, I think Brandom’s account of the emergence of norms via complex scorekeeping practices meets all the criteria of adequacy with respect to the simultaneous modelling of shared norms and internal social heterogeneity.  Brandom does not have a reified concept of the social – his understanding of sociality is very internally heterogeneous, because it is so complexly social-perspectival.  It is both “social constructivist” and “microfounded”.  I think that Brandom’s scorekeeping account of rule-formation is the best account of the institution of individual-transcendent social structures that I know.

So what I want to do is pick up this Brandomian apparatus for the analysis of rule-formation, and apply it to the problem space of institutional political economy.  However, up until this point I’ve found it hard to navigate significant obstacles to this application.  One obstacle is Brandom’s focus on linguistic practice rather than the kinds of social practice more central to political economy.  More on that eventually.  The other, as I’ve said a number of times, is that Brandom’s apparatus simply doesn’t tackle the issue of coercion – which has to be central to any credible, or at least critical, political economy.

I now think that this difficulty of treating coercion within a Brandomian framework can usefully be seen as downstream of Brandom’s rejection of Humean moral sentiments theory.  I recognise that this needn’t necessarily be so, and I’m taking some very significant shortcuts here – hopefully I’ll return to all this in more detail somewhere down the road.  But very schematically, I now want to make the following series of moves.

• First, embed Brandom’s practice theory within a ‘Humean’ account of psychological motives.

[NB: I keep saying ‘Humean’ here – that’s because I’ve found, from my cursory recent reading in the philosophy of action, that philosophers tend to identify the broad category of theoretical approach I’m advocating here as ‘Humean’.  Terminology doesn’t really matter to me – I guess in my head this approach is ‘Smithian’ if it’s anything.  The point I’m trying to make is just: an approach in which gratification, the pleasure principle, utility, etc. is fundamental to the explanation of human action.]

• Specifically, see agents as broadly “expected-utility-maximising” in a manner compatible with mainstream mathematised economic approaches.
• Identify “the peculiar force of the better reason” with a specific category of gratification.  Elinor Ostrom writes about the “warm glow” that comes with the experience of moral approbation from peers – I want to think about moral motivation in this kind of ‘deflationary’ or ‘subjectively reductionist’ way.
• This allows the Brandomian apparatus to be folded into a broader political-economic analytic space.  Specifically, it allows a Brandomian account of the institution of norms to be modelled in terms of behaviour associated with ‘instrumental reason’.
• And we already know how to model coercive relations using those (game-theoretic) resources.

This set of moves would then in turn have two sets of benefits:

• Philosophically speaking, it would allow an account of how “non-instrumental behaviour” can be explained in terms of “instrumental behaviour” in a way that I believe would be formally parallel to Brandom’s account of normative statuses in terms of normative attitudes, and of objectivity in terms of social-perspectival mobility.  This, among other things, it seems to me, would at least resonate with what Hegel is trying to do with his effort to synthesise Kantian and (broadly) Humean moral philosophies.
• Social-scientifically speaking, it would potentially give us quite sophisticated resources for modelling the emergence of “the rules of the game” from the utility-maximising behaviour of economic agents.  Obviously I’m a long way from even beginning to cash that claim out, but this is a space I want to explore.

~~

Before I end this post, I want to make one more set of remarks, which are less high-level summary and more trying to continue to inch forward analytically.

Let’s say we adopt this approach I’m proposing.  Let’s say we introduce this “pleasure principle” approach to the Brandomian apparatus.  How do we do so, in very general terms?  And what does this approach do to the Brandomian understanding of normativity?

It seems to me that there are a range of different ways to think about this.

The narrowest way to think about this problem space would be something like the following.  Ok – we’re going to treat “the force of the better reason” as a kind of incentive that can be understood in the same way as other incentives (as gratification associated with the warm glow of a particular category of peer approval, for example).  Then we could, in principle, classify actions into those that are guided by “the force of the better reason” and those that are not, and evaluate actions in those terms.

Taking a slightly more ‘critical’ approach, we could then note that epistemic delegation is a necessary feature of cognition, and that even if an individual is guided by “the force of the better reason” in any given case, the broader social judgements to which they necessarily delegate will, presumably, be influenced by a range of incentives, not just “the force of the better reason”.  In this scenario, the individual-level “force of the better reason” is, so to speak, ‘contaminated’ by a range of other factors, due to the social nature of cognition and the many forces shaping the broader social determination of the relevant conceptual content.  (“The blemish of determinateness”, in Hegel’s great phrase.)  This would be a step towards a more ‘genealogical’ orientation.

But then, given that forces beyond the narrowly-understood “force of the better reason” are ‘always already’ at play in the determination of conceptual content, a question arises about whether it is always reasonable to draw a sharp line between the (narrowly understood) “force of the better reason” and other kinds of motives.  Here the more thoroughgoingly ‘genealogical’ perspective would say: the line we draw between reasonable reasons and unreasonable motives is itself a pragmatic one; motives are granted the status of reasons by our treating them as such within our normative practices; there is no line ‘in nature’ that allows us to pick out one category of motive as intrinsically missing the socially-granted light of reason.  Indeed, one of the goals of Hegel’s theodicy is to ultimately bathe all of irrational nature in this divine light.  The genealogical perspective emerges when we take this Hegelian refusal to draw a sharp line between reason and motive, reason and cause, reason and practice, reason and desire… and yet reject the Hegelian theodicy that makes reality as a whole rational.

Here we are thrown back to the opening of ‘Making It Explicit’, where Brandom draws a distinction between discursive practice driven by “the force of the better reason” and the coercive practices of material sanction – beating people with sticks.  One of the features of Hegel’s alarmingly retributive theory of justice is that reason manifests through coercion too.  I take Brandom not to endorse this Hegelian claim – but the cost of Brandom’s refusal to tackle this dimension of Hegel’s project is a failure to integrate non-discursive practice into his account.  I don’t myself want to end up in the same political place as Hegel – but I think we can do better than ‘A Spirit of Trust’ does in reckoning with this dimension of the Phenomenology.

In any case, clearly I have a lot of work to do in this space.  But I think here, in very broad brush strokes, I’ve outlined the conceptual map that plausibly connects Brandomian normative pragmatics to game-theoretic modelling of political-economic institutions.  This map covers the terrain I want to continue to explore.  There is a huge amount of ‘colouring in’ required to get any of this even faintly ‘operational’.  But this is the space I want to be thinking in.  We’ll see whether I can work any of this up into anything approaching respectability.

Dispositions and desires

A quick and very schematic post to bring together a few things.

First thing: this lecture by Charles Taylor, which I listened to today, and which seems to me to draw a useful distinction between two kinds of reductionism concerning human action.  (Taylor is strongly opposed to these reductionist projects.  I am in favour of them, provided they can be carried out in a way that doesn’t make them ‘problematically’ reductionist, as I think they can be.  But the main point here is just the typology.)

Taylor distinguishes between 1) scientific causal reductionism (e.g. explaining human action in neurophysiological terms) and 2) the reduction of ‘higher’ human goals to ‘lower’ human goals (e.g. reducing pursuit of the intrinsic good to pursuit of gratification).  I’m going to call these objective and subjective reductionism.  

I think this is a useful distinction.  It corresponds to what I’ve been calling the challenges of ‘naturalism’ and ‘cynicism’ in recent posts (e.g. here).  Taylor identifies ‘subjective reductionism’ with Hume and Humeanism.  Anyway, this is the first distinction I want to draw.

The second distinction I want to draw concerns “direction of fit” in the philosophy of action.  This is a concept that is built out of Anscombe’s ‘shopping list’ example (which I discussed in the last post).  The idea is something like: attitudes can relate to facts in the world – but there are two ways they can relate.  If my attitude is attempting to correspond to the facts in the world, this is an effort at representation.  If I am trying to make the world correspond to my attitude, this is an effort at action.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Desire (by Tim Schroeder) puts it like this:

beliefs are like declarative sentences, which are satisfied (made true) by whether the world as it is conforms to them, but desires are like imperative sentences, which are satisfied (fulfilled) by changes in the world bringing the world into conformity with them. 

