Jon Cogburn's Blog

my Journal of Value Inquiry critical notice of Brandom's "Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas"

The Springer link is HERE.

If anyone wants a pdf offprint of this review, or an offprint my recent review in Phil. Books of Brandom's Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, just shoot me an e-mail at joncogburn at yahoo dot com.

Both reviews are quite nice. Though charitable and appropriately excited about all the cool stuff Brandom is doing, they provide indepth readers-guides to some pretty tough material, but I think also some spot on criticism that opens the paths to some interesting new issues.

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]

brief thoughts about the genesis of belief

I have this strange intuition that a lot of confusion in the philosophies of mind and language arises from the fact that representations are used to explain, first, two quite different activities: (1) planning, and (2) correction, and second, two quite different kinds of things: (3) individuals, and (4) groups.

Individual planning that leads to representational explanations occur when, for example, the crow goes offline and then suddenly performs some novel activity, for example bending the paperclip in a way that allows her to unlock the cage. The best explanation is that the crow was running out counterfactuals in her mind, counterfactuals that bear a systematic relation to causal facts in the world (see THIS POST and THIS POST for a link to a relevant discussions). Mark Okrent explains intentionality in this manner, and work on counterfactual and off-line reasoning by others can help fill in the details (my student Joel Okrent and I have just started a paper on this).

Group correction is more complicated. Of course, as Feyerabend said, when conversation breaks down, then we must resort to violence. But the enlightenment ideal that we can adjudicate differences without violence rests on what Crispin Wright calls "cognitive command," the view that when two people are disagreeing, there must be some deficiency in one of them or their environment. In Truth and Objectivity, Wright has a brilliant discussion of how this gives rise to representational pictures.

some background on Harman and Speculative Realism (and cool new book series) [click link for full post]

Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.

via www.newappsblog.com

Another quick thought about Brandom

I just read Brandom's "Unsuccessful Semantics" and I can't for the life of me figure out why the same argument doesn't apply against Brandom's own views.

Brandom critiques the view that the content of a belief is fixed by the role it plays in sets of beliefs and desires leading to action (or construed as practical inferences leading to imperatives to action). The basic criticism trades on the way that such inferences are highly defeasible, depending upon what other beliefs and desires one has.

But on Brandom's own view the content of a desire is fixed by the role it plays in such practical inferences. So why doesn't the defeasibility also hit Brandom's own view of desires.

And things get worse, as Brandom's view of the content of subsentential expressions has them be a function of theoretical inferences involving those expressions (contrasted with the Heideggerian view that they are a function of practical inferences). But such theoretical inferences are also highly defeasible. So, again, why isn't the criticism a criticism of Brandom's own view.

(1) In Brandom's recent work he follows Mark Wilson and stresses the way content is underdetermined and appeals to a neo-Hegelian historical model of rationality to explain how we go on in light of this. This is a longer story, but I think that this move ends up addressing how the "Unsuccessful Semantics" argument applies against Brandom's own view. But I also suspect that it would be equally successful for the Heideggerian (and in fact, there is probably a connection here between this and  Lee Braver's interpretation of Heidegger's own historicism).

(2) If this tu quoque business is correct, then a lot hinges upon Brandom's critique of teleo-semantics, which I haven't read yet. If that critique is well motivated and doesn't apply to his own views, then there will clearly be a reason to go with him on the priority of theoretical inferences.

(3) The more I study Brandom, the deeper my adviser Neal Tennant's work appears (I'm writing something now on his paper on the withering away of formal semantics, which I contrast with Brandom's anti-representationalist strategy in Making it Explicit). It would be really interesting to take Tennant's account of cognitive significance in The Taming of the True as a starting off point for clarifying the above debate.

This weekend I hope to get clearer about the structure of the "Unsuccessful Semantics" argument so I can see if the above works out.

question about internalism

In Chapter 3 of Articulating Reasons, Brandom holds that it would be enough for the justificatory internalist (the person who thinks knowledge requires that one be able to provide a justification of one's true beliefs) if one merely was able to offer as a reason for the true belief that one is in fact reliable.

I'm not an internalist so I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I think there's something almost circular about this. What if the person believes they are reliable but are unable to provide a justification of the claim that they are. And what if their justification for that is just the true belief that they are reliable in determining when they are reliable.

My intuition is that if one could luck into the true belief that one is reliable, then just believing in one's reliability isn't going to work for the internalist. Maybe one would have to have the true belief that one is reliable in judgments of one's own reliability. Could one luck into that? How would that go? You flip a coin and believe you are in general reliable if it is heads and in general unreliable if it is tails?

Sorry if this is confused. Like I said, I'm not an internalist so my intuitions might be a little off here.

aging and writing routines

Man it feels good to be writing again after this Summer's dry spell. I'm down to the wire to get this paper on Brandom in to the APA by September first. The paper's pretty cool. I look at the debate around his substitutional account of singular terms. The bigger project is to show that he needs the objects involved in practical inferences of the sort Heidegger talks about. The second part of this will be taking on his account of sense and reference dependencies and the third following up on McDowell to construct a Chinese Room argument for Brandom. All of these problems are soluble if you follow Graham Harman in various ways.

The next step is to look at Brandom's actual arguments against the Heideggerian approach. Hopefully I'll have something intelligent to say about that after my course this semester.

The only hard part is making the paper I'm writing now short enough (3,000 words) for the APA. That's a fine problem to deal with though.

The dry spell in writing was the result of combined interaction of: (1) needing a break, (2) illness inducing anxiety about financial doom at LSU (you'd be surprised how many of my colleagues have developed weird skin rashes this Summer; we'd initially thought it might be environmental, but research revealed that anxiety is one of the major triggers), (3) having a new baby in addition to my toddler.

The third one is really an ongoing thing with adulthood. Many of us develop a set of work habits in graduate school that aren't really sustainable into later middle age. For most of graduate school I would get up around 11:00 or noon, teach in the afternoon, write at school from about eight or nine PM until around four in the morning, punctuated with frequent caffeine and cigarette breaks. Then I would walk home, drink two glasses of jug burgundy and then go to sleep (if you were to add a bowl full of amphetamines to the mix and throw in the rest of the bottle of jug burgundy, you'd get the terrible work habits that gave rise to Sartre's borderline unintelligible Critique of Dialectical Reason).

Every step away from this pattern has caused a few months of disruption to writing. Quitting smoking, quitting caffeine, and then quitting drinking (I don't think there's anything morally wrong with these things; I'm just happier and healthier not doing them) all forced changes on the writing rituals that took a few months to get used to. And I can't work until four in the morning any more. My body stopped being able to sustain that at some point in my mid thirties. If I'm still up at four any more it's entirely the result of an evil bout of insomnia usually the result of not having gone to yoga class that week.

But now the change is having children. When you have kids and play an active part in raising them, you just don't get as much sustained time to just write. And the time you are writing might be interrupted by the need to change a diaper, intervene in some altercation, read Doctor Seuss, or play cars with a toddler very serious about playing cars with his Dad.

The trick here really is to be the tortoise; slow and steady gets it done.  Instead of reading tons and writing on napkins for a month and then writing everything in a huge burst over a couple of days, it's much better to organize the reading so that you can write a page a day. Of course I'm not at a place where I do this every day of the year, but perhaps I'll get there.

Something I better figure out in the next two weeks

I'm in Chapter 5 of Brandom's Making it Explicit (have read all three of his shorter books and big chunks of Tales of the Mighty Dead), and I'm really caught up on something that should be basic.

I just don't get what Brandom means by "entitlement." On the one hand commitment and permissibility are treated as a species of obligation and permissibility, but on the other hand he wants it to be the case that being entitled requires either the ability to produce a justification or to defer to someone who can.

For the life of me, I can't see how both of these are true, at least without serious logical revision. (1) If commitment and permissibility are a species of obligation and permissibility, then it should follow from one being not committed to believing that P, that one is entitled to believe that P is not the case, (2) if entitlement carries with it the responsibility to defer to the right person or produce a justification yourself, then merely not being committed to something does not entitle one to believe it's negation. I mean you should just sit on the fence for lots of beliefs you are not committed to.

One could possibly (though even this seems implausible to me) get out of this with logical revision. One way to be an intuitionist about modality is to accept that Possibly P is true if and only if there exists a possible world where P is true and that Necessary P is true if and only if P is true at all possible worlds, but to reject the claim that one can define the two in terms of each other (e.g. Possibly P equals Not Necessarily Not P, and vice versa), just because in intuitionistic logic it not being the case that something holds at all possible worlds does not entail that there exists a possible world where something is the case. This means that it not being necessary that P does not in general entail that it is possible that not P. But this is exactly analogous to it not being obligatory that P not entailing that it is permissible that not P. Which is the problematic inference for Brandom's notions of comittment and entitlement.

That doesn't seem that plausible to me just because intuitionism is inconsistent with their being third values. Not (P and ~P) is a theorem of intuitionist logic. But the problem with Brandom's notions is that there do seem to be claims that are such that we are not committed to them and that we are not entitled to their negations. By the analog with modal systems, this would be like a claim that is not true at any possible worlds and such that it is not the case that there is a possible world where it is false. To affirm this is to run afoul of intuitionistic logic.

I suspect I'm missing something.

Two new ones by Pete Wolfendale

Respone to Levi (part 1) and Response to Levi (part 2).

Levi's response to Response to Levi (part 1), and Levi's response to Respone to Levi (part 2).

Wolfendale's challenges

I'm moving a comment of Pete Wolfendale from the previous thread to the front, because it raises so many things worth thinking about. And I'm putting my response as the first comment. Here's Wolfendale's comment:

 
Levi: I should point out that most of these claims have been made in more detail in my most recent post (http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/hijacking-correlationism/) although some of them are backed up in earlier posts which are all linked to. This post also includes a very rough parsing of Meillassoux's argument from facticity if you're interested. However, I'll try to address your points in order, and bring in the relevant arguments without making this comment too long.

1. The idea of translation is a nice metaphor, but that's what it is - a metaphor - and it needs cashing out. The simplest way to cash it out is that the effect the affecting object has upon the affected object is in some way dependent upon the affected object, i.e., that the same object will produce different affects upon different things. However, this is something that everyone accepts, and they can accept it without having to talk about 'real objects' or 'proper being' that withdraws. Maybe you can enlighten me as to the correct stronger way to cash this out, and how this solves any of these issues.

Assuming you can provide an enlightening account of translation, you still have to explain how exactly translation can 'fail', as this is far from obvious. What is it that provides the normative standard for translations? Is it the withdrawn object and its unknowable real properties? If so, how do these actually constitute a standard if they are inaccessible? An inapplicable standard is no standard at all. Moreover, if the withdrawn object sets the standard, the standard cannot be to correctly represent it, as it is by definition unrepresentable, and we can't be bound to do something we can't achieve (ought implies can), unless this obligation is constituted out of some finite achievable obligations.

Jonathan Bennett influential inferentialist?

It’s a strange experience to be reading Brandom’s Making It Explicit at the same time as I’m reading Jonathan Bennett’ Kant’s Analytic. Brandom’s reading of Kant as being so important in part because he thought of concepts inferentially as opposed as quasi-perceptually (e.g. Humean ideas) is one of Bennett’s guiding ideas. Even weirder, some of the specific views I associate with Brandom were argued for explicitly by Bennett.

