Reading Brandom

On Making It Explicit

Bernhard Weiss, Jeremy Wanderer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136971846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment is one of the most significant, talked about and daunting books published in philosophy in recent years. Featuring specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers with replies by Brandom himself, Reading Brandom clarifies, critically appraises and furthers understanding of Brandom's important book.

Divided into four parts - 'Normative Pragmatics'; 'The Challenge of Inferentialism'; 'Inferentialist Semantics'; and 'Brandom's Replies', Reading Brandom covers the following key aspects of Brandom's work:

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• inferentialism vs. representationalism

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• normativity in philosophy of language and mind

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• pragmatics and the centrality of asserting

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• language entries and exits

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• meaning and truth

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• semantic deflationism and logical locutions.

Essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy of language and mind, Reading Brandom is also an excellent companion volume to Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, also published by Routledge.

1
INTRODUCTION

Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer

In 1994, Harvard University Press published the first full-length books of two professors of philosophy based at the University of Pittsburgh, John McDowell’s Mind and World and Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit. Both books explore the relationship between what we say and think and what we are talking and thinking about; outline conceptions of this relationship that are deeply indebted to intellectual engagement with the writings of Kant, Frege and Wittgenstein among others; and engage in debate with contemporaries including Davidson, Sellars, Dummett and Rorty. Both books were long anticipated and served to cement the reputation of their respective authors as philosophers of the first rank.

A collection of essays on Mind and World appeared in 2002 under the editorship of Nicholas Smith, entitled Reading McDowell: On Mind and World. This current volume is, in effect, a sister volume to that collection, aiming to provide a focal point for readers engaging with Brandom’s work similar to that Smith’s collection provided for readers engaging with McDowell’s. Like its sister, this volume collects, in the main, newly commissioned essays; combines contributions by prominent critics of the target work with those more sympathetic to the project as a whole; and features, in the concluding section, responses to all those essays by the target author himself.

The delay in commissioning the sister volume reflects a discrepancy in the relative reception of the two works, despite the seminal nature of each. McDowell’s work was quickly the subject of seminars and symposia, rapidly resulting in a large number of published research papers, edited volumes and book-length studies. In contrast, the research interest accorded to Brandom’s work has been relatively sluggish. Whilst the book has been widely cited, the number of detailed studies and discussions is far less than that received by Mind and World, especially in the first decade following their respective publication.¹

While the difficulties of reading McDowell have been documented and discussed, these are very different from the difficulties of reading Brandom, or at least from the difficulties involved in reading Making It Explicit (MIE). The difficulty many have in reading McDowell stems from their failure to share a certain philosophical temperament and style that characterizes his project. As such, this is not a difficulty that worries those many philosophers who do harbour McDowellian philosophical sensibilities. In contrast, even those sympathetic to the bold and ambitious character of Brandom’s philosophical project are unlikely to find reading MIE an easygoing or exhilarating affair, despite its obvious brilliance.

One seemingly trite reason for this is its length. In contrast to the terse and tightly argued article that is often seen as the hallmark of the contemporary Anglophone philosopher, MIE is a long book more akin to the style of those German philosophers of the past who serve as Brandom’s heroes. This, however, is not simply a comment about its sheer length (though it is indeed a very long and intimidating tome, as Brandom himself kindly reminds the already daunted reader in the Preface) but also a comment about its systemic ambitions. As the building images throughout the Preface reveal, Brandom aims to construct a self-standing theoretical structure, a unified philosophical system that reveals what it is to say or think something, including one that provides the resources required to state the very system itself. Further, since Brandom is well aware of the non-finality and historical contingency of any such philosophical system, he aspires not only to construct this structure but to reveal its foundations in a specific historical tradition at the same time. These lofty ambitions place a number of onerous demands on the reader. One is that the reader needs to keep in view both the detailed fine print of some part of the construction plans and the abstract artist sketch of the construction as a whole throughout the reading of MIE, a task made all the more difficult by the fact that the latter is only made fully available upon completion of the book. A second is that the reader is required to engage with Brandom’s highly idiosyncratic readings of the historical context of a discussion that are often used to introduce the particular wing of the structure under discussion.