That’s the second thing I want to summarise.

The third thing comes from Brandom’s introductory notes to his 2006 course on contemporary philosophical naturalism.  (I appreciate that I’m largely just cribbing basic points from other people’s high-level summaries here, but so it goes.)  There, in his notes on the Vienna Circle’s project, Brandom distinguishes between naturalism and empiricism.  These are notes so Brandom doesn’t unpack things at huge length, but I take it that the point is that naturalism gives high epistemic weight to the best findings of empirical science, whereas empiricism gives high epistemic weight to the experience of the senses.  Brandom writes:

Schlick led the empiricist wing of the Vienna Circle, and Neurath led the naturalist wing, with Carnap the mediating, synthesizing, irenic center.  All thought and hoped that empiricism and naturalism could be integrated compatibly in the end.  The disagreement was over what to do if not.  

In other words, are we giving priority to scientific findings, and experience be damned; or are we giving priority to subjective experience, as the only proper epistemic ground for scientific findings?

Ok.  So those are my three things.  Now, bringing them together, I want to say the following:

I take it that Sellars (Brandom’s most important influence in a range of ways) takes himself to be inheriting and developing Carnap’s project in a way that leans towards the naturalistic (rather than empiricist) wing of the Vienna Circle.  This is so in two ways.  

First, Sellars’ modification of Kant’s transcendental idealism simply bites the bullet and identifies the noumenal realm with the ultimate best findings of natural science.  The realm of experience, by contrast, is phenomenal – it is transcendentally ideal, in Sellars’ Carnap-influenced linguistic sense of that term.  So Sellars’ philosophy of science gives more epistemic weight to scientific findings than to the (transcendentally ideal) stuff of empirical perception.

Second, and famously, Sellars is highly critical of “the myth of the given” – the idea that experience can grant us a pre-conceptual foundation for erecting our conceptual structures.  This is a direct attack on at least ‘naive’ empiricisms.

Now on to Brandom.  Brandom’s relation to Sellars’ Kantian philosophy of science is quite complex (obviously Brandom is a Hegelian rather than a Kantian, and therefore doesn’t accept the strong phenomenal/noumenal distinction even when reconfigured in Sellars’ naturalistic terms).  But Brandom adopts Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given wholesale.  Brandom and Sellars are not anti-empiricst in a broad sense of that term (they place value in the empirical sciences, etc.), but they definitely are anti-empiricist in a narrow sense: they reject the idea of pre-conceptual experience as epistemically foundational.

For this reason, Brandom goes so far as to never make use of the concept (or even, I think, the word) “experience” in his philosophy.  The category that stands in for experience, in Brandom, is “reliable differential responsive dispositions”.  That is to say, for Brandom, the idea of creatures as having a disposition to respond to stimuli in a predictable way does all the work that “experience” does in traditional empiricism.

This is an extremely “behaviourist” move on Brandom’s part.  In terms of Taylor’s distinction between (in my vocabulary) objective and subjective reductionisms, Brandom is decisively opting for the “objective” pole.  He is dealing with behavioural dispositions, responsive tendencies, causal relations between input and output – not experience, subjective perception, etc. etc.  And this is a strategic choice designed to, essentially, cut the Gordian knot of all the problems subjective empiricism has subjected itself to, from Hume to the Vienna Circle and beyond.

Fine.  I don’t have a problem with this at all.  I have no interest in fighting for empiricism in the narrow (subjective) sense – I sort of don’t hugely care about this set of problems (while acknowledging their importance).

But now change the pole of the ‘direction of fit’ distinction.  That is to say: think not about theory of knowledge, but theory of action.  This is what I want to talk about.

I find Taylor’s intellectual history, locating this tendency in Hume, to be helpful, because Hume is clearly* a subjectivist along both directions of the action/epistemology “direction of fit”.

[*I say “clearly”, but Hume is one of those philosophers that I have actually read, but so long ago that I don’t trust my own memory.  Probably I need to reread Hume at some point.  But I’m going to roll with my impression of him for now.]

Along the epistemology direction of fit, Hume is an empiricist in every sense.  He (famously) sees our scientific concepts as generalisations from tendencies in subjective experience, and as therefore necessarily having no very strong lawlike robustness.  This argument (again famously) is what prompts Kant to develop his doctrine of the synthetic a prior categories – and in a relatively strong sense all the philosophers I’ve been wrangling on here are downstream of that Kantian move.

Along the action direction of fit, Hume is interested in sentiment as motive – he’s a subjectivist reductionist about what we value.  He is all about utility, gratification, and instrumental reason as the decision mechanism for achieving that gratification.  For Taylor, this makes him more or less the devil himself, the true moment at which the rot decisively sets in when it comes to the moral philosophy of modernity.  The “pleasure principle” traditions that I’ve been talking about wanting to identify myself with are (in Taylor’s intellectual history, at least) all downstream of the basic Humean move concerning the sources of human action and value.

So here’s the issue.  I’m happy to grant to Brandom (and Sellars) the rejection of Humean empiricism (in its Vienna Circle variety) in favour of ‘objective’ reductionism – the replacement of experience with reliable differential responsive dispositions.  However, I am not prepared to cede the analogous move along the “action” direction of fit.  I don’t want to just talk about dispositions when it comes to the sources of action.  I want to talk, also, about desires and gratifications – the “pleasure principle”.

In other words, there’s an asymmetry in my philosophical preferences.  I’m basically totally indifferent to the objective versus subjective reductionism question when it comes to epistemology – I’m happy for reliable differential responsive dispositions to carry all the philosophical weight.  But I want to make space for desire, gratification, pleasure when it comes to action.  And that applies both to psychoanalytic inheritors of the ‘Humean’ move in philosophy of action, and to ‘rational choice’ inheritors in the mathematised apparatus of utility theory.  I want to keep space for all of this in my philosophical apparatus.

[NB: I appreciate, of course, that if you have a social epistemology that grounds knowledge in distributed action across a complex recognitive community, you can’t separate out your epistemology from your theory of action – this, after all, is one of Brandom’s (and Hegel’s) big claims. But I think it’s clear enough what I’m getting at here – the relevant cutting of the Gordian knot with respect to subjective empiricism is happening at the level of the individual social actor.]

My current view is that Brandom is, by contrast, happy to jettison the ‘subjective’ side of Taylor’s two reductionisms more or less completely, along both directions of fit.  This, I think, is why Brandom collapses Hegel’s discussion of desire (in the concluding sections of the Spirit section of the Phenomenology) into Gilbert Harman’s naturalistic attempt to explain normative statuses in terms of normative attitudes – collapsing subjective reductionism into objective reductionism.  But these are, I think, different things.  For this reason, I think Brandom is missing a crucial dimension of the Phenomenology: Hegel’s wrestling with the Humean (though not only Humean) problematic of desire and utility.

Anyway, this is what I wanted to say.  I don’t know how best to “bring desire back in” to Brandom, but I do think that this element of Brandom’s inheritance from and development of Sellars is preventing him from fully engaging with an important element of the Phenomenology… in fact, with the element of the Phenomenology that is most important to me, interested as I am in the contemporary forms of “subjective reductionism” (psychoanalysis and marginal utility theory) that descend from this basic ‘Humean’ philosophical move.

Beyond Brandom – the pleasure principle

Ok – once again circling around ideas that I’ve already covered on the blog, in the hope of slowly advancing, somehow.  Let me summarise where I’ve gotten to again.

In the last couple of posts I’ve outlined in a maximally schematic and programmatic way the basic apparatus I’m trying to assemble here, and what I think it’s good for.  Basically I want to push beyond Brandom in a range of ways, and I’m trying here, in an inchoate way, to think about what those ways are.

