Jon Cogburn's Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).