The question of whether a language is a concept-exercising one does depend upon what sorts of statements can be made in it: for example, it depends partly upon whether statemetns of a general or reason-giving kind can be made in it (Bennett 1966, 87).

Then he goes on and differentiates between measuring devices and actual asserters in the same way that Brandom does.

The class of possible languages divides into those whose use does, and those whose use does not, consist solely in a pattern of responders to sensory stimuli. I discuss this at length in my book Rationality, and here sketch it only in outline. A language consisting solely in statements of the form ‘This is. . .’ and ‘That is. . .’ can be seen as a technique ofr the linguistic handling of items which are presented to the speaker: it has been called the speaker’s way of ‘hitting back’ at the things which sensorily bombard him. But human languages have means for making at leat two sorts of statements which are not like this: general statements, and statements about the past. These do not have to be responses to, or operations upon, the environments in which they are made.

Then Brandom gives the example of a dog digging up a buried bone in this context. In doing so he discusses Kant’s view that “the dog does not think that the bone is there unless it has reasons for thinking this. . . (Bennett 1966 88)."

The next section has the clincher though.

It is arguable that any concept-exercising language must contain negative statements: perhaps not precise analogues of the form ‘It is not the case that. . .’, but statements which reject or rule out other statements. I have argued for this in Rationality on the grounds--roughly--that a concept-exercising language must contain something like ‘because’ which in its turn requires something like ‘That doesn’t follow’. At a non-technical level it is perhaps worth noting that any pattern of behavior looks blind and mechanical unless it contains something of a mistake-recognizing and mistake-correcting kind (Bennett 1966, 89)

Both the interpretation of Kant and the reformulation of the metaphysical deduction look like pretty strong historical precursors to Brandom. Of course there are important differences; particularly that Bennett doesn’t subscribe to what Brandom calls the “Kant-Sellars Thesis” about modality; but the project of inferentialistically reformulating the deduction in a Quine friendly manner is in common to both Brandom and Bennett. I need to check out Rationality.

In Making it Explicit Brandom just attributes a story to Bennett and later contrasts his own perspective with the Gricean intention based one that Searle, Bennett, and Lewis have in common. The only Bennett book he cites is Linguistic Behavior. It Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom just parenthetically lauds Bennett and Strawson for making the study of Kant respectable for analytic philosophers. 

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I should note in passing that I loathe the way people casually put Bennett's (and Strawson's for that matter) Kant and Spinoza books down. When you read these books you get to be party to a great philosopher struggling with the ideas of greater philosophers. You never lose sight of why Kant and Spinoza continue to be philosophically important. Actually, again, this is one of the great things about the essays in Brandom's Tales of the Mighty Dead too.

I worry that too many specialist historians today feel that it is anachronistic to read great philosophers as if their work is still philosophically relevant. I forget the sneering Sorabchi piece where he castigates Nusbaum and Putnam for not realizing that Aristotle hadn't read Descartes. Habermas actually explicitly discusses this issue in the beginning of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. He refuses to apologize for entering into philosophical dialogue with the thinkers he is presenting.

nice scientific american article about animal cognition

Article HERE.

I hope in the next two years (in addition to a bunch of other projects) to work through a good set of the relevant empirical work (I'll need to teach THIS BOOK). What seems to me to be basic to sapience is the ability to work through counterfactual scenarios "off-line," instead of making minute adjustments in trying a task different ways, sitting back and considering the different and novel ways it can be done and then picking one.

Moreover, I think the extent to which non-language users do this with means-ends reasoning is both empirical and something experimenters are already operationalizing.

syllabus for next semester's grad seminar

I'm teaching the grad. seminar in our M.A. program next semester and I uncharacteristically made the syllabus well before the night before the first day and have put it on line HERE.

I'm desperately trying to get ahead of the schedule this summer so that I can still watch the kids every day in Fall so Emily has a few hours every day to write. In Spring semester it will get easier because Audrey will be a year old and old enough to go to Thomas' Mother's Day Out three days a week from 9:00-3:00. But Fall Semester is going to be a lot of work.

Anyhow, the course should be really cool. Everything is really geared towards getting as clear as possible about what Robert Brandom does and should say about non-linguistic cognition (aphaisics, highly functional deaf adults in parts of the world where there is no sign language, and higher animals). Several times in his two most recent books he just asserts that Parrots are no different from thermostats. The thing is, by his own philosophy he needn't say that. But I don't know if he does have the resources to say the things one should, in light of empirical research into deaf and aphaisic humans. With Alisdair MacIntyre, I think Heidegger's notion of "world richness" is really the place to go, and I want to see how that fits with Brandom's theoretical framework. My suspicion is that Brandom's critique of rational choice theory does not in fact tell against the Heideggerian notion, but I'm not at all sure right now and am really excited about having a chance to read him just in terms of this issue.

[Many, many thanks to Pete Wolfendale for guiding me in this.]

Beiser on Maimon (with morals for McDowell and Brandom)

This is from pages 288-289 of Beiser's The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte.

The main target of Maimon's skepticism is Kant's transcendental deduction. Like Shulze, Maimon maintains that the deduction is a petitio principii, presupposing precisely what Hume calls into question. According to Maimon's interpretation, the deduction attempts to demonstrate that synthetic a priori principles are a necessary condition of possible experience, where 'experience' is understood as the universal and necessary connection between distinct representations and not only as the contingent constant conjunction between them. Although Maimon is willing to admit the argument of the deduction, that possible experience requires the application of the categories, he still disputes its premise, that there is possible experience. If we closely examine our sense impressions, he claims, then all we find are contingent constant conjunctions. Maimon puts the problem this way: Kant answers the question quid juris? Under what conditions do synthetic a priori principles apply to nature? But that still leaves the question quid facti? Are these conditions in fact the case?

Likewise to Brandom on the Kant-Sellars thesis, discussed in the previous post. I can agree with him that speaking a language requires us to make distinctions regarding necessity and possibility. But with Maimon and Fichte and Hegel (who built on his ideas) we should not regard this as  in any way solving Hume's problem. Yes from Brandom we know that successful use of language requires us to view the world in such a way. But is the world really like that?

Pete Wolfendale really excellently argues that this is where Brandom's quietism comes in (and I'm going to reread Making it Explicit this Summer with this question in mind). In this regard, I should also note, that after this Beiser attributes another anti-Kantian argument to Maimon that is really, really similar to the upshot of the Kripke/Wittgenstein paradox (which motivates quietism for McDowell). But then consider Beiser's footnote 15.

Kant himself misses this point. In his reply to Maimon's Versuch Kant argues that he can overcome Maimon's objections simply by remaining within the sphere of consciousness. It is impossible to explain the correspondence between a priori concepts and experiences, he says, only if experience is understood as the realm of things-in-themselves. If, however it is assumed that experience consists in nothing more than appearances, the problem disappears. See Kant's letter of May 26, 1789, to Herz, in Kant, Briefwechsel, p. 397. kant's reply does not explain the correspondence between such distinct kinds of representations as a priori concepts and a posteriori intuitions.

I don't think it's possible to read Graham Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought and not regard Wittgensteinian quietism as exactly analogous to the way Kant "misses the point" here.

questions about Chapter 4 of Brandom's Saying and Doing

1. The Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis

The Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis is first presented as a rebuttal to Hume's view that we observe actual, observable facts and cannot make sense of necessity based on these facts.

Hume found that even his best understanding of actual observable empirical facts did not yield an understanding of rules relating or otherwise governing them. Those facts did not settle which of the things that actually happened had to happen (given others), that is, were (at least conditionally) necessary, and which of the things that did not happen nonetheless were possible (not ruled out by laws concerning what did happen) (Brandom 2008, 96)

In contrast to this Sellars revives the Kantian idea that:

The ability to use ordinary empirical descriptive terms such as ''green', 'rigid', and 'mass' already presupposes grasp of the kinds of properties and relations made explicit by modal vocabulary (Brandom 2008, 96-97).

Brandom unpacks this into the conjunction of the following two claims:

1. In using ordinary empirical vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to introduce and deploy modal vocabulary.
2. The expressive role characteristic of alethic modal vocabulary is to make explicit semantic, conceptual connections and commitments that are already implicit in the use of ordinary empirical vocabulary

Here he is saying that modal vocabulary is elaborating-explicating (LX) in the same way argued that logical vocabulary is in Chapter 2.

2. Argument for the Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis

Brandom's considered argument is given on pages 106-109 and has five premises.

2.1 The Premises

2.1.1. Every autonomous discursive practice contains observational vocabulary that involves non-inferential reports where practitioners can pass double blind tests for mastery (reliable differential reports).

2.1.2. Discursive use of such practice involves differentiating between materially good and materially bad inferences. Someone who could reliably differentiate blue things from non-blue things but who got wrong the majority of if-then claims involving blue would not understand blue. Brandom writes,

Otherwise, one's utterances are wholly devoid of conceptual content; whatever pragmatic significance they may have, it cannot be though of as discursive significance. Even toeknings that are non-inferentially elicted by environing stimuli--that is, the applications of observational vocabulary mentioned in the first premise--must have inferential consequences, if they are not to be idle (Brandom 2008, 106).

One might worry that there is a difference here between not making the inferences and making the wrong inferences that I worry Brandom elides. But his basic point that thermometers pass double blind tests shows that just passing such a test is not sufficient for grasp of the concept. This being said, as a  Heideggerian, I accept Brandom's claim but contra Brandom hold that one can make perfect sense of practical inferences having a primacy over linguistically constituted theoretical inferences (next semester I'm teaching a class on Brandom, Okrent, and teleological semantics to try to get clear on this issue).

2.1.3. Material inferences are non-monotonic, "the inference from p to q may be materially good, even though the inference from p and r is not (Brandom 2008, 106)." For example the material inference "if a match is in water it will not light" is a good one, but if you add enough defeating information it goes south (the match is the kind of white phosphorous that burns in water, etc.). So any such material inference has a non stated ceteris paribus clause.

But it is critical to understand what such clauses do and do not do. . .The real expressive function of ceteris paribus clauses is not magically to remove the non-monotonicity of material inferences, nor to replace them with other monotonic ones, but rather explicitly to acknowledge their non-monotonicity; to mark the inference being endorsed as one that has unspecified, but potentially important defeasors (Brandom 2008, 107).

2.1.4. Call a believer 'epistemically responsible' to the extent that 'she acknowledges a commitment to being able to justify many, if not most, of her beliefs, under suitable circumstances (Brandom 2008, 108)." This is done by "exhibiting them as the conclusions of material inferences (ibid.)."

2.1.5. Minimal epistemic responsibility is a necessary condition for being a discursive practitioner.

2.2. The Argument

Building on his stuff about the frame problem from Chapter 3, Brandom argues that the epistemically responsible face a potentially intractable problem in sorting relevant from no relevant beliefs.

Every change of belief, no matter how small, is potentially relevant to the justification of every prior belief. Acquiring a new belief means acquiring whta, for any material inference the believer endorses and relies upon for justification, might possibly turn out to be a defeasor. And giving up any belief means giving up not only a premise that might previously have been relied upon in justification but also a potential counter-defeasor (Brandom 2008, 108).

Of course people can't explicitly check through all of their beliefs whenever they acquire a new belief. But

Language users who do not (because they cannot) do that, must practically distinguish, among all the inferences that rationalize their current beliefs, which of them are update candidates, in light of the current change of belief (let us say for simplicity, a newly added belief). That is practically to associate with the new belief a set of material inferences of which it is a potential defeasor (Brandom 2008, 108).