This ties in to the research sub-projects I was interested in pursuing back in April.  In that post I articulated the areas I wanted to focus on in extending or modifying Brandom as follows: pluralism; conflict theory; psychodynamics.  I was worried that Brandom’s apparatus gives inadequate weight to normative pluralism, and I wanted to push on that.  I also felt that Brandom’s apparatus didn’t spend any serious time on conflict, and I wanted to address that.  Finally, I wanted to push in the direction of ‘psychodynamics’ – bring more Freudian, psychoanalytic resources to bear on the Brandomian theoretical space.

I still agree with all of that, and I’ve done some reading in these areas, although of course it’s a drop in the ocean – I’ve barely advanced along any of these fronts.  Still, I want to revisit these subprojects, and mildly reconfigure how I think about them.

On pluralism, I have no objections to how I thought about that project back in April – I’m interested in how a Brandomian project can reckon with depth normative pluralism.  I now think that to tackle this issue I need to spend significant time with Carnap, who is (as I understand things) a pluralist about logic – and therefore about the ‘categorial’ elements of Sellars’ linguistic Kantianism that is so important for Brandom.  I’ll come back to this if and when I’ve actually read Carnap.

On the other two issues, though – conflict/coercion and psychodynamics – I want to rejig things slightly.  I’m now thinking that a lot (though certainly not all) of what one might want to say about coercion flows out of psychodynamics.  After all, what is coercion other than threatening people with disincentives (pain, shame, etc.) if they don’t do what you say?  It seems to me, then, that if you’ve got a “pleasure and pain as incentives for action” apparatus up and running, a lot of what you might want to say about coercion flows fairly directly out of that apparatus.  (This is why game theory can unproblematically model coercion, contra Ellen Meiksins Wood: coercion is basically just a matter of a particular kind of possible imposition of disutility.)

And so I want to recentre this end of things in thinking about “the pleasure principle”.  This is, of course, Freud’s phrase.  (For what it’s worth, I reject Freud’s move “beyond the pleasure principle” – the mid-period Freudian apparatus is what I’m taking my bearings from here.) 

As I see it (and I apologise, I’m repeating myself yet again here) there are two great theoretical projects that see human behaviour as regulated by “the pleasure principle” – psychoanalysis and utilitarianism.  Utilitarianism has led to formal decision theory, mathematised economics – all that good stuff – and I really ought to be spending more time on this mathematised utilitarian end of things, given my supposed research interests.  Utilitarian-influenced social theory is vast in scope and influence, and exhibits all the features of a respectable normal science.  By contrast, psychoanalysis has never really (in my view) successfully achieved the status of a normal science – it is too full of crackpots (of which of course I am one), and highly vulnerable to the problems of unfalsifiability that make it a favourite target of (say) Popperian philosophy of science.  And yet, at some level I think that psychoanalysis has core insights that we should learn from.  For me, when I think about my real commitments, I see mathematised utilitarian choice theory as a pale shadow of the real insights associated with locating “the pleasure principle” at the heart of human behaviour.  Those real insights can be found in psychoanalysis, for all its many abundantly-documented flaws.

Anyway, the choice between psychoanalytic resources and mathematised decision-theoretic resources lies downstream of the basic philosophical commitment, here, as I see it – which is locating “the pleasure principle” at the heart of human action.  At that level of abstraction, Freud and Bentham can agree: we are motivated by pleasure and by the avoidance of pain, and the countless complexities of human behaviour are downstream of this basic fact about us.  Of course, many people see this as a vulgar, even a degrading commitment.  My claim, obviously, is that something in the space of the Brandomian apparatus can ‘redeem’ this commitment for an account of normativity that exhibits the features of ‘non-instrumental reason’ that critics of “the pleasure principle” typically desire.

And yet I say “something in the space of the Brandomian apparatus”, because I think fairly extensive adjustments probably need to be made to the Brandomian apparatus to accommodate this project.  Brandom, at base, isn’t so interested in desire.  He isn’t so interested in “the pleasure principle”.  For Brandom, the key motive force in his apparatus is human beings’ vulnerability to “the force of the better reason”.  The motor of Brandom’s account of social dynamics is “the game of giving and asking for reasons”.  The force of the better reason – and of the purely normative sanctions associated with being seen not to have met one’s discursive obligations by social actors we regard as having the authority to properly make this normative judgement – is what makes Brandom’s account of linguistic practice go.

To a crude but reasonable first approximation, I want to fold all this into “the pleasure principle”.  That is, I want to say that the displeasure associated with being normatively sanctioned by those we grant authority to do so, and the pleasure of being vindicated by “the force of the better reason”, is just one kind of pleasure and displeasure in the roiling psychodynamics of our emotional lives.  I want to bring in other factors too – other desires and satisfactions.  I want to say that all kinds of desires can also acquire normative statuses, as they are granted those statuses by others’ attitudes towards them.  And if “the pleasure principle” is the underlying motive force of all of this, then there is no barrier to analysing coercion (or bribery, or seduction, or sadistic delight in cruelty, or so on and so forth) using the same underlying apparatus we use to analyse “the force of the better reason”.

Downstream of this move, we can then decide whether we want to specifically analyse pleasure-principle-motivated behaviour using the apparatus of psychoanalysis or the apparatus of formal decision theory.  This is a contextual question of, essentially, modelling convenience.  But we need to bring “the pleasure principle” into the basic philosophical and social-theoretic apparatus for such modelling to be possible in the first place.

So that’s the goal.  I feel radically under-prepared, under-educated, and under-read, in terms of having the resources to pursue that goal.  I guess I probably need to read more in moral philosophy and philosophy of action, to see how people tend to theorise the relationship between reason and desire?  But I’m really not sure how best to pursue this project.  Still, that’s my current reconfiguration of what I’m trying to do here.

Cynical reason

Ok – let me circle around this same content another time.  In the last post I distinguished between three different critiques of claims to normative action that ‘cynical’ or ‘genealogical’ consciousness can make.

One critique went as follows: You may think you’re following norms, but you’re really just following your beliefs about norms – there are no norms there, really, only your beliefs.

This critique comes in a local and a global variety.  

In the local variety, it claims: there are norms out there (probably I know what they are) but you’re completely wrong about them.  Your beliefs about norms are false beliefs, so you’re not really following norms (though I am).

In the global variety, it claims: there are no norms at all, only beliefs about norms.  Beliefs about norms can do all the explanatory work that we might want norms to do, so let’s just evacuate norms from our picture altogether.  (This is a form of ‘nihilism’.)

As I said in the last post, Brandom has a complicated (and in my view adequate) set of responses to this critique.  However, in terms of my own typology (naturalism/nihilism, perspectivalism/relativism, cynicism/cynicism), this is really a form of nihilistic naturalism, not a form of cynicism.  And I’m interested here, now, in ‘cynical reason’.

I want to try out the following idea: what characterises cynical reason is its attitude towards motives. I am interested here in the relationship between desires, motives, and reasons.  Cynical reason says: you are motivated by desires not reasons.

Again, cynical reason has a local and a global variety.

The local variety says: you may say that such-and-such an action was motivated by high norms, but actually it was motivated by base desires – you were simply motivated by a form of gratification or pleasure, not the norm.  For example: you may say you are motivated by doing good, but actually you are motivated by fear of divine punishment and desire for divine reward.  Or: you may say you are motivated by doing good, but actually you are motivated by the gratifications associated with others seeing you as a good person – you are really motivated by reputation.  And so on and so forth.  Any given action can be ‘critiqued’ by ‘cynical reason’ along these lines.

The global variety says: this is true of all action.  All action is simply motivated by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.  All human action can be explained by the expected gratifications associated with the action.  Even apparent counterexamples of extremes of self-sacrifice are really just the product of psychological structures that mean the gratifications associated with self-sacrifice (belief in a reward after death; the gratification associated with imagining one’s posthumous earthly reputation; the desire to avoid the shame of earthly condemnation by those whose opinions you value more than your own life) outweigh the fear of death or the horror of pain.  And so on.