Given these difficulties, one of our central aims is to gather a collection of original papers that together can genuinely contribute towards a satisfying engagement with MIE. First, most of the papers focus primarily on MIE rather than engage with material written following its production. Second, unlike many subsequent discussions of Brandom’s work, few of the papers here are embroiled in exegetical concerns arising from Brandom’s interpretation of others. Third, the papers have been organized so that they more or less follow the order of the chapters in MIE on which they primarily focus. We hope that these features will facilitate using the collection as an accompaniment to reading MIE itself, enriching the reader’s progress as she struggles through its 700-plus pages.

The reader of MIE is asked to enter the edifice through an entrance hall consisting of two historically-oriented chapters, the first entitled ‘Toward a Normative Pragmatics’ and the second ‘Towards an Inferentialist Semantics’. Loosely put, normative pragmatics refers to Brandom’s way of thinking about language and thought in terms of participation in a distinctive type of social practice, whereas inferentialist semantics is his approach to semantic theory that adopts an order of explanation of meaningfulness that begins with the notion of materially valid inference and incompatibility, rather than the more familiar notions of truth and reference associated with a representationalist approach to semantics.

We have followed this two-part division in organizing the essays in the volume, so that the essays in Part I concentrate primarily on Brandom’s normative pragmatics, and those in Part III primarily concern semantic issues. (Part II is a more or less self-standing debate that segues from the one to the other.) That said, a key feature of MIE lies in the distinctive way in which normative pragmatics and inferentialist semantics are interlinked. As a result, it is hard to consider pragmatics and semantics in complete isolation from each other, so that there will inevitably be much overlap between issues discussed in the essays in Part I and those in Part c. In the remainder of the Introduction, we aim to highlight certain themes that run across some essays in the collection, in a manner that may facilitate another route of engagement with the array of ideas on display.

Linguistic rationalism

For Brandom, semantics is to be thought of as an account of what is asserted in an act of asserting; pragmatics as an account of the use(s) of language including acts such as the act of asserting. The privileging of the speech of asserting over and above all other acts implied by this is something Brandom explicitly endorses under the heading of linguistic rationalism. The linguistic rationalist affirms both that it is possible for there to be a linguistic practice involving practitioners capable only of asserting, and that any social practice involving practitioners lacking the ability to assert is not a linguistic practice.

Brandom’s adherence to linguistic rationalism is challenged in a number of essays in this volume, especially in the contributions of Taylor, Wanderer, and Kukla and Lance:

• For Taylor, linguistic rationalism is guilty of ignoring the fact that an understanding of the non-conceptual realm of disclosive symbolic forms – those that are used to make, for example, a feeling or a way of being accessible to someone without asserting it – is also a necessary feature of participation in linguistic practice. In ignoring the disclosive realm, Taylor suggests, Brandom is dangerously close to displaying a scientistic insensitivity to an important and positive sense in which our linguistic practice ought to remain mysterious to us.

• Wanderer too challenges the sufficiency of linguistic rationalism, arguing that any Brandomian linguistic practice must include something that plays the functional role of challenging as well as asserting. Noting the suggestion made in MIE that the speech act of asserting can also function as a challenge, Wanderer contends that this is only possible if asserting is a second-personally addressed act, and urges Brandom to endorse this claim, despite some explicit comments to the contrary.

• A related critique, albeit less conciliatory in tone, is found in the paper by Kukla and Lance. They identify a distinctive speech act that they term a ‘recognitive’, an act that expresses recognition of something that makes itself present to the receptive faculties. Kukla and Lance suggest there is a distinct sense in which recognitives are agent-relative in structure, unlike the act of asserting which is agent-neutral, and argue that, contra Brandom’s linguistic rationalism, any functioning language must include such recognitive acts as well as assertings.

The sociality of norms

Brandom’s pragmatics is a normative pragmatics. He is not interested in the actual uses of bits of language as much as in the propriety of uses: those appropriate circumstances when one is committed and entitled to make a claim and the appropriate consequences, in terms of alterations to commitments and entitlements, of so doing. Brandom’s pragmatics is, also, a social pragmatics. He is not interested in the verbal doings of solitary individuals conceived in isolation from their active participation in a social practice. Social is not to be thought of in terms of an interaction between an individual and a community (an I–We relation), but in terms of the interaction between two perspectives – one acknowledging alterations in normative status following socially significant performances and one attributing such alterations (an I–Thou relation).