It's not clear to me why Brandon associates this with the requirement of minimal epistemic responsibility. I guess by  the ability to "practically associate" he must mean "be able to produce an argument to the effect that."

Then Brandon holds that the set of possible defeasors for a material inference end up defining the counterfactual robustness of that inference. So "water is wet" is in a sense more robust than "swans are white" because it is easier to imagine a situation where one could present a new belief that defeats "swans are white."

So,

I conclude that in view of the non-monotonicity of material inference, the practical task of updating the rest of one's beliefs when some of them change is tractable in principle only if those who deploy a vocabulary practically discriminate ranges fo coutnerfatual robustness for many of the material inferences they endorse. If that is right, then establishing the modal kant-Sellars thesis requires further showing how to introduce modal vocabulary on the basis of such counterfactual conditionals, and how to use modal vocabulary to make those counterfacutal conditionals explicit. Ryle's remarks suggest a strategy for both: treat "If p were true, q would be true," as equivalent to "It is not possible that p and not-q" (Brandom 2008, 109).

Brandom then claims that his next chapter will make good on this promissory note.

3. The normative Kant-Sellars Thesis

In Section 4 of the chapter, Brandom makes an analogous argument about normative vocabulary.

. . .to be recognized as assertional, a move must not be idle, it must make a difference, it must have consequences for what else it is appropriate to do, according to the rules of the game. Assertions express judgments or beliefs. Putting a sentence on one's list of judgments, putting it in one's belief box, must have consequences for how else one ought, rationally, to act, judge, and believe (Brandom 2008, 112)

In this context Brandom engages in his unfortunate practice of making claims about the cognitive ethology of parrots without any citation of the voluminous empirical research, but we can let this pass.

In addition to a belief having consequences for which a believer is responsible (to act and believe appropriately contingently upon having the belief in question), there must be norms about what makes it appropriate to have the belief in the first place. For Brandom the inferentialist, these two aspects (what justifies one in believing P and what one is committed to accepting upon believing P) are central to the meaning of P.

But mastery over such practices will require normatively assessing reasons as being good or bad reasons for believing things.

4. My Worries

I have a few worries about this.

First, the way Brandom ties together alethic and deontic modality is by interpreting Kant as seeing both as issues about the justification of rules. I don't know what happens to this if in the philosophy of science you have nuanced enough views about laws and the relation between language and reality to not equate natural necessity with acting according to laws. I don't know what happens to this in ethics if you have views like Jonathon Dancy that do not equate ethical normativity with following according to rules. I guess the connection is that both alethic and deontic modality concern what ought to be the case, but the senses of "ought" here are so different that I don't know if Brandom's views about the connections still stand. I want to keep this issue in front of my mind as I read through Chapters 5 and 6 where Brandom tries to make sense of Sellars claim about the relation between normativity and (alethic) modality. Will this relation survive dropping the language/rules fetishism? There's a sense in which he himself does not hold it. He does not think that the set of defeasors for a material conditional can be alogirthmically elaborated. So our practical abilities with updating are such that they cannot be given as an algorithmic procedure.

Second, just because Hume was mistake about how he set up his problem, doesn't make Hume's problem go away. O.K., we can't talk about things without talking in modal and normative idioms. But this alone doesn't justify these idioms. I mean, one of the big worries after Kant was just this problem.

In his book right after this one (Reason in Philosophy) Brandom at one point kind of out of the blue claims that he's a "modal realist." The context is in trying to limit degrees of autonomy. Reason has the autonomy to believe what it wants to within limits. At the level of concepts, if your beliefs are too disordered then it doesn't make any sense to attribute content to them (Brandom attributes to Hegel a social model of reason to deal with this; there's actually a somewhat Kripkensteinian backstory about applying rules in Kant that he doesn't go into). But one can make enough correct inferences to be attributed mastery of the relevant concepts, and still have false beliefs (this is Russell's challenge to the the holism of British Idealism). In Brandom's idiom the question arises about how the world limits our autonomy in this regard.

Brandom suggests the Hegelian Spinozistic tradition right here, with the world itself having mental properties being responsible for certain things and us as a result being responsible to the world (this is a very long story, but the point is that he makes the same move with respect to world-mind relations as he does with how mind-mind communitarian relations restrict autonomy with respect to concepts).

All I'm saying is that even within Brandom's favored idioms the Humean problematic raises it's head, just as it did with respect to Kant. If spatial claims are really about how we organize experience, why are they any more necessary than if they were about experience itself, or a thing in itself causing experience?

I think there's an empricistically acceptable answer here involving the role of the lived body as a thing in itself experiencing frustration (and hence a relative form of something necessarily not being the case), and that this has interesting ramifications for the broader theory of alethic modality that are roughly analogous to Dummettian debates about epistemic modality. A big part of my investigations into German idealism is to investigate the historical precursors to this kind of view (it's kind of there in Schopenhauer if you read him the right way).

Third. This is a minor point, but I don't think he needs all of the five premises I gave above to make at least some versions of the modal Kant-Sellars thesis. Say that epistemic responsibility is false because practical inferences (what you are constrained to do after making an assertion and what behaviors should lead to that assertion) played a much bigger role than Brandom allows, and theoretical inferences (what you are constrained to say as a result of making assertions, and what sayings should lead to the assertion) a much smaller one, it would still follow that modality is in some sense unavoidable. For the realm of practical reasoning that the Heideggerian concept user has mastery over is only articulable in terms of how various chains of counterfactuals fit together. One of the things I want to think about as I get clearer about the relation between Brandomian and Heideggerian (as I read Heidegger, with some violence to the text) inferetialisms is the extent to which modal talk still ends up being LX in Brandom's sense. If it is not, then it follows that Brandom's spiel of the Kant-Sellars thesis in terms of LX is mistaken, for the Heideggerian move undermines Humean epistemology in exactly the same way as the reading Brandom encourages of Kant.

To tie this to the normative Kant-Sellars Thesis, higher, social animals remonstrate with their offspring and one another all the time. Explaining what is going on with them does require use of normative and modal vocabulary.

Heidegger's concept of world richness can be spieled in just these quasi-Brandomian terms, how fine-grained the normative and modal distinctions one must make in describing how creatures react to new stimuli. And this is relative not just to species but to individuals and their areas of expertise. An expert in auto mechanics will be richer in Heideggerian world with respect to that domain than lay people.

questions about Chapter 3 of Brandom's Saying and Doing

This chapter is incredibly rich philosophically. In it Brandom: (1) uses his model of pragmatic meaning analysis to reconfigure philosophical debates about the computational theory of mind, (2) updates the Dreyfusarain critique of computationalism, (3) makes important claims about language of possible significance to his somewhat notorious views about animal cognition, and (4) makes an important distinction between "practical elaboration by training" and "algorithmic elaboration."

Part of what is interesting here to me is that Mark Silcox and I have made somewhat similar arguments in articles and especially in Chapter 6 of our Philosophy Through Video Games. I think our arguments actually supplement Brandom's in important ways as well as raise a couple of questions concerning how he should deal with the performance/competence distinction. I'll try to raise these questions in what follows.

1. Reconfiguring the computational theory of mind

Brandon has up to this point discussed three examples of what he calls "pragmatic expressive bootstrapping:" (1) in Chapter 1, context free grammars specifying the recursively enumerable grammars, (2) in the appendix to Chapter 2, non-indexical vocabulary that are VP-sufficient to specify practices PV-sufficient to deploy indexical vocabulary, and (3) in Chapter 1 Huw Price's normative naturalism, which holds that naturalistic vocabulary is rich enough to specify what one can do to count as engaging in normative discourse, while denying that the latter reduces to the former.

Here he wants to reconceptualize the classical computational-representational understanding of mind (CRUM) in exactly these terms. Classically AI is motivated by the Hobbesian equation of thinking with calculating and worry about the implausibility of both substance dualism and kinds of physicalism that hold mental properties to be reducible in some sense to physical properties. By explaining mind as software and brain as hardware, it was hoped that one can understand thinking as symbol manipulation while avoiding the Scylla of dualism and the Charibdis of physicalism.

For Brandom, "algorithmic pragmatic elaboration" AI, or "pragmatic AI" holds substantively for a practice or ability P ability iff:

that practice-or-ability can be algorithmically decomposed (pragmatically analyzed) into a set of primitive practices-or-abilities such that:

1. they are PP-sufficient for P, in the sense that P can be algorithmically elaborated from them (that is, that all you need in prinicple to be able to engage in or exercise P is to be able to engage in those abilities plus the algorithmic elaborative abilities, when these are all integrated as specified by some algorithm); and
2. one could have the capacity to engage in or exercise each of those primitive practices-or-abilities without having the capacity to engage in or exercise the target practice-or-ability P.

It should be noted that this can be asked with respect to any ability, not just symbol use. So Brandom's version does not end up configuring all cognition as symbol use, which Brandom takes to be important in avoiding Searle's Chinese Room argument as well as the specific way that Dreyfus critiques AI.

2. Updating the Dreyfusarian Critique of AI

This is a really beautiful paragraph, worth quoting in entirety.

For instance, Dreyfus objects to classical symbolic AI on the grounds that it requires that all the implicit practical skills necessary for understanding our ordinary life-word have to be made explicit in the form of rules (codified in programs)./footnote{For instance, in Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do (MIT Press, 1997).} He diagnoses classy AI as built around the traditional platonist or intellectualist commitment to finding some bit of explicit knowing- (or believing-)that behind every bit of implicit practical knowing-how. Like Dewey, he is skeptical about that framing commitment. By contrast, the corresponding argument against the substantive practical algorithmic decomposability version of AI would have to offer reasons for pessimism about the possiblitiy of algorithmically resovling essentially discursive knowing-(or beliving-)that without remainder into non-discursive forms of knowing-how. Whatever problems there may be with this kind of AI, they do not stem from some hidden intellectualism, but, on the contrary, concern the particular variety of pragmatism it articulates: algorithmic pragmatism about the discursive. For what make sthe substantive algorithmic practical elaboration model of AI interesting is the relatively precise shape that it gives to the pragmatist program of explaining knowing-that in terms of knowing-how: specifying in a non-intentional, non-semantic vocabulary what it is one must do in order to count as deployooing some vocabulary to say something, hence as making intentional and semantic vocabulary applicable to the perfromances one produces (a kind of pragmatic expressive bootstrapping).

In Dreyfus' defense, he would still critique Brandom's emphasis on the centrality of discursiveness to cognition in the first place. In Brandomese, for Dreyfusarians practical inferences are the cornerstone of cognition, and theoretical inferences are defined and then built up in terms of sets of practical inferences. Of course Brandom (see Articulating Reasons) wants to reverse this, and argues that his opponent (whom he equates with rational choice theory) is begging a question.

But I am highly interested in how Brandom's Dreyfusarian opponent here would represent her position in terms of the pragmatic meaning analysis of this book. I think Brandom and his opponent would agree on the major diagrams from Chapter II, but just disagree with what is going on in the boxes.In any case this is all highly relevant to the next substantive claim in this chapter.

3. One Reason to Doubt that Linguistic Abilities are Algoritmically Elaboratable

This discussion is a little bit confusing. Brandom starts by talking about how a central linguistic ability is revising one's set of beliefs in light of new information ("doxastic updating" (Brandom 2008, 79). I thought he was going to bring in logical results to show that even simple things like testing for consistency are not algorithmically specifiable for first order logic. But he doesn't. Instead he shows how this ties into his inferentialism, claiming that part of grasp of meaning is the conditions under which a claim is falsified. Then he notes that this is radically holistic.

