As part of research for a review I'm doing of Robert Brandom's Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas and as part of a independent study I'm doing with Andrew Johnson, I just read Brandom's fantastic essay "Holism and Idealism in Hegel's Phenomenology" (chapter 6 of Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays on the Metaphysics of Intentionality ).
One of the many great things in the essay is the way Brandom uses a distinction between sense dependency and reference dependency, and his explanation of how the first does not entail the latter. In the context of Brandom's discussion, this allows one to avail oneself of Hegel's insights without being committed to idealism. But I think Brandom gets this wrong in important respects. First, he isn't quite careful enough to distinguish between pantheism and idealism, and second he doesn't consider the role of skepticism. When you do this what you get is that Hegel's insights (as expressed in the relevant sense dependency claims) entail either skepticism, Berkeleyan idealism, pantheism, or Wittgensteinian quietism.
1. Sense and Reference Dependency and how they block the inference to Idealism
Brandom defines the two concepts in this manner:
(11) Concept P is sense dependent on concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q.
(12) Concept P is reference dependent on concept Q just in case P cannot apply to something unless Q applies to something. (194-195)
Example- The concept "having the same mass as Earth" is sense dependent upon the concept "Earth." One cannot understand it with out understanding "Earth." However reference dependency does not hold here. There are possible worlds where things have the same mass as Earth does in this universe, but where Earth does not exist.
Brandom uses this distinction to be able to accept key theses of Hegel's idealism while blocking the idea that reality is mind dependent. I think his argument only works with important (and philosophically important) qualifications.
Brandom's Hegel shows that a lot of concepts concerning the world are sense dependent upon concepts concerning language and mind (and vice versa). So for example, a Hegelian might hold that the concept of fact is sense dependent upon the concept of true sentence. Brandom quite rightly points out that this does not entail that the concept of fact is reference dependent upon the concept of true sentence. Just because we cannot understand the concept of fact without understanding true sentence does not mean that facts are dependent upon true sentences for their existence. So he concludes:
The determinateness of the objective world and the structured process of grasping it are reciprocally sense dependent concepts, each intelligible only in terms of the other. So understood, objective idealism does not entail or involve any claims of reference dependence--as though our concept using activity were required to produce, as opposed to being required to make intelligible, the conceptually structured world. (208)
So we can help ourselves to Hegel's insights (and, as much as I love Schopenhauer, Chapter 3 of Brandom's Reason in Philosophy absolutely convinces me that we have to help ourselves to them) without committing ourselves to idealism.
2. A simple argument using excluded middle.
Here we are assuming that the kind of sense dependency Brandom describes (between mind and world) holds. And, by the law of excluded middle, either the relevant reference dependency claim is true, or it is false.
2a. If world is referentially dependent upon mind then the determinateness of the objective world would not exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. This could be because Berkeleyan idealism is true, where minds like ours or God's somehow bring into existence the world (which is what Brandom is trying to block). But it could also be true for pantheistic reasons, that is because the world itself is engaged in the structured process of grasping itself. On this model it's not that God or people's minds think the world into being, but rather that the world itself has a lot properties we normally associate with minds.
So if reference dependency is true, then either idealism or pantheism (of some sort) is true.
2b. If the world is not reference dependent upon the mind, then the determinateness of the objective world could exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. And remember (crucially) that this denial is a denial of pantheism! The world could exist without possessing the mental properties that we are forced (by sense dependency, which we are assuming to be true) to attribute to it. But this is just to say that we have no idea what the world is really like, because we are forced to understand it in such a way that we have no idea if it really is. This is skepticism.
So if I can apply excluded middle to Brandom's reference dependency claim it follows that either idealism, pantheism, or skepticism is true.
3. McDowelliana
This is precisely where McDowell backs into Wittgensteinian quietism (according to my somewhat impoverished understanding of Mind and World). His denial of "bald naturalism" seems to return us to a kind of enchanted/pantheistic world, but it's not clear if it really does.
Well maybe one could affirm Brandom's sense dependency of mind and world and neither affirm nor reject reference dependency. One rather refuses to say one way or the other. But then you are not saying that idealism is false, but rather refusing to comment on it.
I want to study this strategy more. I'm deeply skeptical of it, though I don't yet have an knockdown argument (and need to study McDowell more before committing to one). My suspicions come from: (1) researching and writing about reasons against universal applicability of excluded middle from Michael Dummett, (2) suspecting that Meillassoux's After Finitude contains an argument (the one about "semantic doubling") that can be reconstructed to argue against this strategy, (3) playing around with three valued systems in trying to reformulate Boghossian's "Status of Content" argument against similar moves (I was in the process of this when I saw an article in Mind where the guy did something very similar and I got so depressed I dropped it; I have to go get that article).
(4) Conclusions-
4a. Assuming that quietism is a no-go here, then since Berkelyean idealism is also deeply unsatisfying (for the similar reasons that transcendental idealism is; first discovered by Maimon, Fichte, and Schopenhauer; discussed as "the affection argument" in Lee Braver's A Thing of This World; and also really clearly presented in Graham Priest's Beyond The Limit's of Thought), it follows that Brandom's Hegelian is committed to either pantheism or skepticism. Since I agree with Brandom's Hegel I find myself committed to pantheism or skepticism. Pretty fun.
4b. I'd like to push this a little bit with regards to Speculative Realism. First, how does the nihilism of Ray Brassier (Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction) fit in? Brassier might be read as a critic of the initial Hegelian insight (sense dependency), or as someone supporting skepticism over pantheism, or as someone putting forward nihilism as an alternative. I really want to reread his book in terms of this dialectic. Second, does the kind of pantheism gestured at above encompass Graham Harman and Levi Bryant's Object Oriented Philosophy version of Speculative Realism? The Harman of Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects is sometimes presented (and I'm almost positive that I was the first person to so represent it so on internet discussions during the Halcyon days) as radically externalizing Kant's scheme-content distinction. But this is a species of Brandom's Hegelianism in terms of taking certain mental properties and applying them to the world itself. Harman would certainly reject the view that his philosophy is just making claims of sense dependency, and he would certainly reject that the kind of reference dependency involves him in Berkeleyan idealism. Now interestingly (along with Brandom!) he tends to reject what he regards as overly naturalistic or scientistic philosophies (google Harman eliminativism). Is it fair to characterize his and Levi's views as pantheistic? Levi applies the notion of "translation" to objects in the world itself (see the essay in the forthcoming Speculative Realism anthology, I should note that I heartily approve). This seems to be a case of Hegelian sense dependency too.But I don't think he wants to deny reference dependency (skepticism) and I know he doesn't want to be an idealist (Berkeleyan or transcendental). To what extent is it fair to characterize him (and Graham) as thinkers in the pantheistic tradition (and who else besides Spinoza and some readings of Hegel fit in this tradition?)?
Or should they also as part of the critique of correlationism try to reject the sense dependency claims? This seems like a vital set of questions (and a productive way of framing them) for anyone interested in Harman and Bryant's thoughts.