A central Brandomian insight is that these two aspects of pragmatics — the normative and the social — are interdependent, such that normativity can only be understood in terms of participation in a social practice understood in I–Thou terms. The reason for this stems from Brandom’s desire to preserve two ideas that can seem to pull in opposed directions. The first is what he takes to be an Enlightenment ideal: any instance of genuine authority can only be made sense of in terms of acknowledgement of that authority. The second is what he takes to be a Wittgensteinian insight: for anything to function as a binding norm, there must be a possible difference between what one acknowledges being bound to and what one is bound to. These two ideas seem to stand in some tension: the former treats one’s attitudes towards the norm as the ultimate authority in determining its scope, whereas the latter precludes this. The social division of labour between attributing and acknowledging normative status is supposed to help resolve the tension by maintaining the distinction between what an individual takes her normative status to be (acknowledged) and what it is (attributed), while still allowing that all normative authority is dependent on the attitudes to that authority, although in the form of the combined attitudes of the I–Thou pairing. Brandom notoriously uses the language of institution throughout MIE to capture this, claiming that normative attitudes institute normative statuses.

This claim about the interdependence of the normative and the social concerns normative practices broadly conceived, and is not limited to a linguistic practice. One way of characterizing the normative pragmatic project undertaken in MIE is to say that it begins with a description of participants in a social-normative practice and attempts to spell out in the terms provided by this level of description just what would need to be the case for that practice to be a discursive one. Brandom likens this project to that of repairing Neurath’s boat while still at sea: it abstracts away from the richness and complexity of our actual discursive interactions all that is not essential to their being discursive, such that what remains is a still-floating, though thoroughly stripped-down, linguistic boat.

A number of contributors to this volume worry, in very different ways, about the aims of such a project or whether too much has been thrown overboard.

• In the course of surveying different attempts at an inferentialist semantics, Macbeth casts a sceptical glance at Brandom’s I–Thou framework in MIE, worrying that it is insufficient even to deliver something recognizable as a genuinely normative practice, let alone one of the discursive variety. She contends that, in rejecting I–We approaches, Brandom must reject the claim that there are shared norms implicit in our performances that govern the correctness of our responses. Without such shared norms, however, our assessing performances are far too individualized and private to be able to make sense of normative talk of correctness and incorrectness of performance essential to the very idea of a normative practice.

• Why undertake a project of the sort just outlined? Rödl identifies two different motivations in Brandom’s writings: a commitment to thinking of the mental in normative terms and a conception of the aim of philosophy as seeking to explain mysterious phenomena by accounting for them in less mysterious terms. These motivations jointly motivate a project that seeks reductively to explain mental discourse in normative terms, which is how Rödl understands the aim of MIE. He sees a tension between these two motivations, since the latter requires that it be possible to master the normative terminology that does the explaining independent of having mastered the mental terminology to be explained, something that a full understanding of the former rules out. Rödl contends that this joint adherence to irreconcilable goals yields formulations of key positions in MIE that do not cohere with one another.

• Rödl echoes a theme we have already noted in Taylor’s paper: that Brandom is far too tempted by an approach that tries to dispel any appearance of mystery from our thinking about the discursive, in a way that serves to over-simplify the phenomena thus explained. Dennett’s contribution can be seen as having the opposite thrust, complaining that Brandom seems far too prepared to leave matters in a shroud of mystery. In particular, in failing to consider the relevance of the literature regarding the evolutionary emergence of communication, Brandom helps himself to a conception of a community as the source of the normativity of the mental without considering how such a community came about. This neglect, complains Dennett, both serves to distort the emergent model and gives the project an unfortunate whiff of anti-naturalistic magic.

• Gibbard raises a series of questions about the language of institution found throughout MIE. Normative attitudes institute normative statuses, so that if there were no takers of normative attitudes whatsoever, there would be no normative statuses. If so, worries Gibbard, it seems possible for there to be a third-personal interpreter of a particular linguistic practice able to describe a system of linguistic norms without participating in the practice itself, as her attitudes do not institute normative statuses (cf. Wanderer’s contribution to this volume for a related discussion). Yet a key theme of MIE is that, when it comes to discursive practice, such an external standpoint is not available. Gibbard considers a variety of ways in which to understand the language of institution here in light of this stipulated collapse of perspectives between external interpreter and internal practitioner, concluding that a clear overall understan...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• Part I NORMATIVE PRAGMATICS
• Part II THE CHALLENGE OF INFERENTIALISM
• Part III INFERENTIALIST SEMANTICS
• Part IV BRANDOM’S RESPONSES
• Index