If all this is right, then the question of whether doxastic updating can serve as a reason to be pessimistic aobut the practical algorithmic elaboration version of AI comes down to an assessment of the prospects for a substantive algorithmic decomposition of the ability to update. Why might one think that no such decomposition is possible--that is, that that essential discursive ability could not be algorithmically elaborated from any set of non-discursive abilities? The  key point, I think, is that the updating process is highly sensitive to collatroal commitments or beliefs. The significance of undertaking a new commitment (or relinquishing an old one) depends not just on the content of that commitment, but also on what else one is already committed to. I will argue in my next lecture that we can think of this global updating ability as a collection of subabilties: as the capacity, in one's actual doxastic context, to associate with each commitment a range of counterfactual robustness. To do that is to distinguish, for each commitment (including inferential commitments), which furthe rcommitments would, and which would not, infirm or defeeat it. This includes not only claims that are incompatible with it, but also claims that are incompatible with it in the context of one's other collateral beliefs-that is, which complete a set of claims that are jointly (but perhaps not severally) incompatible with it (Brandom 2008, 80).

Good enough so far. This is old Quinean hat. And as I noted, there are limitation results in logic that show that at least in full generality, such abilities are not algorithmically specifiable for languages of sufficient expressive richness.

But Brandom doesn't go there. Instead he goes back to the definition of substantiveness, given by the second clause by the earlier definition. The decomposition is only substantive if "one could have the capacity to engage in or exercise each of those primitive practices-or-abilities without having the capacity to engage in or exercise the target practice-or-ability P." Brandom just sort of baldly asserts that due to the holistic concerns that any algorithmic elaboration of the abilities to disconfirm a sentence in language will not be substantive in this way. He gives no argument for the claim (the relevant passage is in pages 81-83 of the text).

In the context, Brandom discusses the standard frame problem for A.I., which concerns differentiating between relevant and irrelevant information. If a search tree contains too much irrelevant information, then the system gets stuck. But if it doesn't contain enough information, then the system doesn't react correctly to novel situations. 

Brandom notes that an instance of this is situations where we should ignore overly relational properties, such as the property of having "the same eye color as the oldest living person in Provo, Utah." I can lose this property just because someone in Provo passes away. Brandom just says "one of the lessons of the narrowing, engineering versions of the frame problem is that updating becomes computationally infeasible if I cannot" ignore such properties. But he never shows why this is the case, and it's confusing, because then it is not at all clear why he immediately uses this to do his normal shit on animals, aphasics, and the retarded move, when it's not clear that it has anything to do with it [His other examples of possible computational non-feasibility such as riding a bicycle and seeing red are clearly things that non-human animals can do. So why the extra dig at non-language users here?] Anyway, here's what he gives in lieu of argument.

I am claiming that:

• One cannot talk unless one can ignore a vast variety of considerations one is capable of attending to, in particular those that involve complex relational properties, that lie within the range of counterfactual robustness of various inferences.
• Only something that can talk can do that, since one cannot ignore what one cannot attend to (a PP-necessity claim), and for many complex relational properties, only those with access to the combinatorial productive resources of a language can pick them out and respond differentially to them. No non-linguistic creature can be concerned with fridgeons or old-Provo eye colors.
• So language use, deploying autonomous vocabularies, brings with it the need for a new kind of capacity: for each inference one entertains to distinguish in practice among all the new complex relational properties that one comes to be able to consider, those that are, from those that are not relevant to assessing it.
• Since non-linguistic creatures have no semantic, cognitive, or practical access at all to most of the complex relational properties they would have to distinguish to asses the goodness of many material inferences, there is no reason at all to expect that the sophisticated ability to distinguish ranges of counterfactual robustness involving them could be algorithmically elaborated from the sorts of abilities those creatures do have (Brandom 2008, 83)

The argument is that only language creatures could differentiate between the relevant and irrelevant properties, this ability being PP necessary for language use. So any algorithmic decomposition of language use will decompose into something that could only be possessed by a language user. But then any algorithmic decomposition will fail to be substantive.

I'm just not convinced that just because Brandom has to use lots of compositional language to specify the properties in question, that it follows that one needs to speak a language to differentiate the properties in question. This is an empirical issue.

But even assuming Brandom is right that language gives most people the ability to respond differentially to new sets of properties. Are these new properties really the very same ones that have to be responded to differentially in order to use language? This is a very tight circle. How could you ever learn a language then? [I'm not defending the computational theory of mind here; I find Brandom's argument genuinely puzzling.]

The biggest problem with this discussion is that Brandom is not clear enough about performance/competence issues. If one is talking about a competence theory in Chomsky's sense, then it follows just from logic that  the relevant inferential properties (e.g. consistency) of expressively rich enough languages are not algorithmically specifiable. However, one might say that human beings don't in fact possess the abilities in full generality. Then perhaps a performance theory could model what finite, fallible humans in fact do. One would need an argument against this sort of theory in order to make Brandom's case (I should note taht I think one can make such an argument).

But again, this has nothing to do with the mute verses the speakers. Nor should it by Brandom's own terms, because he openly countenances the view that many abilities possessed by the mute also fail to be algorithmically specifiable.

4. Practical Elaboration by Training

This is a really nice section where Brandom notes that linguistic abilities do have a ontogeny and phylogeny, and he is not meaning to follow Chomsky (I should note that he does not cite Chomsky's or his followers' weird claims about evolution) and present language as something magical that couldn't evolve. Brandom wants to demystify this by providing an account of how we learn things where this learning is not algorithmic. Brandom calls this "practical elaboration by training."

The discussion of teaching strategies for abilities that are algorithmic (division, subtraction, etc.) is really pretty amazing. The solvability of how to optimally teach a procedure in no way corresponds to the computational properties of the procedure itself.

There is also a nice discussion of some relevant political issues about pedagogy.

questions about Chapter 2 of Brandom's Saying and Doing

RECAP OF CHAPTER 1

Brandom recaps Chapter 1 in the following manner:

So far, I have introduced three basic meaning-use relations (MURs) and used automaton-theoretic considerations to illustrate and clarify them. These basic MURs are:

• the PV-sufficiency of practices-or-abilities to deploy a vocabulary
• the VP-sufficiency of a vocabulary to specify a set of practices-or-abilities
• the PP-sufficiency of a set of practices or abilities that can be elaborated into another, by a set o algorithmic abilities that implement that practical elaboration.

I have also appealed to a fourth:

• the VV-sufficiency of one vocabulary to characterize another (ther relation of being a direct or immediate semantic or syntactic metavocabulary) (Brandom 2010, 39)

Brandom's central philosophical application of these notions is to characterize a certain form of V V relation called strict pragmatic expressive bootstrapping, and presents Huw Price's naturalistic explanation of what we are doing when we engage in moral discourse to be a paradigm case of this (I hypothesize that a certain reading of Nietzsche does the job well too). He attempts to illustrate all of these notions with a result in computability theory concerning context free grammars and recursively enumerable grammars.

I gave a brief, somewhat befuddled spiel of all of this HERE.

Unfortunately, at the end of that chapter, I still was not clear about : (1) what a "vocabulary" is supposed to be for Brandom (intuitively, vocabularies are inert lists of words that don't do anything, but Brandom has vocabularies characterizing one another), (2) what actual theorem he is referencing in his discussion of computability theory, and (3) how the theorem would be analogous to the kind of philosophical project of Huw Price, which is to be a paradigm example of strict pragmatic bootstrapping. Brandom's example elided a number of important distinctions (function as set of input output pairs, program, different methods of specifying the same program (e.g. flowchart or table), and machine for executing the program) in computability theory, making the example unhelpful. My hope was that as the book continues his examples will become clearer and these notions will be better defined. Chapter 2 really does deliver here.

Main Claims in Chapter 2

If Chapter 1 was to clarify the kind of strict pragmatic expressive bootstrapping of Price (or maybe Nietzsche on a certain interpretation), Chapter 2 does two important things. First, it makes a really interesting proposal for demarcating logical vocabulary from non-logical vocabulary. For Brandom if something is not a "universal LX vocabulary" then it does not count as logical. Second, the framework is to provide a solution to the puzzle put forward by Dummett in "The Justification of Deduction" (Brandom doesn't cite the article, but would surely admit it as an influence given how generous he is in citing Dummett in other contexts) concerning how logical deduction can be both semantically transparent and analytically efficacious. The picture here is that logical vocabulary allows us to do in practice what we could only do in principle before. So in a language without logical vocabulary one can do all sorts of things in principle, but only when one adds the logical vocabulary can one do those things in practice.

Chapter 2 introduces a bunch of new notions and again leaves me confused. Though, as with Chapter 1, if this framework can do what Brandom promises for it, then things will be very cool.

The new notions: (1) PV-necessity ("PV-nec"), (2) PP-sufficiency, (3) a certain form of PP-sufficiency called algorithmic elaboration ("P_AlgEL #: PP-suff"), (4) a certain form of V V-relation called an elaborating explicating "LX" relation, and (5) the notion of a universal LX-vocabulary.

A Necessary Condition for Logicality

Brandom's definition of an elaborating explicating relation is a mouthful:

As shorthand, I will call this important kind of pragmatically mediated semantic VV-relation an "LX relation. It obtains when some practices-or-abilities PV-necessary for the deployment of one vocabulary can be algorithmically elaborated (the 'L' part) into a set that is PV-sufficient to deploy a vocabulary that is VP-sufficient explicitly to specify or codify the original set of practices (the 'X' part) (Brandom 2010, 47)

The lower triangle in the following diagram illustrates this (right click and open in a new tab to get a full sized view):

Two things are new here: (1) "algorithmic elaboration," and (2) ADP, which is "autonomous discursive practice." The first was defined by Brandom at the end of Chapter 1 in this manner:

One concrete way of filling in a definite sense of "in principle" is by algorithmic elaboration, where exercising the target ability just is exercising the right basic abilities in the right order and under the right circumstances. As an example, the ability to do long division just consists in exercising the abilities to do multiplication and subtraction and write down the results f those calculations, according to a particular conditional branched-schedule algorithm. The practical abilities that implement such an algorithmic PP-sufficiency relation are just those exercised by a finite-state automaton. Indeed, automata are defined by a definite set of meta-abilities: abilities to elaborate a set of primitive abilities into a set of more complex ones, which can accordingly be pragmatically analyzed in terms of or decomposed into the other (Brandom 2010, 27 [see also the same example and discussion on pages 32-33).

I think it is important to note that the base ability need not be in any sense algorithmic. What is at issue is whether given the base ability, an algorithm can then characterize the second ability with the base abilities as inputs. So it is consistent with what Brandom says here that some non-recursive function is an algorithmic elaboration of another set of non-recursive functions! This will be an important point when Brandom turns to discussing Artificial Intelligence in Chapter 3.