I want to claim that there’s a close analogy between the relationship between normative attitudes and normative statuses, and the relationship between desires-as-motive and reasons-as-motive.  However, I also want to claim that these are, even so, different domains that need to be analysed separately.  I claim that Brandom is collapsing cynical reason’s critique of reasons as motives into naturalistic reason’s critique of norms as attitudes.  But I think these need to be kept at least somewhat separate.

Nevertheless, I also claim that a closely parallel argument to Brandom’s can be made in connection to desires and reasons, with respect to motives.  Just as Brandom explains normative attitudes as instituting normative statuses by participating in a complex social system with the right structure, so, I want to claim, desires can rightly be treated as rational motives, provided they are also part of the same appropriately structured complex social system.

The problem with cynical reason, then, is not that it misidentifies desires as motives.  The problem with cynical reason is that it thinks that by identifying motives as desires, it is ‘crowding out’ the ability of those desires to also be rational or justified motives.

I think this is all relevant for how we navigate the world around us, the social world of which we are a part.  It is good to be able to see people’s motive structures for what they are.  People are, in fact, motivated by gratifications.  Nobody does good actions ‘just to be good’ – they do good actions because there is some gratification associated with that action, or some fear associated with not taking the action.  And, in fact, the ‘mechanism design’ task of ethical systems is to shape people’s psychological and social structures of gratifications and pain in such a way as to elicit the ‘right’ behaviour.  It’s desire (pleasure, pain, gratification, reward, etc.) all the way down – that’s just how humans are made.

But taking this attitude is not to evacuate the normative.  A normative system is one that institutes rational justifications in a way that (sometimes) aligns those justifications with desire.  A motive can be both a desire and a reason (if reason and desire align).

In my view this point is a central preoccupation of Hegel’s.  For me (with my interests) Brandom folding this point about desire into his point about normative attitudes is the greatest ‘loss’ in Brandom’s interpretation of the Phenomenology.  And this element of Hegel is also why Hegel is influential within the ‘genealogical’ tradition that adopts ‘cynical reason’ as its watchword.

Anyway, I want to mobilise Brandom’s apparatus for a more ‘genealogical’ theoretical approach than Brandom’s own.  And I think this is one of the spaces I need to push on, in order to achieve that.

Motives and Instrumentalism

This post aims to go over material that I’ve already covered on the blog, and then maybe try to advance a little bit in associating around those thoughts.  This is (I regret to say) a very inarticulate post, and (as I say at the end) would benefit even more than usual from me having done a lot more reading than I have.  In any case, the goal is to further specify the problem space I am primarily now interested in – which is to say, the relation between the analytic Hegelian apparatus of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ and ‘genealogical’ social theory.

I’m pretty happy with the typology I articulated a few posts ago on the blog (in my post ‘Nihilism, Relativism, Cynicism’).  This typology feels like a genuine advance, to me, in my clarity of thinking in this space.  That’s not saying much, given the general muddiness of my thinking, but still.

In that post, I said that there are three big objections to ‘genealogical’ projects of the kinds pursued by thinkers like Marx and Freud.  First objection: naturalism leads to nihilism.  Second objection: perspectivalism leads to relativism.  Third objection: cynicism leads to… well, I guess just to cynicism, which is bad in itself.

I also said that I feel that Brandom’s apparatus addresses the first two of these objections very well.  On naturalism: I still don’t feel fully on top of Brandom’s complicated engagement with philosophical naturalism, but the broad outline of Brandom’s position is, I think, clear enough.  Brandom argues that social practices (which are features of the natural world) can institute norms, and that as members of the normative communities so instituted we can then properly regard those practices as themselves normative.  On perspectivalism: Brandom develops a social-perspectival formal concept of objectivity, using his ‘double-bookkeeping’ scorekeeping apparatus.  This apparatus allows Brandom to explain how our standards of normative assessment are not tethered to any specific social perspective, while still being entirely comprehensible in perspectival terms.

So as I see it, Brandom has adequately taken care of the first two big objections to ‘genealogical’ social theory.  On the issue of cynicism, though, I feel like Brandom’s apparatus is shakier (at least by my lights and in terms of my own theoretical goals).  As I argued in the post, as I see it Brandom has a tendency to collapse critiques of cynicism into critiques of naturalism – but these are not the same.

Here’s a long passage from page 552 of ‘A Spirit of Trust’ that I see as conflating – or at least moving rapidly between – several issues that I would prefer to treat separately.

Consider the official who exercises state power.  He has committed himself to act purely according to universal interests or norms.  That is, he commits himself to doing only what acknowledgement of the norms requires.  But every actual performance is a particular doing, and incorporates contingency.  It is always more than just the acknowledgement of a norm, and may well also be less than that.  (I can never just turn on the light or feed the poor – I am always also doing other things, such as alerting the burglar, or cutting the education budget or raising taxes.)  Contingent motives and interests will always be in play.  Thus it will always be possible for the niedertrӓchtig consciousness to point out the moment of disparity, the particularity and contingency that infects each action.  It is never just an instance of the universal.  The Kammerdiener can always explain what the hero of service did in terms of self-interested (hence particular, contingent) motives and interests, rather than as a response to an acknowledged normative necessity.  There is no action at all that is not vulnerable to this sort of reductive, ignoble description.

Broadening our horizons a little bit, I think we can see an issue being raised concerning the relations between norms and attitudes quite generally.  The Kammerdiener does not appeal to norms in his explanations of behaviour.  The attitudes of individuals are enough.  The public official says that he acted as he did because it was his duty.  The Kammerdiener offers a competing explanation that appeals only to his desires.  What his duty actually is, what he ought to do, plays no role in this account.  Thought of at this level of generality, the moral-psychological valet stands for a kind of nihilism about norms that has most recently been championed by Gilbert Harman for the special case of moral norms.  According to this view, invoking moral norms or values is explanatorily otiose.  For we can offer explanations of everything that actually happens in terms of people’s views about what is right and wrong, what they take to be permissible or obligatory.  It is those attitudes that are causally efficacious.  And those attitudes – believing that it is wrong to steal, for instance – would have just the same causal consequences whether or not there were facts to which they corresponded, whether or not it is in fact wrong to steal.

(ASOT 552)

I want to distinguish three different points that I take Brandom to be making in this passage.  I think these points are different enough that they really ought to be treated separately.

The first point concerns Brandom’s Davidsonian-Hegelian theory of action.  I’ve blogged about this before, but just to recap very quickly: Brandom summarises his theory of action using the example of the person pressing the light switch, turning on the light, and alerting the burglar.  On one theory of action (which Brandom rejects), this scenario is best understood as a sequence of events, where the first event truly counts as an action, and subsequent events are different consequences of that action.  On this (non-Brandomian) account, the action is pressing the light switch, and two consequences of that action are turning on the light and alerting the burglar.

Brandom’s preferred alternative account is that this entire nexus of events is one action, seen from different perspectives.  What makes the action an action is that at least one of its elements is intended by the person doing the action.  But this action then has a range of unintended dimensions, that nevertheless count as part of the action precisely because one dimension of the action was intended.

Something in the space of this theory of action seems right to me.  However, I also think we should be a bit cautious about adopting Brandom-Hegel’s theory of action uncritically.  The reason for caution, as I see it, is that we nevertheless do want to retain the ability to draw a distinction between an action and its consequences.  We don’t (in my view) want every event that exists in any causal chain downstream of some action to count as part of that action.  At least, it seems to me that we clearly don’t want that.  At some point we want to be able to pragmatically draw a line around an action and say “such-and-such is (no doubt in some complex multicausal way) a consequence of this action, but it isn’t really part of the action”.  And given that we have granted ourselves the ability to draw this pragmatic line at all, it is then an open matter of rational dispute where the line should actually be drawn.