An "autonomous discursive practice" is characterized in the following manner:

In the very  general way in which I have been using the term 'vocabulary', many of the vocabularies of most concern are language fragments: expressions whose use is not an autonomous discursive practice (ADP), in the sense of a language game one could play thou one played no other, or a set of discursive abilities one could have though one had no other specifically discursive ability. Singular terms, for instance, constitute a vocabulary in my sense. But no one could count as using singular terms unless she could also use sentences containing them, and hence predicates as well. Vocabularies deployed by autonomous discursive practices may be called 'autonomous' vocabularies, or just 'languages.' (In this sense, there is no 'language of physics', though there  is a vocabulary of physics.) Any vocabulary that is fragmentary (that is, not autonomous) pragmatically presupposes, in the PV-necessity sense, some set of autonomous discursive practices, which are PV-sufficient for deploying the autonomous vocabulary of which the vocabulary in question is a fragment. If that is right, then any practices PV-necessary for every autonomous vocabulary would be PV-necessary for every vocabulary whatsoever (Brandom 2010, 41)

In the context of "realism" debates in analytic philosophy, this is an extremely important point. Following Michael Dummett, Crispin Wright thinks of realism and anti-realism in terms of how one characterizes a truth predicate for a given "discourse." This is in some sense the fulfillment of the linguistic turn. Whereas old metaphysicians would have asked about whether numbers exist, now we inquire about the realism-relevant features of discourse about numbers. But the kind of metaphysical issues that concerned the British empiricists and German idealists often crop up in every discourse. And this is Brandom's point, anything that could count as a discourse is going to include logical inferences and alethic and deontic modal proprieties. And possibly as a consequence of this, there is a problem with a position like Michael Reznik's which tries to be anti-realist about logic and realist about mathematics (this would be an interesting paper).

In terms of the picture above the practice in the lower right hand side could be any practice (sufficient for correct use of a vocabulary) at all, it will include in it the practice of inferring.

Now we can see what Brandom means by an LX relation. V_1 is a language without conditionals, correct use of which is given by the P_ADP box. Within that will be a set of practices of inferring. Here he gestures about how this will work with conditionals and negation.

By way of anticipatory illustration, I can say that I take it that just as every autonomous discursive practices must involve distinguishing some inferences as materially good, so it must involve distinguishing some claims as materially incompatible with others. That a monochromatic patch is red rules out its being blue (Brandom 2010, 47).

So speakers of a language without a conditional or negation still have ways of accepting or rejecting material inferences. If I say that something is water, and then you say that that thing is dry, I remonstrate with you. If you say it's wet (and I'm teaching you the meaning of the word, for example) I will praise you. If you say of the same thing that it is both dry and wet, I remonstrate with you. But then,

Only algorithmic elaboration is required to turn the ability to distinguish material incompatibility of claims into the ability to deploy logical negation. And once that bit of logical vocabulary is deployed, it (together with the conditional) lets one say that two claimables are materially incompatible: "If a monochromatic patch is red, then it is not blue." That is, negation lets one make explicit, in the form of claims-something that can be said and (so) thought-a relation that otherwise remained implicit in what one practically did, namely treat two claims as materially incompatible (Brandom 2010, 47-48).

So this algorithmic elaboration (and what we have here is just a promissory note, I assume one delivered upon in later chapters, probably the formal appendices) gets us to the lower left hand box in the above picture. Brandom does not here say exactly what these practices are. From his other inferentialist commitments, I assume they have to include behavior that is best represented as utilizing the introduction and elimination rules for the operators in questions. These practices are then PV sufficient for successful deployment of the vocabulary represented in the upper right hand oval. Again, I don't really know what goes in this box! I hope, hope, hope that when lets us cash in the promissory note he is clearer about this. Maybe it is an explicit statement of the logic of  the operators in questions? The actual introduction and elimination rules stated as part of a formal logic, whose correct use is given by the practices sufficient for it? This would work.

Then you get the diagonal line. Whatever is in the V_conditionals oval is supposed to allow you to explicate the original practices that did not involve the conditional. And this triangle we have traced is what constitutes an LX relation. This allows Brandom to give a really rich necessary condition for logicality in terms of a piece of vocabulary being universal LX.

I want to suggest that the meaning-use analysis just offered of conditionals specifies the genus of which logical vocabulary is a species. That genus is distinguished by three characteristics:

1. being deployed by practices-or-abilities that are algorithmically elaborated from
2. practices-or-abilities that are PV-necessary for every autonomous vocabulary (and hence very vocabulary whatsoever) and that
3. suffice to specify explicitly those PV-necessary practices or abilities.

Any vocabulary meeting these conditions I will call a "universal LX-vocabulary." In my fifth lecture I will offer more details about how one can think of other logical connectives as exhibiting this pattern of pragmatically mediated semantic relation to non-logical vocabularies generally (Brandom 2010, 47).

To recap, in the case of conditionals:

. . .conditionals let one say something, where before one could only do something. Saying that if something is copper then it conducts electricity is a new way of doing--by saying--what one was doing before by endorsing the material inference from "That is copper" to "That conducts electricity." Conditionals make explicit something that otherwise was implicit in the practical sorting of non-logical inferences into good and bad. Where before one could only in practice take or treat inferences as good or bad, after the algorithmic introduction of conditionals one can endorse or reject the inference by explicitly saying something, bu asserting or denying the corresponding conditionals. What the conditional says explicitly is what one endorsed implicitly by doing what one did. the expressive role distinctive of conditionals whose use is elaborated in the way I have just specified is to codify inferences, to specify inferential practices-or-abilities, to explicate them, in the sense of making explicit something that was implicit in them (Brandom 2010, 46).

The closest Brandom comes to suggesting sufficient conditions for logicality is the view that logic is "analytically efficacious"- that is, something that can non-problematically be used in characterizing "definability, translatability, reducibility, supervenience, or whatever (Brandom 2010, 52)." This is a little strange, because he is tying his characterization of logicality to the classic conception of philosophical analysis. But maybe not too strange, since Brandom's main project is to save analysis from being undermined by the realizations concerning meaning and use of Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, Wilson, and Stich. So Brandom writes

The claim I want to defend is that being an LX-vocabulary with respect to every autonomous vocabulary is at least sufficient, and may be necessary, for playing the privileged role logical vocabulary is called on to playing the classic project of semantic analysis (Brandom 2010, 52).

From earlier we have that being universally LX is necessary for logicality. Here we have that it is sufficient for being analytically efficacious. But then if analytic efficacy is sufficient for logicality, it follows that being universally LX is both necessary and sufficient for logicality.

The Logicist's Dilemma

Traditionally logic is conceived of as just concerning form and not content (following his student John MacFarlane and Etchemendy (whom he doesn't cite) Brandom finds this very problematic). This gives rise to the problem Dummett discusses in "The Justification of Deduction." How can something that does not contribute to content still be useful? If logic doesn't add anything to what is already contained in premises then why does it lead to surprises.

Of course this isn't that big a mystery. It would only be a problem if logic provided God with surprises, but given our limited epistemic abilities, we of course with logic learn new things that were in a sense already there.

Brandom explicates this problem and the solution in terms of his schema. For him logic is transparent in the sense that it does not allow you to do anything that you could not already do in principle. But, in practice, it does allow you to do new things.

Transparency arises from the pragmatic fact that one is already in principle able to do everything one must do to deploy logical vocabulary, just by being able to talk at all. That this pragmatic potential was always already in place i sthe sense in which "nothing is added" by logical vocabulary. On the other hand, actualizing that potential, by introducing an deploying, actually using and applying, logical vocabulary, does involve doing something new: something one could in principle have done before, but had not actually done (Brandom 2010, 54).

Some questions-

1. Am I right that the P_conditionals is behavior with conditionals that is best represented by introduction and elimination rules and that V_conditionals is the explicit statement of those rules?
2. How does this generalize to natural languages, where (following Kratzer) conditionals are best thought of as generalized quantifiers over possible worlds?
3. How is this possibly going to work with quantifiers? First order logic can axiomatize theories that are only true of infinite domains. Doesn't Brandom's conception that one could in principle already do everything without the logical vocabulary then force it to be the case that one could then enumerate a completed infinity? Or does this force Brandom to be committed to a constructivist account of the infinity and the quantifiers (and hence reject classical logic)?
4. How does this tie to Dummettian concepts of "harmony" and related conservative extension requirements? (need to dig up Tennant's Taming of the True!) Is Brandom also committed to intuitionism since classical negation is not conservative with respect to its negation free fragment? Isn't second order logic non-conservative with respect to first order logic (that is, when you add second order quantifiers you can prove new first order formula that you couldn't before)? Does this non-conservativity (assuming I'm remembering that right) hold in intuitionistic logic (Shapiro's article "The Goedel Sentence is True, But Did Somebody Change the Subject" is relevant here)? Does this mean that for Brandom second order logic is not logic? (Shapiro's second order logic book is a must here)

I'm not complaining here! I feel like I understand this material much better than I do the discussion of the Chomsky hierarchy in Chapter 1. The questions are just things to keep aware of when he provides the details of how the algorithmic elaboration is supposed to work.

questions about Chapter 1 of Brandom's Between Saying and Doing

I just finished Chapter 1 of Robert Brandom's Between Saying and Doing and I have a lot of unanswered questions.

Overview of Brandom's Project

The task of task of the book is to see one much of the classical project of analysis can be justified in light of critiques of meaning coming from Wittgenstein, Quine, and Mark Wilson (he should have cited Stephen Stich in this regard too). The upshot of all of these thinkers is that the way use constrains meaning entails that meaning itself is underdetermined. This form of underdetermination is not normal vagueness. For a word like "red" the meaning unambiguously determines that some objects will be vaguely red. And part of the grasp of "red" is being sensitive to contexts where this vagueness arises. This is quite different from cases where the world surprises you and it is not even clear if the word determines that the object in question is vague with respect to it. Legal cases involving precedent, scientific cases where new and surprising empirical phenomena, and new interactions between different cultures and species always bring to fore this kind of meaning underdetermination.

Unfortunately for the classical project of philosophical analysis, weird thought experiments about what should be the case in far away possible worlds tend to involve possible objects that illustrate the undeterermination of word meaning. At some point when reading the latest Gettier style counterexample to some fantastically complicated definition of knowledge your intuitions just drop out and you start to wonder if the meaning of "knowledge" is just underdetermined in this regard.

Brandom, rightfully so, does not want to conclude from this that anything a philosopher does that might be considered "analysis" is automatically ruled out. It would be incredibly lazy to disagree with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, or Sellars brilliant account of "seems" talk, just because the meaning of moral terms are underdetermined.

So Brandom wants to keep the pragmatist's insight into the connection between use and meaning, and keep what is right about how this limits a priori approaches to philosophy, but retain some facets of the linguistic turn.

Brandom's Meaning-Use diagrams

This is where things start to get difficult. Brandom explicates a lot of what he is doing in terms of these "meaning-use" diagrams, and in explaining the key notion of "pragmatic expressive bootstrapping" he gives an example from the Chomsky hierarchy in recursion theory. I have real questions about what the diagrams mean, and whether the Chomsky hierarchy does what it is supposed to for him. Here's the diagram from page 23.