There’s lots more that could be said in this direction – and, I think, more distinctions that could be drawn.  (For example, the tripartite distinction between: events that are part of an action; events for which the action (and actor) are responsible; and events that are a consequence of the action.  These categories can overlap in different ways – but this is not the place to pursue these lines of thought.)

Anyway, the reason I’m rehearsing all this is the following: Brandom presents his theory of action in social-perspectival terms, but this social-perspectival account is really capturing two different ways in which actions can be seen from different perspectives.  First, there are literally different events.  (The light turning on could have happened without the burglar being alerted, had there been no burglar.  So these aren’t just the same event seen from different perspectives, they can be ‘objectively’ distinguished.)  Second, there is the same event (not just the same action) interpreted in different ways.  I raise my hand, and one person interprets this action as a wave of greeting, another person interprets it as an instruction to stop moving.  This is the same event interpreted differently.  

So these are (and I realise this is a crass point) two different ways in which the same action looks different from different social perspectives.  From the perspective of the homeowner (at the time), turning on the light means illuminating the kitchen; from the (retrospective) perspective of the police, turning on the light also means alerting the burglar to the homeowner’s presence.  Because these can be distinguished as different events (hence the ability to analyse them as different moments of a causal chain), these different perspectives are not just different perspectives.  By contrast, when two people interpret the same movement of the arm in different ways, this is (in a way that I’m about to qualify in a moment) ‘just’ a social-perspectival matter.

With that said, and having drawn this distinction, it now needs to be emphasised that this distinction is less robust than it might appear, because on a Brandomian theory of action (and, derivatively, of semantic content), there is no semantic content independent of the web of consequences associated with action.  The implications of an action produce the content of the action, and therefore are ‘always already’ part of the action itself.  A disagreement about the interpretation of an action is therefore in turn a disagreement about which consequences are the ‘core’ or intended implications of an action (these in turn aren’t necessarily the same thing), and which are incidental.  If I raise my hand, this can have either the consequence of being interpreted as a greeting or as an instruction to halt.  Which of these interpretations I intended is (from one perspective) the ‘truth’ of the subjective dimension of an action that makes it into an action, but this is not necessarily the same as the ‘real’ content of the action (when seen from another perspective).

We therefore I think need to preserve the distinction between the content of an action and the consequences of an action, while acknowledging that this is a pragmatic distinction where the content of an action is itself produced by which ‘consequences’ we choose to treat as ‘internal’ to the action.

(I’m not being very articulate here, but my intuition, for what it’s worth, is that something in this broad space needs to be right, even if I’m messing up the articulation of it.)

Now, when considering the passage from ‘A Spirit of Trust’ that I quoted above, I think it’s important to keep in mind these two different ways in which Brandom’s theory of action gives us different perspectives on the same action.  Specifically, these two different (pragmatically distinguishable) categories of different perspective on action correspond to two different ways in which the Kammerdiener can interpret an action as ignoble.

Let’s follow Brandom in using the example of an official who exercises state power.  Let’s say the official implements some official decree in some specific way.  This implementation (let’s say it’s a change in the practical interpretation of tax law) benefits the official’s family.  On a non-Brandomian theory of action, that benefit is a consequence of the official’s action; on a Brandomian theory it is an aspect of the action.  The cynical (let’s say, public choice) interpretation of the official’s action is that they carried out the action because of this dimension of the action.  One way to interpret this element of Brandom’s argument here, then, is that Brandom is drawing a distinction between the ‘noble’ elements of an action and the ‘ignoble’ elements of an action, and saying that because no action has only one dimension, it is always possible to re-interpret even a noble action as if its ignoble dimensions are really its core.  On this account, the ‘good’ motive of the state official would be to follow a norm, and the ‘bad’ motive of the state official would be to benefit their family financially, and the fact that both of these are elements of the action permits the Kammerdiener to always emphasis the negative (but contingent) element of every action.

Let’s call this the first position that Brandom can be seen as articulating here.  This position is something like: there are at least two possible goals for every action, because every action has multiple dimensions – one is following the norm; the other is (let’s say) self-interest.  The Kammerdiener always chooses to interpret action in terms of the ignoble goal rather than the goal of norm-following.  We’re here talking about two different classes of motive, basically, a good and a bad one.  Every action can be interpreted in the light of either; the Kammerdiener always picks the cynical option.

Ok.  Again I’m being inarticulate, but I think it’s clear in broad brush strokes what I’m getting at.  Now on to point two.

This is the point that Brandom attributes to Gilbert Harman.  (Note to self: I ought to read Harman.)  This point is – the motive for engaging in normative action can only ever be that we believe that such-and-such is the right thing to do, rather than that something is the right thing to do.  In other words, our motives for action are not norms (normative statuses) but our beliefs about norms (normative attitudes).  Therefore, norms themselves (normative statuses) are explanatorily redundant – all we need, in explanatory terms, is normative attitudes.  This (as Brandom sees it) is a form of reductionist naturalistic nihilism.  I take it that this kind of position is a major target of Brandom’s apparatus, and I take it that Brandom has adequately addressed this Harmanian position.

Now on to point three.  This is the position that Brandom summarises as follows:

The public official says that he acted as he did because it was his duty.  The Kammerdiener offers a competing explanation that appeals only to his desires.

Brandom glosses this position in terms of Harman’s explanatory elimination of normative statuses in terms of normative attitudes. Alternatively, one could gloss it in terms of the first position that I articulate above – the point about (in non-Brandomian language) multiple consequences of any given action. As I see it, though, the position that Brandom is capturing in these two sentences is in fact dramatically different from Harman’s (at least as summarised by Brandom – again, I need to read Harman himself!), and subtly different from the ‘multiple dimensions of action’ point.  The position being summarised here is about motive (not quite the same thing as goal). 

Let’s say we adopt Harman’s position, and think that normative attitudes are all that have any explanatory power with respect to normative action.  A normative attitude, in this context, is a belief that such-and-such an action is wrong.  We can (I’m suggesting) distinguish this point from the question of what motivates us to take an action.  The Kammerdiener, in this context, is saying that desire is what motivates the action.  The tacit argument here, then, is that the gratifications associated with following our desires are what is explanatorily relevant – and this is a different point from the claim that beliefs about norms (rather than norms themselves) are what is explanatorily relevant.  We can imagine a Harmanian position which sees an agent as motivated by something other than desire, in acting in accordance with the contents of their normative attitudes.  The question of whether normative attitudes are tethered to actual normative statuses is basically orthogonal to the question of why we act in accordance with those attitudes.  Here the Kammerdiener is saying: we only act in accordance with those attitudes because we are driven by desire.

Ok.  Let me try to summarise this very muddled post.

I am distinguishing at least three different points that are moved through in the passage from Brandom I quoted.

• Every action has multiple elements – in a non-Brandomian framework we would phrase this point by saying that every action has multiple consequences.
• Because every action has multiple elements, it is always possible to see an action’s goal (or content) as the least ‘noble’ of those elements/consequences.  We can explain every action not in terms of the goal of “fulfilling a duty”, but in terms of some other, ignoble goal that accompanies the noble goal in practice.  That’s the first point.
• Second point.  Even if we see an action’s goal as “fulfilling a duty”, rather than some less noble goal, the only explanatorily relevant element of that goal is belief about one’s duties – the duty itself is explanatorily redundant.  So we can evacuate normative statuses from our framework, and analyse things only in terms of normative attitudes.
• Third point.  Even if we grant that an action’s goal is fulfilling a duty, and even if we grant that there really is a duty to be fulfilled, a case can still be made that “fulfilling a duty” is not itself a motive for action.  What is really a motive for action is gratifying desire.  And so our real motives are gratifying our desires, even if those desires have been constituted so as to align with our beliefs about our duties, and even if those duties are real. This point could be interpreted as a variant of the first point, above, but I think it is worth keeping distinct, for reasons that I haven’t really adequately articulated in this post.