O.K. This is supposed to be a paradigm case of strict pragamtic semantic bootstrapping. Let me first use Nietzsche to explain this. One interpretation of Nietzsche on ethics is that he was explaining what people must be doing to successfully engage in discourse involving good and evil, but that Nietzsche's own explanation did not involve commitment to the truth of this discourse. One could also use Marx on ideology and Freud on religion here. Brandom uses Huw Price's naturalistic theory of normativity (which from the spiel is similar in the respect I've isolated to the view of Nietzsche presented). Brandom spiels this kind of thing in terms of expressive power of vocabularies:

At least one sort of result that could be of considerable potential significance, I think, is if it turned out that, in some cases, pragmatic metavocabularies exist that differ significantly in their expressive power form the vocabularies for the deployment of which they speify sufficient practices-or-abilities. I will call that phenomenon "pragmatic expressive bootstrapping." If one vocabulary is strictly weaker in expressive power than the other, I will call that strict expressive bootstrapping. We are familiar with this sort of phenomenon in ordinary semantics, where sometimes a semantic metalanguage differs substantially in expressive power from its object language--for instance, where we can produce an extensional metalanguage for intensional languages, as in the case of posible worlds semantics for modality. One example of a claim of this shape in the case of pragmatically mediated semantic relations--though of course it is not expressed in terms of the machinery I have been introducing--is Huw Price's pragmatic normative natrualism. {/footnote "Naturalism without Representationism" in Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question (Harvard Unviersity Press, 2004), 71-90.} He argues in effect that although normative vocabulary is not reducible to naturalistic vocabulary it might still be possible to say what one must do to be using normative vocabulary (Brandom 2010, 12)

Now look at the diagram above. Brandom takes this strict pragmatic bootstrapping to hold when one vocabulary is strictly less expressive than another but when nontheless correct use of the first vocabulary is sufficient to express what one must do in order to correctly use the second vocabulary. The diagram itself expresses this sufficiency in terms of the "Res1: VV 1,2" claim and the diagonal arrow it is over. This claim is defined as the composition the two claims over the other two arrows. The definition is a mouthful, so please look at the diagram.

. . .the relation that holds between vocabulary V' and vocabulary V when V' is VP-sufficient to specify practices-or-abilities P that are PV sufficient to deploy vocabuary V. This VV-relation is the composition of the two basic MURs. When it obtains I will say that V' is a pragmatic metavocabulary for V (Brandom 2010, 10).

To make sense of this we only need to make sense of the weird Rortian way Brandom is talking about "vocabularies" as well as the way these are related to practices. Unfortunately Chapter 1 is not at all clear on just this point.

PV-sufficiency is defined in the following way:

We must look at what it is to use locutions as expressing meanings--that is, at what one must do in order to count as saying what the vocabulary lets practitioners express. i am going to call this kind of relation "practice-vocabulary" sufficiency"--or, usually "PV-sufficiency" for short. It obtains when engaging in a specified set of practices or exercising a pseccified set of abilities is sufficient for someone to count as deploying a specified vocabulary (Brandom 2010, 9)

First problem- If by vocabulary we just mean the words in a language, then from context it is clear that Brandom means this to only count if the person is correctly deploying the vocabulary. I'm not sure this is what Brandom means by vocabulary though. If you look at the ovals above, he treats the vocabulary for recursive enumerability differently from the vocabulary for context freeness. But by the normal use of the word "vocabulary" the difference in these two notions is not one of vocabulary. The same set of words yield different possible languages depending upon whether the grammar is context free or recursively enumerable, with the first set of languages being a proper subset of the second. I don't know how big a deal this is going to be as I go forward in the book. I hope by going over his examples it will be clear to me just what a vocabulary is for Brandom.

VP-sufficiency is defined in the following manner:

. . ."vocabulary-practice sufficiency,' or just "VP-sufficiency," is the relation that holds between a vocabulary and a set of practices-or-abilities when the vocabulary is sufficient to specify those practices-or-abilities. VP-sufficient vocabularies that specify PV-sufficient practices let one say what it is one must do to count as engaging in those practices or exercising those abilities, and as to deploy a vocabulary to say something (Brandom 2010, 10).

Again, I have no idea what he means by "vocabulary" here. If he just means "set of words" this doesn't make much sense, as we could just use natural number numerals for all of our morphemes (since there are only a finite number of morphemes). From this perspective the only thing that is relevant expressively is the number of distinct words you can make (with zero and a genuine successor function you can make an infinite number of distinct words).

I mean, vocabularies on their own, separated from the practices of using them, are completely inert. They don't specify anything. So why doesn't Brandom say that a PV pair is sufficient to specify another practice and read his diagrams in that manner. I don't get it, and conjecture that he must mean something different by "vocabulary" than is meant in normal discourse. Unfortunately by the end of Chapter 1 I still don't know what this is.

Brandom's use of the Chomsky Hierarchy

Given that I don't know what a vocabulary is, it's very difficult for me to make sense of the diagram above. Normally, when doing these things one thinks in terms of four things, (1) a program specification, (2) a machine to run the program, (3) a set of possible inputs, and (4) the outputs of the machine running the program, given the inputs.

Brandom's rectangles elide the difference between (1) and (2)! On page 19 he has two different boxes for two different ways to specify the same program, the first a state-table (for the "laughing santa" autamaton) and the second a flow chart (which he just calls "the laughing Santa automaton"). These are just two different ways to represent programs run by a context free machine. But on page 23 you see the diagram represented above, where each box contains different machines (the pushdown automaton and the Turing machine). Turing machines can be represented in flow charts, graphs, etc. Why just one box for all of them now? This is not a trivial matter, as differentiating not just different individual programs, but different ways to specify the programs gives you a deeper level of intensionality than just identifying machines the most abstractly in terms of input output relations, or in terms of a way of executing the program (e.g. the actual "Turing machine" the same kind of which can be though of as executing a flow chart, or a graph, or a linear representation, etc.)

Unfortunately, he never says what the vocabulary ovals represent either. Sets of input-output pairs corresponding to each infinite run-through of a specified program by a machine? I think that's the only thing that would work.

Then, to get this as a paradigm case of strict pragmatic bootstrapping. Brandom notes,

The surprising fact is that the abilities codified in Turing machines--the abilities to recognize and produce arbitrary recursively enumerable vocabularies--can quite generally be specified in context free vocabularies. It is demonstrable that context-free vocabularies are strictly weaker in syntactic expressive resources than recursively enumerable vocabularies. the PDAs that read and write only context-free vocabularies cannot read and write recursively enumerable vocabularies in general. But it is possible to say in a context-free vocabulary what one needs to be able to do in order to deploy recursively enumerable vocabularies in general (Brandom 2010, 22).

Unfortunately, from a logical perspective, it is not at all clear what theorem he is gesturing at. I take it (and I haven't looked at the Chomsky hierarchy in a long time) that he is saying that a push down automaton can enumerate the set of Turing machine programs. Or he could be saying that a push down automaton can enumerate both the set of Turing machine programs and the set of strings that do not count as Turing machine programs. This latter claim is much stronger, as it would imply that push down automatons could yield a decision procedure to tell of any arbitrary string whether it is a Turing machine program.

The thing is, I'm not sure that this property is decidable (I'm going to go back and dig through the relevant logic this week). My intuition is that it being decidable probably entails the decidability of first order logic (which is not decidable), or vice versa, and so it's not decidable. If that's true, then what we have is something very weak, better expressed in this manner: The practices contained in the push-down automaton box are sufficient to produce what can be interpreted as enumeration of Turing machine programs, which will be one of the enumerations in the box for the "vocabulary" of context free grammars.

Then, given a method of intepreting the enumeration of programs, one can then specify the practices necessary for running a Turing Machine. Now the method of interpreting will be straightforward and pretheoretically algorithmic/computable as long as the interpreter already knows what a Turing machine does. But if one already needs to know how a Turing machine runs to get from the enumeration to the practices, in what sense is it true to say that "that the abilities codified in Turing machines--the abilities to recognize and produce arbitrary recursively enumerable vocabularies--can quite generally be specified in context free vocabularies."

This is independent of the concern about whether a push-down automaton can merely enumerate the set of programs or also enumerate the set of non-programs and hence yield a decision procedure. Even if it could do this, we would still need to understand how a Turing machine worked to be able to use the enumerations as a Turing machine. But if push down automatons could only enumerate the set of programs, there is another disanalogy.

The Nietzschean, Freudian, and Marxist "hermeneutics of suspicion" involve explaining a given discourse without commitment to the truth of important claims in that discourse. But for them to succeed they presumably have to not just give a list of all the times people in the discourse succeed in using the relevant vocabulary. They also need to explain when people get it wrong according to their own standards. So Nietzsche is not just explaining when people successfully use the word "good." It is part of his explanation when people take themselves to get it wrong and use the word "good" incorrectly (his whole point about the evolution of this word from an aesthetic good/bad polarity to a moralistic good/evil polarity could not be expressed if he weren't explaining people's failures in their respective communities as well). But this would be analogous to the push-down automaton also enumerating the set of strings that do not yield Turing machine programs. 

Brandom is just too unclear on all of this. He doesn't differentiate effective enumeration from decidability, and his unclarity about distinguishing program specification from machines and how that goes into his V and P boxes makes him unclear about the process of decoding whatever is supposed to be in the V box (it's quite possible that there is more in the V box than sets of enumerations or (perhaps also) printouts of run throughs; as far as I can tell one has no idea from anything he says). Again, consider:

The proof of this claim is tedious but not difficult, and the claim itself is not at all controversial--though computational linguists make nothing of it, having theoretical concerns very different from those that lead me to underly the fact. (My introductory textbook leaves the proof as an exercise to the reader.{/footnote Thomas A. Sudkamp, Languages and Machines, 2nd ed. (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998).} General-purpose computer langauges such as Pascal and C++ can specify the algorithsm a Turing machine, or any other universal computer, uses to comptue an recursively enumerable function, hence to recognize or produce any recursively enumberable vocabulary. And they are invariably context-free languages{/footnote. . .}--in no small part just because the simplicity of this type of grammar makes it easy to write parsers for them. yet they suffice to specivy the state-table, contents of the tape (or of the dual stacks), and primitive operations of any and every Turing machine (Brandom 2010, 23)

Again, "specify" does not differentiate between "enumerate" and "decide." I suspect it is just "enumerate," which is not analogous to the kind of explanation he attributes to Huw Price, and that Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx engaged in. It's interesting in this quote how he includes the fact that the context free language can print instructions for how to interpret the primitive operations. But as I said above, these are still just bits of inert language if one does not know how to interpret them. And the real question (analogous to the issue Price is concerned with) should then be whether the practices modeled by a push down automaton are sufficient for being able to so interpret them. I suspect that the interesting kind of "expressive" limitations in this context are when they are not.

I'll find this out this week (as Brandom writes, these aren't difficult theorems), as well as forge ahead and hopefully figure out exactly what a practice and vocabulary are from other examples Brandom gives in Chapter 2.

[Addendum: After reading Chapter 2 I'm wondering if Humean "skeptical solutions" and if Dennett's "heterophenomenology" count as attempted strict pragmatic bootstrapping for Brandom. I think there might be a priori limits on how far this can go for Brandom that give rise to a critique of both Hume/Kripke and Dennett in just this way, but I need to read his chapter on normativity first. This will be worth keeping up with.]

Brandom on (sentient) categorizers versus (sapient) inferers

I worry I'm being terribly obtuse here, but one of Brandom's central arguments totally loses me. Over and over again he contrasts mere classification with inference, claiming the former is not indicative of conceptual mastery while the latter is. This underwrites his dismissal of animals as "merely sentient," as he baldly groups (it should be noted with no citation of any relevant empirical research; see great Wolfendale/Silcox discussion HERE on this issue) parrot and pigeon behavior with that of thermometers and rusting iron, contrasting this with humans who are doing something more.

But when he says what we do that is more it is incredibly paltry, in fact the kind of thing that computer programs also do well. Here's a representative passage from Reason in Philosophy.

One could at this piont throw up one's hands, jettison the functionalist project, and concede that what is missing can only be supplied by invoking intrinsically conceptually contentful states of understanding-something that we concept-mongering sapients have, but that mere sentients such as pigeons do not. But there is an alternative. The rationalist's idea is that what is distinctive of the conceptual is its specifically inferential articulation. For a response reliably differentially elicited by red things to qualify as the application of a concept, it must have the significance of a move in the game of giving and asking for reasons. It must be available as a premise for drawing further conclusions, and be liable to challenge by inferences from premises with incompatible consequences. Grasping the concept red requires practical mastery of its inferential role, as well as its non-inferential role as an appropriate response to certain sorts of stimuli. This means being able to discriminate what follows from it, what it follows from, and what is incompatible with it-endorsing in practice the move from red to colored and from scarlet to red, and treating red as ruling out green. (Brandom 2009, 184)

Chinese room anyone? What am I missing?

Of course, the very highest conceptual ability Brandom writes about in the fantastic Chapter 3 of Reason in Philosophy, the Hegelian/existentialist ability to change concepts and reinvent a history that shows this change to be rational, is something that computers can't do. In fact, the old school of theory revision (where you just have to derive a good consistent subset of an inconsistent theory) is computationally intractable in all sorts of ways. However, these abilities are also the ones that are very, very hard for humans too!

So Brandom seems to either have to say that a simple expert system programmed in LISP or PROLOG is sapient, or to hold that only philosophers are sapient. Something's gone wrong.

Right after the above quote Brandom writes,

(Indeed, the considerations advanced by the pragmatist can be seen to be subsumed by those advanced by the rationalist, for the inferential role of a claim or concept includes its service as a premise in practical inferences: those whose conclusions are intentional actions.) (ibid)

Richard Dreyfus would strongly beg to differ here (and What Computers Still Can't Do should still be required reading). His Heideggerian critique of linguaform explanations just is a critique of this kind of assurance. I think it is here that Brandom goes wrong, and this Summer hope to show so with a paper on Heideggerian world-richness how this works (see my earlier post HERE on how this will go; I've also got to read Okrent's fascinating new book while doing this).

[Addendum: the same article has a very nice discussion of how "the generality problem" for epistemic reliabilism and "the disjunction problem"/gavagai issue play out, but again Brandom almost constitutively deals in false dichotomies whenever animals come up. He acts as if the disjunction problem (i.e. "is the frog responding to flies or moving dots") occurs only when we try to attribute conceptual mastery to animals, but that inference solves the problem for us, e.g.

What picks out one kind of thing as what is being reported to is a matter of the inferential commitments that response is involved in. These inferential consequences of going into a state make it clear that what is being classified is something outside the system. They are what determine that a physicist is reporting the presence of a mu meson in a bubble chamber, and not simply a large hook-shaped pattern. For the consequences of classifying something as a microscopic mu meson are quite different from those of classifying something as a macroscopic hook-shaped trace. It is the lack of such consequences that makes Dretske's dual thermometer liable to a disjunctive proximal interpretation (ibid, 195)

But surely it is not too science fictiony to imagine an alien race with a more intensionally rich idiom for whom our physicist's mu meson is just as crude as the frog's fly or moving spot, that is where the reactions to the mu meson are reactions to two different things that co-occur enough for it to work for human physicists.

And we don't have to go to aliens, normal human expertise do this, think if the experts' jadeite and nephrite to the non-experts jade (which is correctly applied either to jadeite or nephrite). And I'm sure we seem incredibly naive to our dogs in terms of how we differentially respond to smells.

Again, Brandom treats something that admits all sorts of degrees as if it were an on-off switch. I'll just reiterate that I think that this is a function of the way he is slighting "pragmatist" explanations, and that one can make sense of intensional richness entirely in terms of practical means-ends behavior.

Again, there are adult humans who are entirely non-linguistic (being born deaf and never having learned a language) who are migrant farmers. These people have been studied. They certainly can differentiate barn facades from real barns, and the abilities that make that possible for them interact with possible courses of action in all sorts or ways relevant to attributing to them conceptual mastery. Or consider a severe aphasic who only retains the word "red" but whose behavior makes it clear she grasps the relevant concept. As far as I understand him, Brandom is stuck a priori saying these things aren't possible. But they are actual, so of course they are possible. Again, I think the solution is to work out Heidegger's notion of world richness along early Heideggerian lines.]

[ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM:

Here's another one from the next essay, which presents itself as advice to cognitive scientists, (without citing any actual cognitive science).

We might train a parrot reliably to respond differentially to the visible presence of red things by squawking "That's red." It would not yet be describing things as red, would not be applying the concept of red to them, because the noise it makes has no significance for it. It does not know that it follows from something's being red that it is colored, that it cannot be wholly green, and so on. Ignorant as it is of those inferential consequences, the parrot does not grasp the concept (ibid. 204).

Does Brandom mean to say that speakers of language with impoverished color words relative to ours (there are plenty of languages with only two, three, or four color words), do not grasp the concept of Red because they don't conclude that red things aren't green? This would be puerile, and really just be the result of individuating content too finely, with the result being that  people with different beliefs end up having different concepts automatically.

So I guess it's that the parrot makes no conclusions from her labeling something red. But Brandom and Sellars include "practical inferences" and clearly the Parrot will manifest all sorts of these. So does he just have a catastrophically empirically ill informed picture of bird cognition?

Weirdly, on the next page he says that one can stretch the word "conceptual" to include animals and computers, but that such things still don't have "genuinely descriptive-concepts" as if the distinction between being descriptive and not descriptive was clear. But then he makes the distinction in terms of drawing inferences in the first case and not the second. Does he mean inferences in natural language? Then aphasics and adult deaf non-language users have no concepts! So does he allow that practical inferences could be sufficient? Then he has to admit that there is continuum with higher animals such as parrots, dolphins, chimps, etc. closer to the average human. But he refuses to do this. Again, I'm not sure if this is just because he hasn't studied any of the empirical research about animal cognition, or what.]

PAIN or ONE's OWN PAIN

I think you are able to be the least philosophical about things that just seem obvious to you. I've seen this with lots of friends. The seeming obviousness gives you an excuse not to think any more about whatever issue it is.

For me it's meta-ethics. It just seems obvious to me that pain has intrinsic normative significance.

That's not quite the end of the story, because one might raise a "disjunction problem" between the concepts PAIN and ONE'S OWN PAIN. If all that has intrinsic normative significance is one's own pain, then ethics won't get off the ground.

I think that there are two responses. First, there is the Hegel/Marx/Heidegger/Sartre/Wittgenstein/Levinas reversal, which argues that the concepts concerning the self are in some sense dependent on concepts involving others. A Wittgensteinian would do this in terms of having to learn the public applicability of "pain" which involves perceiving other people's pain and grasping its normative significance in terms of their pain. Or, if that is implausible (and I think it is) one can do something similar by arguing that the primary concept is PAIN, just because the differentiation between self and others is something that comes later.

I think the second type of response is a lot more promising. With some interpretive stretching, one can read Kant [I'll post the relevant passage from the Groundwork here later today] as raising a burden of proof issue. The challenge is to produce an argument to the claim that one's own pain has normative moral force while everybody else's does not. You can't do this, so if you believe that your own pain has normative moral force, you are rationally constrained to believe that everybody else's does too.

This just seems like it should be commonsense to me, which makes me pretty bad at engaging in philosophical disputes regarding it. Maybe it's not commonsense because it borrows both from the Millean utilitarian tradition and Kantian deontological tradition, but I just don't buy the over-application of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium to the project of ethics. I think the phenomena of tragic choices shows that there are genuine moral contradictions, and that a lot of these arise out of the way utilitarianism and kantian ethics contradict one another. But, again, this just seems like commonsense to me. . .

In any case, here's this boss Danzig song that involves some of the same concepts.

Question about Brandom versus McDowell on Sellars

I'm getting a sneaking suspicion that Brandom and McDowell read Sellars "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" in radically different ways. Brandom takes the main message to be that there are no purely non-inferential reports. For the assertion that something is red to count as an assertion it must be possible for it to be the conclusion or premise of an inference, even though it can also be non-inferentially asserted.

McDowell on the other hand takes Sellars to show that objects in the causal realm cannot play a justificatory role vis a vis propositions in the space of reasons. One can easily believe Brandom's moral while completely rejecting McDowell's moral (which was sent up by Jerry Fodor in his review of Mind and World with the simple question, "Why can't the actual Oak tree justify my belief that it's an Oak tree?")

I know there's a chapter in Brandom's Articulating Reasons where he talks about externalism in epistemology, which should settle this, since externalism directly contradicts McDowell's Selllars. For the epistemic externalist the mere reliability of a belief counts as justification for that belief. If I remember right, Brandom agrees with this as far as it goes, but says it's not a belief unless it is inferentially articulated in the right way. Again, one can agree with this and, like Fodor, be completely unmoved by McDowell's claim that there is a kind of naturalistic fallacy in going from the causal to the space of reasons.

Brandom has a study guide to Sellars' essay in the Oxford publication of that essay. It would be fun to teach a class on that and McDowell's Mind and World.

"Ignore the following if you don't think Jon Cogburn's thoughts are worth your time. . ."

Ha!

Rest of quote, "continue reading if you do think they're worthwhile. (There is no big payoff at the end.)" And there is more of the same in a post titled "A Very Bad Argument for Skepticism" from my number two internet fan Daniel Lindquist HERE. Lindquist is commenting on a possibly worthwhile post of mine on Brandom  HERE.

Levi Bryant also has a post referencing it HERE.

Paul Ennis has one HERE.

Mark Silcox and Andrew Johnson raise interesting (worthwhile IMHO) points in their responses in the original thread. Johnson wants to know if Speculative Realists deny Brandom's sense dependency or if they affirm his sense dependency and reject reference dependency. I do too! [Update- Paul Ennis and Skholiasts' comments in the original thread (again, it's HERE) go a long way toward setting up a framework for answering me and Johnson's question. Also note that Skholiast quite correctly notes that I should be using the word "panpsychism" rather than "pantheism." This is totally right; my only justification is that the argument came out of a discussion with Andrew Johnson about Hegel and Spinoza's pantheism, and Spinoza's pantheism is arguably panpsychism (not that I understand Spinoza at all).]

Mark points to a weakness in the argument, which I patch in my response in the comments. The new argument has the following structure (again, see the original post HERE and response to Mark in the thread for definitions and justifications).

1. Assume sense dependency is true.

2. Either reference dependency is true or it is not the case that reference dependency is true (law of excluded middle)

3. | Assume reference dependency (for disjunction elimination)

4. | Then either idealism or pantheism is true (1,3 argued in post)

5. | Then either idealism or pantheism or skepticism is true (3, disjunction introduction)

6.   | Assume reference dependency is not the case (for disjunction elimination)

7.   | | Assume idealism and pantheism are not the case (for negation introduction)

8.   | | Then skepticism is true (1, 6, 7 argued in comment string of original post in reaction to Silcox)

9.   | Then if idealism and pantheism are not the case, skepticism is the case (7-8 negation introduction)

10. | So either idealism or pantheism or skepticism is true (9 propositional logic)

11. So either idealism or pantheism or skepticism is true (2, 3-8, 6-10 disjunction elimination)

Since the Wittgensteinian quietist about reference dependency would reject the application of excluded middle on line two, what we have is that Brandom's sense dependency claim entails Wittgensteinian quietism, idealism, pantheism, or skepticism [and since I take Wittgensteinian quietism in this context and idealism to be problematic (see original posts gesturing at why), and also find Brandom's sense dependency plausible (I'm in the process of reviewing two  of his books), I conclude that either some form of pantheism or skepticism are true.]