As I see it these are three quite different ‘critical’ moves, each of which makes a different assault on the idea that we are norm-governed creatures.  I think Brandom has a decisive (or at a minimum, very well-developed) rebuttal to the second of these objections (the Harman point).  But I think he also has a tendency to collapse the first and third objections into the second one.  In particular, I think Brandom systematically ‘hears’ the point about desire as a point about normative attitudes, even though (as I see it) these are quite different points.  A normative attitude is, fundamentally, a belief; a desire is… well, a desire.  How our desires interact with our beliefs feels like a deep topic that I have basically not explored at all.  And yet I think this question needs to be front and centre when we are thinking about ‘genealogy’.

Moreover (jumping off a cliff into a totally different space, and very telegraphically), there are as I see it two great traditions (at least, two traditions that I’m interested in!) that are focused on desire or gratification as the motive structure of action – psychoanalysis (in the critical genealogical space) and rational choice theory (in the space of economics and other quantitative social sciences).  Both of these traditions centre desire/utility rather than belief in their accounts of action – they are focused on (I guess) practical reason rather than theoretical reason – and their arguments are, therefore, largely orthogonal to the Harman/Brandom debate about the relation between normative attitudes and normative statuses.  And yet when Brandom runs into ‘genealogical’ thinkers who emphasise desire rather than duty as a motive for action, he tends to assimilate this point to the normative attitudes / normative statuses debate. I’m arguing that this is a mistake.

Anyway – I’m 100% confident that there is a vast literature tackling these issues (presumably somewhere in moral philosophy?) that I simply haven’t read, and that if I were to read that literature (or find the right works within it) I would have the vocabulary and categories to talk and think about these issues properly.  Hopefully one day I’ll find works that can walk me through this theoretical space.  In any case, as so often, I’m putting up this post anyway, for now, to try to inch forward in my own head, however embarrassing the vast gaps in my knowledge are.

Derrida and Brandom again

I keep circling around this, even though I don’t really want to be thinking about it. If I’m serious about it I ought to sit down and read or reread, at a minimum: Aristotle’s Metaphysics; Husserl’s Logical Investigations; more Heidegger; the relevant Derrida.  I really don’t want to do that.  So in lieu of doing it, I’m posting on the blog again.

As I see it (repeating here content I’ve already gone over on the blog in more telegraphic, and perhaps slightly modified, form) there are arguably two big points of disagreement, and one big point of agreement, between Brandom and Derrida.

First, Brandom thinks that Derrida’s semantics are naive.  Brandom thinks that Derrida is operating with a Saussurian signifier/signified distinction, and that this is a wholly inadequate semantic apparatus for Derrida to base his project off of.  I’m not sure the extent to which Brandom thinks that Derrida is literally just reducing the signified to the signifier, and the extent to which Brandom thinks that Derrida just lacks the semantic resources to articulate a more sophisticated point, because Derrida is operating within such a meagre tradition of philosophical semantics.  In any case, Brandom thinks Derrida is simply no good on semantics.

Now, I am myself no good on semantics.  Fundamentally, as I keep saying, my interest is in the pragmatics side of Brandom’s project, not the semantics side.  I am worried, though, that this simply isn’t a credible approach to take – that if I spent the best part of a decade deeply engaged with Derrida, and now more than a decade deeply engaged with Brandom, I am in fact clearly preoccupied by the philosophy of language whether I want to be or not, and I really simply ought to do my homework better.

In any case, my impulse is that Brandom is being unfair to Derrida on this score – but fundamentally I don’t feel I understand the terrain of philosophical semantics well enough to make my case.  The way to start to fix this, on the Derrida side, would be to read Husserl properly, and work through Derrida’s early engagement with Husserl’s theory of signs.  I really don’t want to do that – but maybe I should??

So there’s the basic “unpack what the disagreements and commonalities actually are here, in terms of philosophical semantics” side of things.

Then there’s the fact that (and here I’m much more confident that I’m on solid ground) Brandom and Derrida are making the same core point about the determination of conceptual content by unpredictable and ‘ungovernable’ social context.  They’re both getting this point from Hegel, in some sense.  But it’s a good point, and they’re right to make it.  Derrida’s core argument here is that no conceptual content can ever be fully or definitively determinate, because conceptual content is determined by a social context that is never fully ‘closed’, but is always ongoingly, unpredictably unfolding.  This argument caused a lot of freakout among analytic critics of Derrida, back in the day, but I take it that Brandom and Derrida simply agree on this point, and the difference is that Brandom makes this point in the staid idiom of analytic pragmatism, rather than in the pretentious, opaque idiom of poststructuralism, and therefore people don’t freak out at Brandom.

That point, I think, belongs broadly in the domain of ‘pragmatics’ (though obviously it is about semantics too).

Then, finally, there’s a disagreement that sits in the domain of ‘metaphysics’.  That disagreement concerns ‘logocentrism’, ‘the metaphysics of presence’, ‘onto-theology’, and so forth.  Brandom adopts (at least his version of) the basic Hegelian analysis of reality as conceptually structured – a fundamentally Aristotelian metaphysics, which sees determinate form as shared by the conceptual and the material realms.  Derrida, following Heidegger, is critical of this entire metaphysical tradition as ‘onto-theological’.  For Heidegger, if I am understanding correctly (which I may very well not be, because Heidegger is difficult at best and an obscurantist mystic at frequent worst), this tradition, by understanding being in terms of determinate form, and determinate form as something shared across the material and conceptual realms, is unable to adequately think Being as something distinct from the determinate being of specific entities.  Heidegger’s own thought (I take it the argument goes) then tries to undo this inability to think Being as distinct from determinate beings, by loosening the grip of this ‘onto-theological’ emphasis on determinate being as necessarily always-already conceptually structured.

Derrida takes over key elements of this Heideggerian critique of ‘onto-theology’.  Exactly how Derrida understands his own differences from Heidegger (including the implications of those differences for the obviously extremely fraught issue of Heidegger’s Nazism) I don’t feel I properly understand.  But in any case, Derrida endorses at least some version of this Heideggerian critique of ‘onto-theology’.

Moreover, for Derrida, the three elements I’ve just outlined – the semantic, the pragmatic, and the metaphysical – all lead into each other.  For Derrida, his critique of the idea of ‘pure conceptual content’ that can be conceived independently of its manifestation in signs – Derrida’s critical semantics – leads naturally to the idea that conceptual content must be determined by a never-fully closed ongoing social context.  This idea in turn leads to the idea that no concept is ever fully determinate.  And for Derrida, this idea is in turn the wedge that can be used to break open ‘logocentric’ metaphysics – ‘onto-theology’ or ‘the metaphysics of presence’.  Derrida clearly believes that if he can show that no concept is ever fully or finally determinate, this position will in itself undermine the idea that the same determinate form, shared by the conceptual and the material realms, is the mechanism of our knowledge of the world.

This final point is, I think, where Brandom and Derrida most fundamentally disagree.  Brandom agrees with Derrida that conceptual content is never fully or finally determinate, but he simply doesn’t see this as a problem in adopting a basically Aristotelian/Tractarian metaphysics in which ‘the world is the totality of facts’, those facts are always already in conceptual shape, and we can know the world because the concepts we articulate in our speech share conceptual form (in a normative mode) with the mind-independent facts out there (in alethic modal mode).  Brandom and Derrida, in other words, simply disagree about whether a basically pragmatist account of ongoing, never-fully-complete social determination of conceptual content causes any kind of a problem for a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics.

Anyway, I’ve said all this before – but now I’m saying it again, in a slightly different form.  Thinking about it, I think what this post articulates more clearly than I have previously is the tripartite distinction between elements of each thinker’s argument – the semantic, pragmatic, and metaphysical dimensions of each of the projects.  I also think it’s clearer that the area I’m truly shaky on is the semantics, for what that’s worth.