Idealism, Pantheism, Skepticism, or Quietism in Brandom's Hegelianism (hat tip Andrew Johnson)

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.

3d post on Brandom/(Stalnaker?)- this one on de-dicto de-re

Everything below is only from Chapter 5 of Articulating Reasons (I've yet to read Chapter 8 of Making it Explicit), so this is going to be a bit crude.

On page 177 Brandom considers the following bit of dialogue.

A: The defense attorney believes a pathological liar is a trustworthy witness.
B: Not so; what I believe is that the man who just testified is a trustworthy witness.
A: Exactly, and I have presented evidence that ought to convince anyone that the man who just testified is a pathological liar.

This is important because it suggests what is going on with the de re reading of the first sentence. According to the distinction, the first sentence understood de dicto would be to attribute incoherent beliefs to the defense attorney, the belief that something can be both trustworthy and a pathological liar [note: that there are other possibly relevant issues with "a" functioning as a generic and not merely as a quantifier here; there is a de re reading where the person is talking about the reference of the generic type "pathological liar" and not referring to one or more; I propose for now that we set these aside and charitably take Brandom to just read it existentially.] The de re reading asserts something that may be true or false. These can be paraphrased, as Brandom does, in the following way.

de re: The defense attorney claims of a pathological liar that he is a trust-worthy witness.
de dicto: The defense attorney claims that a pathological liar is a trust-worthy witness.

Then Brandom goes on to give a very interesting account of what is going on with the "of" here as a way to distinguish between de dicto and de re readings.

My suggestion is that the expressive function of de re ascriptions of propositional attitude is to make explicit which aspects of what is said express commitments that are being attributed and which express commitments that are undertaken. The part of the content specification that appears within the de dicto 'that' clause is limited to what, according to the ascriber would (or i( a strong sense should) acknowledge as an expression of what that individual is committed to. The part of the content specification that appears within the scope of the de re 'of' includes what, according to the ascriber of the commitment (but not necessarily according to the one to whom it is ascribed), is acknowledged as an expression of what the target of the ascription is committed to.

This, according to Brandom is the reason the ascriber is free to substitute co-referring terms within the "of" clause but not within the "that" clause.

I think this is a cool idea, and provides the kernel of how one can claim that there are in fact no de re interpretations of beliefs (Silcox tells me that Stalnaker argued for something similar to that, I've got to get his paper).

Assume that the semantics only yields something that means what the "that" version of Brandom's rewrite is supposed to mean. Namely a sentence that is incoherent as it stands and not guaranteed such that co-referential substitutions preserve truth. But now supposed that both speaker and hearer can from the context tell that Sam the defendant is being picked out with the phrase "a pathological liar" in A's assertion. But then both speakers accept as a consequence of A's assertion  that B believes that Sam is a trustworthy defendant.

I think you can call this kind of thing "Kripke Implicature" because (if I remember right) it's what he says in reference to Donnellan's account of what's going on when we say of a man drinking water, "The man in the corner drinking a martini is a spy." For Kripke, we've said something false, but can still communicate something true to someone who even knows that the man is drinking water, just because "The man in the corner drinking a martini is a spy" logically entails that someone is a spy, and the pragmatics of the conversation picks out that someone to everyone's satisfaction. Likewise, "a pathological liar is a trustworthy witness" entails that someone is a trustworthy witness, and the pragmatics of the conversation pick out that someone to everyone's satisfaction. Then we can go on and debate whether or not that person is a trustworthy witness.

All I'm doing here is using Brandom's insight to argue that semantically there is only a de dicto reading of the claim, and that "de re readings" are really just sentences generated by inference from the de dicto reading plus pragmatic information. If this worked it would be a boon for semantics, getting rid of the need to deal with at least one kind of scope ambiguity (I hope something like it could be extended to more general "Every man loves a woman" type scope ambiguities to avoid going the underspecification route, the semantics generating the normal wide scope of the leftmost quantifier from the sytactic form, and pragmatics giving you the rest, but that's very, very iffy.)

Another interesting thing about Brandom's account is that the de re reading is not perfectly extensional. The only things that are substitutable in the "of" phrases are what the speaker takes to be co-extensional. I think that this is perfectly right and interesting in its own case. The last remnant of de re is a kind of relativized substitutability-within-a-given-web-of-belief-(and-acting). The inferential role of attributing beliefs (again, on this model it is always de dicto) to others is sensitive to their webs of belief.

But there is still an issue of how we get to norms concerning shared reference between webs. When we communicate we act "as if" we are all mean the same thing (and as Rorty writes, to say we disagree in meaning is nothing more than a decision to stop talking with one another). Maybe Brandom gets into that in Chapter 6.

One part Brandom, one part Wittgenstein, two parts Heidegger

I think that Brandom on the philosophical significance of Kant is really interesting (for what that's worth), but his Wittgenstein eludes me. For example, on page 160 of Articulating Reasons, he writes:

As the later Wittgenstein puts the point, only the utterance of a sentence makes a move in the language game. applying a concept is to be understood in terms of making a claim or expressing a belief. The concept concept is not intelligbe [sic] apart from the possibility of such application in judging.

I always thought the role of the primative language games ("Block!") in the early part of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was precisely to deny this point. "Block!" is indeterminate in force. Is the person uttering it in effect uttering an assertion that the ostended thing is a block or is he ordering the someone to hand him the block.

This is not trivial. In Chapter 3 Brandom improbably wants to understand desires as resulting from sets of practical inferences that take as an input beliefs and give as output actions. You can triangulate to understand desires in this manner.

But the much more plausible Wittgensteinnian/Heideggerian line is to utilize the two other angles of the triangle as being primordial or "historically necessary" in the sense described below. That is take proto- or (in Heideggerese) "originary" belief attribution to be the result of desire/action pairs. This is important in part because: (1) it makes sense of how human highly functioning non-language users (severe aphasics and deaf people who are never taught languages), and (2) it makes sense how having beliefs is not an either-or phenomena, but admits grades of intentionality between what children and animals and fools (with respect to some subject matter) possess and what experts possess. So you don't fall into the Descartes/Chomsky/Fodor trap of not being able to explain the development or evolution of language without implausible a priori knowledge and/or vivisection.

Heidegger's analysis of broken tools is incredibly important here. At least on the Okrentian "pragmatist" readings of Heidegger, we start with a base non-linguistic understanding (I think this is what Heidegger means by the "hermeneutic as-structure," but I may be off base here) of means-ends activity and the way the world is structured to permit this (Alva Noe's work on perception is highly relevant here). From this we can make sense of desires leading to action. How do we get to contentful belief then? Or rather, how do we get to the content of belief? By seeing what happens when things go wrong, when the desires do not lead to the right kind of behavior. My belief that this is spoiled is a function of my not eating it even though I am hungry. On this view, the most basic kinds of beliefs are such that their content is a function of a set of counterfactual "desire-action" inferences (I think that Stalnaker's original "Assertion" two-dimensionalism can developed fruitfully to make sense of this, but that is a long story).

The claim is not one of logical necessity, that all beliefs are functions of broken tool desire-action inferences, but rather what the aesthetician Stephen Davies calls "historical necessity" (which is the same status Brandom gives to internalist justification). The claim is that functioning language require a stock of broken-tool type "desire-action" determined proto-beliefs. Of course things like logical compositionality and norms of communication alter the landscape, in both cases by forcing us to treat vague phenomena as if they were precise (here's where Rorty's claim that a disagreement in meaning is just an agreement not to argue any more does a tremendous amount of work).

In the denigrate-the-animals section of the introduction to Articulating Reasons Brandom is explicit about his disagreements with Heidegger. But I think that the late Wittgenstein is much more on Heidegger's side than Brandom's.

quick thought about Brandom

I've been slogging through Brandom's Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, and I think I'm just missing something with the big argument in Chapter 4.

Brandom tries to semantically differentiate singular terms from predicates solely by their substitutional behavior. His big conclusion is that valid material inferences involving substitution of singular terms are symmetric, whereas those involving substitution of predicates are asymmetric (not anti-symmetric!).

Take "X entails Y" just to mean that the in some primitive sense the inference from X to Y is licit. So "Charlie is happy" both entails and is entailed by "The small dog on Hearthstone Drive is happy." But "Frank is joyous" entails "Frank is in an emotional state," but not vice versa.

Weirdly Brandom uses definite descriptions ("the so and so") in his examples and counts them as singular terms. But indefinite descriptions ("a so and so") are not symmetric. "Charlie is happy" entails "A small dog on Hearthstone Drive is happy," but not necessarily the other way around. Their might be two small dogs on Hearthstone Drive such that the one other than Charlie is happy.

Footnote 15 on page 215 sort of addresses this, but it is really pretty opaque. In full it reads:

The restriction to substitution instances is required because one may, for instance, infer asymmetrically from the applicability of a singular term to the applicabilty of a predicate: from "The inventor of bifocals is Benjamin Franklin" to "The inventor of bifocals is an American." These do not count as substitution inferences even int he extended sense allowing replacement of frames, because they cross syntactic categorical boundaries.

Maybe I'm being completely dense, but I don't see how he can treat definite descriptions as being in the same syntactic category as names, and indefinite descriptions as not. Definite descriptions and indefinite descriptions satisfy all the same syntactic substitution tests. That is you don't go from grammatical sentence to ungrammatical sentence by replacing one by the other. And Brandom explicitly states that such tests are all that creates syntactic categories (as someone who works in computationally friendly syntactic frameworks, I like this view, though I have to note that post X bar theory Chomskyans would probably disagree).

This is actually a huge problem. In Montague Grammar proper names and noun phrases such as definitite and indefinite descriptions have the same semantic type. Each takes something of the type of a predicate (if we're extensional <e,t>) and returns something of type t (a truth value). Making this work was one of the deep insights that made a recursive syntax-semantics interface possible, because the you don't have different semantic types for things that are the same syntactic type. The fact that Brandom loses this is a big mark against his theory then.

Assume that Bradom can deal with the issue of indefinite descriptions satisfying all the same syntactic distributional tests as definite descriptions and proper names. There's a bigger problem. If we start with a language that does not include negation, then proper names can yield asymmetric inferences. Assume that our language contains five predicates and three of them are true of John and two of those three are true of Billy. Then for all basic predicates Phi, Billy Phi's entails that John Phi's, and not vice versa. You have uniform asymetric substitutivity.

If you have negation in the language and understand any open sentence to define a predicate then it does not follow. Let's say that "is happy" is the basic predicate that holds of John and not Billy. Then "Billy is not happy" does not entail "John is not happy.

Isn't that a little bit weird though? On his account, logical operators are supposed to be making explicit what is already implicit in our inferential behavior. I'm not sure this is really what's going on when "Billy" is a proper name in a language with negation but a predicate in a language without. I guess the question is whether you need that category to make sense of negation in the first place. I need to reread Sections 2 and 3 with this in mind though. Brandom might just say that this second problem shows something deep about the gloriously holistic nature of language (that might be part of what Sections 2 and 3 of the chapter are getting at; I don't yet understand them).