In terms of my own views: I don’t feel like I really have any serious views in philosophical semantics, to be honest.  I agree with both Derrida and Brandom on the pragmatics (as I say, I think their position is fundamentally the same, here).  On metaphysics: I am, I feel, closer to Derrida than to Brandom, with the major caveat that I worry that Derrida fails to adequately distance himself from Heidegger’s basic mystical irrationalism.  Obviously being an irrationalist mystic isn’t the only reason that Heidegger was also a Nazi, but I don’t want to open the door to anything in that space – affectively, if not substantively, I’m with the positivists.  

My view, however, is that the ‘correct’ take here is basically a thoroughgoingly fallibilist one – something closer to Dewey, or indeed a slightly less dogmatic and crankish Popper.  Basically the idea that our philosophy ought to be able to tell us the fundamental structure of reality is ridiculous – but not because there is an intrinsic ungraspable mystical core to reality (maybe there is, but our philosophy can’t tell us that either).  Rather, we should just adopt a position of epistemic humility, whereby all our categories could be wrong, but that’s no reason not to take them seriously as our best available efforts.  I think both Derrida and Brandom, at their best, partake of that spirit, but both (from my perspective) lapse in different directions – Brandom towards a rationalist metaphysics that sees reality itself as necessarily conceptually structured; Derrida towards an anti-rationalist metaphysics that sees reality itself as necessarily escaping reason.  Better not to have an a priori view on this in either direction, in my view, and just preoccupy ourselves with doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

Nihilism, Relativism, Cynicism

Ok.  I feel like I’m at least pinning down the problem space that I’m after here a bit more precisely.  That problem space is: I want to develop a more ‘genealogical’ Brandomian apparatus, or put Brandom to more ‘genealogical’ uses.  I’m repeating myself a lot here, and I apologise for that, but unfortunately a lot of what the blog is for is laboriously inching forward by working over the same content again and again and again, almost always without having read relevant literature that covers the same content vastly more cogently.  In any case.

It seems to me that one can usefully distinguish three different objections to ‘genealogical’ approaches (in, for example, the social sciences, or in social theory).

Objection number one: Nihilism.  This is the point I was talking about in the last post.  The argument here is, I think, mainly one about naturalism.  We apply naturalistic scientific approaches to the study of the world out there – fine.  (Not everyone agrees with this, of course, but this blog is on board with the broad scientific endeavour.)  Then what happens when we apply natural-scientific analysis to ourselves?  Well, then it turns out that we are natural phenomena too.  And, of course, norms, values, etc. do not appear to be phenomena that exist as objects of natural-scientific study.  So if we take seriously the application of natural-scientific research principles to human phenomena, don’t those principles evacuate normativity (values, etc.) from our world?  Doesn’t science give us a vision of the world in which there are no values to speak of – a nihilistic worldview?

The first wave of Enlightenment theorists basically pre-empted this problem by exceptionalising out human agency and cognition from the domain of the natural sciences.  Descartes had his mind/body dualism; Kant had the distinction between the transcendental and empirical domains, whatever that amounted to.  But over time (and as science’s capacity to explain the human animal in naturalistic terms expanded) more and more theorists decided that the correct approach was simply to bite the bullet, and accept that we are fully natural creatures.  One minority tendency within this approach was to bite a further bullet and endorse nihilism – but the majority tendency was to argue, contra the critics, that normativity is real, and is somehow an artefact of natural behaviour.  This is also the orientation adopted on this blog.  This theoretical tendency looks at the argument that naturalism implies nihilism, and says that there has to be a category error here somewhere.  The problem (this line of thought goes) is in having a faulty conception of normativity, such that we think the existence and legitimacy of norms are precluded by our explanatory apparatus being broadly naturalistic.

Ok.  But what’s the specific argument for this position?  Here, I think, there is not in fact a huge amount of consensus.  Hopefully I’ll have more to say in this space if and when I work through Brandom’s naturalism course (and other materials).  But even based on my current meagre reading, it seems like there are several competing approaches.  There are approaches that see norms, meanings, values etc. as produced by biological processes shaped by natural selection (I take it that ‘teleosemantics’ belongs in this box).  And there are approaches that see norms, etc. as instituted by social practice.  Brandom obviously belongs in this latter box.  If we follow this second line of thought, there are then a range of different ways in which we can explain norms in terms of social practice.  Brandom’s critiques of ‘regularism’ are arguments against one of the most dominant tendencies in this tradition – explaining norms as regularities of social behaviour.

Anyway, this is the first big debate – does naturalism imply nihilism, and if it doesn’t, why not?

Now, let’s say we follow the tradition of which Brandom is a member, and aim to explain norms in terms of social practices.  This move then opens up a second problem space: the problem space of relativism.  Here we take it that norms are produced somehow by social practices, and observe that there is actually a very wide diversity of social practices out there in the world.  There are many different communities, with very different norms.  If norms are produced by social practices, doesn’t that mean that different communities with different practices produce different norms?  And so when we say “what is the right thing to do in situation [X]?” isn’t the answer to that question going to depend on our social location – not just because context matters for action, but because the norms that properly guide action are themselves relative to social location?  Then, the argument goes, if we accept this relativist conclusion, doesn’t this imply the actual meaninglessness of the norms themselves?  How can a norm function as a meaningful standard for action if that standard changes depending on arbitrary contingent facts about local social practice?  Haven’t we in fact evacuated the core concept of what a norm consists in, by relativising norms to social location?

If one accepts this critique of relativism, then a natural next step is to argue that relativism is itself, in practice, a form of nihilism.  If relativism evacuates the real meaning of normativity, then haven’t we simply rejected normativity in general again, by a slightly more indirect route than straight up ruling it out of bounds on naturalistic grounds?  For this perspective, relativism is just a particular brand of nihilism – probably a particularly self-indulgent and spineless one.  For the purposes of this post, though, I want to keep the critique of nihilism separate from the critique of relativism.

How do “norms are produced by social practices” theorists respond to the charge of relativism?  Again, one approach is simply to bite the bullet, and say “yes, I’m a relativist”.  The strong programme theorists are, for me, the iconic version of this position (though they’re of course not the only ones).  The dominant tendency again, however, is to argue that there is a category error somewhere in the argument that explaining norms in terms of social practice implies relativism.    

How do social practice theorists go about making that case?  Here, again, I don’t think there’s consensus.  One approach is to make some kind of transcendental argument – make the claim, that is, that there are substantive normative commitments that everyone is in fact committed to by virtue of engaging in normative social practice at all, whether they realise it or not.  (The problem here, at least by my lights, is that it’s not clear that there is, in fact, such a transcendental argument – at least not one that is load-bearing of the kinds of substantive normative commitments that people typically want such an argument to defend.)  Another approach is a sort of soft teleological approach – to argue that there is a social perspective towards which all social perspectives for some reason tend, and that this future or ideal social perspective functions as the ultimate standard by which other social perspectives can be assessed.  (The problem here is, again, that it’s not clear that there is in fact such a tendency or perspective available.)  Another approach is to say: Ok, there is no privileged social perspective, and no necessary common feature of all social perspectives, but that’s fine – the anti-relativist category error lies in the belief that we need some kind of meta-theoretically underwritten commonality in order to wield concepts like ‘objectivity’ or ‘truth’ in the first place.  (This is the approach that I have been advocating on the blog, backed up by the ‘slimline’ social-perspectival concept of objectivity that I take Brandom to have elaborated in ‘Making It Explicit’.)

In any case, these are two objections to the kind of ‘genealogical’ orientation I aspire to pursue here.  One objection is that naturalism leads to nihilism.  Another objection is that a social-practice-based or social-perspectival account of normativity leads to relativism.

I take it that Brandom is wrestling with both of these problem spaces simultaneously.  Brandom is committed (following Rorty, basically) to a social-perspectival account of objectivity.  ‘Making It Explicit’, in particular, is centrally preoccupied with the charge that this explanatory approach is problematically relativist.  I still think the most impressive feature of Brandom’s work is how he goes about responding to that charge.  At the same time, Brandom is also wrestling with philosophical naturalism.  Here, as I said in the last post, his position is quite complex, and I still don’t feel I quite have it nailed down (in part because I don’t feel I am knowledgeable enough about the analytic philosophical traditions Brandom is reworking and responding to).  This element of my reading of Brandom is still, I think, something of a work in progress.

But now I want to turn to a third critique of ‘genealogical’ approaches – the critique of ‘cynicism’.

This critique – the charge of cynicism – basically amounts to the following: you ‘genealogists’ see the worst in people.  You constantly explain people’s actions in terms of base, ignoble motives.  Marxists see liberal ideals as driven simply by class interests; Freudians see high-flown values and great artistic production as simply expressing sexual hang-ups; Nietzscheans see noble moral teachings as simple expressing ressentiment; Foucauldians see projects of impartial knowledge production as simply channelling power relations; and so on and so forth.  The critique of these ‘cynical’ genealogists is: by understanding these normative phenomena in terms of base interests and gratifications, you are evacuating normativity – trampling virtue and value – in another way yet again.  People aren’t as bad as all that.  Stop trashing everything that is valuable and beautiful with this ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.

Now, when Brandom discusses ‘genealogical’ approaches, he tends to assimilate them to the problematic of naturalism and nihilism.  For Brandom (and as I said in the last post) these genealogical approaches replace reasons with causes.  Alternatively (and it is not at all clear that this is the same thing) they replace normative reason with instrumental reason.  It’s not clear that this is the same thing because, of course, instrumental reasons are still reasons.  If I say (as a Marxist) “such-and-such a politician did this because of their class interests” or even (as a public choice theorist) “because of their personal interests” it doesn’t intuitively seem like I’m moving the explanation outside the space of reasons – I am just substituting one kind of reason (a more ‘debased’ reason) for another (a more ‘noble’ reason).  The distinction between debased and noble reasons does not, however, clearly map on to the distinction between reasons and causes – bad, ignoble reasons for action are still reasons for action.

So I have my worries about the assimilation of a disagreement over what kinds of reasons are motivating action, to a debate about whether reasons are motivating action.  This ties into the question of what the distinction between instrumental and normative reason really amounts to – a debate that I don’t feel I have an adequate handle on, as of yet.

My main point here, in any case, is that many features of the critique of genealogical theorists as excessively cynical don’t seem to very immediately collapse into the previously enumerated critiques of nihilism or relativism.  Yes, it’s true, many critics of Marxism or Freudianism object to those projects in part because the kind of ‘debasement’ of values they engage in may seem to evacuate value in general – these genealogical projects are, for many critics, forms of nihilism.  But it seems clear, as well, that there is a separate point here, in the critique of cynicism, which can be articulated without making the broader claim about the nihilistic implications of genealogical analysis.  That critique is something in the space of: you’re just wrong about the motives you diagnose; this kind of ungenerosity – the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ – is corrosive of the kinds of values and social bonds that make for a good and healthy social order.  Critics of Marxism or Freudianism don’t need to see these projects as fully nihilistic in order to see them as corrosive of important values.

Now, when Brandom discusses genealogical analysis, the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, and so forth, he is typically interested in their global forms, and he is (in my view) typically aiming to rebut them as special cases of the broader naturalistic project of replacing reasons with causes.  This is how Brandom interprets the conclusion of the ‘Spirit’ section of the Phenomenology.  And I think Brandom is clearly right that this is one of the things in play in this debate, and in Hegel.

However – I also think Hegel has the more ‘local’ point about cynicism in mind, in a lot of his discussions of these kinds of themes.  I am, finally, and slowly, trying to work through Hegel  himself properly (I still have a lot of reading to do in that regard).  For what it’s worth, it seems to me that Brandom is clearly right that when Hegel talks about the sociality of normativity (the relation between the particular and the universal, the individual and Spirit, morality and ethical life, etc. etc.) he is very often making a semantic argument about the determination of conceptual content by the broad social institution of normativity.  When Hegel says we cannot (or should not) detach our morality from our social reality, one of the reasons he’s saying this is his view that the substantive content of individuals’ norms is determined by broad community practices.  From this it follows that norms that are detached from that community end up underdetermined, and therefore lack the substantive content necessary to actually function as a guide to action.  Likewise, Hegel is of course preoccupied with ‘alienation’, our ability to be ‘at home’ in our ethical world, and so on and so forth.

But I think Hegel also has what I would characterise as a more ‘crass’ set of issues in mind, that I would (anachronistically) capture under the heading ‘incentive compatible institution design’.  Hegel is interested in both the great classical political-economic texts – Steuart, Smith, and so forth – and in the debates about liberal state institution design that wracked Europe in the wake of the French Revolution.  Feeding into Hegel’s thought are two strands of ‘cynical’ liberal reason which I’ve discussed elsewhere on the blog.  The core idea of this ‘cynical’ classical liberal tradition is the following: you cannot build your state or civil society on virtue alone.  People are not good enough for that; they are not other-oriented enough for that.  If you want to construct modern liberal institutions (economic or political) that actually work, you need those institutions to be broadly ‘incentive compatible’ – you need institutions to be constructed in such a way that individuals’ self-interest motivates them to take actions that serve the common good.  This is how the market economy (broadly) functions for Smith; it is how the checks and balances of federalism work for ‘Publius’.  Hegel is also part of this tradition – Hegel also thinks that we need to see rational social structures as operating not just through public-oriented or self-consciously moral action, but through the binding of ‘particular’ interests into a broader universality.  This is one dimension of “the cunning of reason” – reason’s presence even in apparently unreasoned action, due to the broader rational structures within which particular action is swept up.

And this kind of argument operates fractally, for Hegel, I think.  It operates at the level of the grandest sweep of history.  It operates at the level of constitution-design for states, and institution-design for market society.  And it also operates at the level of personal ethics.  Hegel seems impatient with visions of morality that require particular individual virtue, a morality isolated from the broader dynamics of our social and physical lives.  This seems to me to be the same basic orientation – and it is, in some sense, a ‘cynical’ orientation.  It sees reason not as something that is separate from the crass dimensions of our selves, but that operates through those dimensions, and that cannot be understood without them.

My worry with Brandom’s interpretation of the Phenomenology, then, is that it tends to assimilate this ‘cynical’ dimension of Hegel to the debate around naturalism and normativity.  These sets of issues are clearly related, but I think it’s worth distinguishing them – and doing so, I think, shifts our focus as regards ‘genealogy’ – away from the metaphysics of naturalism, and towards the human sciences and, in particular, ‘debased’ or ‘instrumental’ understandings of human motives and behaviours.

Anyway, let me sum up this rather basic post.  I’ve distinguished three different debates, each of them over analytic moves that appear to threaten normativity, in different ways.  Naturalism appears to threaten normativity in general, by insisting that the only things that are real are the objects of natural science, and norms do not exist in the scientific worldview.  Social-perspectivalist social theory appears to threaten normativity by explaining normativity in terms of contingent social practice, and thereby committing us to relativism.  And cynical genealogical analysis appears to threaten normativity by ‘debasing’ our values – analysing normative actions in terms of ignoble, self-interested or instrumental motives, in a way that corrodes the real value of normative content and ideals.

And my preferred response to all of these debates is basically to say “no, you don’t understand, normativity is produced by these things that you see as threatening it.”  I want an account of normativity that is broadly compatible with natural science; I want a social-perspectival account of norms as instituted by contingent social practices; and I want a ‘cynical’ account of norms that see them as (in significant part) produced by the debased behaviour of real humans that can be analysed ‘genealogically’.  I feel like all these arguments implicate each other to some extent, but also that they can be usefully distinguished.  And I guess I’m writing this post because I also feel that, in thinking out loud on the blog to this point, I haven’t distinguished them clearly enough.