November 20, 2012
Questions for Week 13
Is there anything one might be able to say with objective modal language
that wouldn't be able to say in the subjective, normative modal language?
That is, it sounds, for all that has been said, that one could express
everything one says with "It is impossible for X to be Y" with "In saying
that something is X, one is thereby committed to its not being Y", and I
see no reason that, in principle, one couldn't continue to do so with
embeddings, etc. If this is right it, it seems like you take the discourses
to be so similar that the only real distinction will be one of emphasis.
What do each forms of discourse allow us to do or say that we simply could
not do in the other, if anything?
-Billy Eck
In chapter 6 of Between Saying and Doing, Brandom claims that “A single object [sic:
subject] just is what ought not to have incompatible commitments...it is an essential
individuating feature of the metaphysical categorical sortal metaconcept subject
that subjects have the metaproperty of normatively repelling incompatibilities”
(192). Here Brandom suggests that repelling incompatibilities is both necessary and
sufficient for being a subject. It seems convincing that this is a necessary
condition (given that we take material inference to normatively govern the laws of
thought) but is it also sufficient? Is there nothing more to being a subject than
the normative requirement of having compatible commitments?
Laura Davis
[Cf. Aristotle on objects being distinguished from properties by not having opposites.]
Brandom claims that an essential part of having a commitment is taking
responsibility for weeding out incompatibilities between that commitment
and other commitments. One is normatively obliged to repair
incompatibilities. I wonder if that obligation is defeasible. As Harman
has pointed out, it may be best for one to knowingly hold incompatible
beliefs, while leaving the incompatibility relatively isolated, because an
agent might not see a way to modify her beliefs, may not have time, etc. In
such cases, it is argued, the agent ought to admit incompatible beliefs
into her belief set. Is the obligation to repair incompatibilities
non-defeasible?
-- Shivam Patel
I have a question inspired by Kripke’s “bizarre skeptic” from his *Wittgenstein
on Rule Following and Private Language*. My intention in asking it is to
use that skeptic’s line of thought to drive at a clarification of how the
practice of “discursive updating”, “rectifying commitments”, or
“shouldering the responsibility of repair…of incompatible commitments” (*BSD
*, 187, 193, 194) establishes the meaning or representational purport of
what said or believed. My intuition is that whatever meaning does get
established is a fairly different sense of ‘meaning’ than the one that most
philosophers and common folk have in mind. But I’m not clear about this
yet.
Kripke gives the novel concept *quus*:
*x *quus *y
*= *x *+ *y*,
if *x*, *y *< 57
=5
otherwise
(*WRPL*, 9).
If it happens that I have never computed an addition problem where either
of the numbers added are 57 or greater, appeal to all of my computations
will still be insufficient to show that I preformed (i.e., followed the
rule of) addition rather than (the rule of) *quaddition*. Kripke’s
introduction of the term *quus* is waged as a challenge against the idea
that in producing particular performances a person, or even a whole
community, follows one rule, or understands or means one thing rather than
another by some term. To rule out my performing *quaddition *(or an
infinity of other appropriately gerrymandered activities), Kripke says,
“there must be some fact...that can be cited to refute” those
interpretations of what I have done (*WRPL*, 9). Kripke thinks that there
is no such fact: no facts about my past history—nothing that was ever in my
mind, or in my external behavior—establishes that I meant plus rather than
quus” (13). The result, Kripke says, is “a new form of philosophical
skepticism”: “There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word”
because “no *fact *about me constituted my meaning” one thing rather than
another by it (7, 55, 21).
This “new form of philosophical skepticism” dramatizes a more
general form of the worry that begins Ch. 6 of *BSD*: Brandom recognizes
that his “talk of ‘vocabularies’ and the practices of deploying them can
make it look as if *all *that is in play is words and their use. If the *
world* is left out of the story, what justification could there be for
saying that *meaning* has not been?” (*BSD*, 177). He explains how some “*
friction* between the world and the deployment of a vocabulary” (185) can
be acquired with his toy model of repairing incompatibility with respect to
the term ‘acid*’: Because the practitioner tastes something sour that
turns phenolphthalein red, she is obliged to revise her concept
‘acid*’—which previously had inferential connections to ‘turns
phenolphthalein blue’—in some way that makes it compatible with her new
observations (either that or reject her observations). She sees that she
ought to revise her concept ‘acid*’ because she sees that committing
herself to the liquid’s being acid* (pre-revision) would commit her to two
incompatible states of affairs (its turning phenolphthalein blue and its
turning it red). For Brandom, the harmony between the *normative
*incompatibility—the
practitioner’s feeling that she ought to revise her commitments—and the *
modal* incompatibility—that the liquid cannot have conflicting
properties—is what gives the practitioner’s commitment(s) representational
purport, i.e., makes them meaningfully represent properties of objects (*cf*.
193).
Models like this one show how Brandom’s account can provide some
“friction” between word and world. The representation purport of terms and
claims in a language derives from a constraint of compatibility within a
speaker’s web of material inferences and incompatibilities, and this web
must be compatible with the observational data. But is this enough
“friction”? Kripke’s bizarre skeptic draws our attention to the fact that
the observational data supports many putative meanings: Perhaps no fact
about what anyone in the linguistic community has seen or done rules out
their meaning *quus* by ‘plus’ or *grue* by ‘blue’. Of course, we can rule
out some of these gerrymandered meanings by, e.g., asking each other
questions about when a term or claim is correctly used, but it will always
be possible to think up more candidate meanings to show that an infinity of
them can never be ruled out. The practice of “rectifying commitments”,
which for Brandom gives terms or claims their representational purport or
meaning, looks then to be no more than a necessary condition for such
purport or meaning in general. What seems to be a lacking is a sufficient
condition on some term or claim’s having its particular meaning.
It seems to me that there are two ways Brandom could respond. One
is the appeal to some fact that really does rule out someone’s meaning,
e.g., anything but plus by ‘plus’. But another route seems to me more
promising, and perhaps more in Brandomian spirit, which would be to reject
the way that Kripke conceives of meaning in presenting his skeptical
conclusion, perhaps in favor of pragmatic analysis of meaning. I would
like to know how this could be done.
Chuck Goldhaber
I have a tangential question regarding BSD chapter 5: causation is often thought to
be a modal notion, expressible via modal vocabulary (e.g. talk of "causal
necessity/necessitation") What kind of consequences (if any) do you think your
incompatibility semantics for modal vocabulary has for how we understand causal
vocabulary? For instance, should we take causal conditionals as endorsements of
inferences based on incompatibility-entailments?
Sam Gavin
I'm still sort of wrangling with a good way of placing understanding in
terms of commitments, collateral commitments, and the
attribution/acknowledgement between interlocutors. It would seem that,
from the TOTE/discursive obligation towards deontic status updating, one
might be granted understanding as given until 'proven otherwise' -- that
one is 'understanding' someone until it becomes aware to him that the
concepts both are using split in terms of the commitments they involve.
But I'm thinking backwards of a case where two people share all the same
commitments a concept entails/shares the same space in all inferences to
and from it, but refer to the concept in different ways -- say 'scallion'
or 'spring onion' -- perhaps provoked by one of those guessing games where
one begins, "I'm thinking of a vegetable...". If two people were having a
conversation, they could sort this out, but if it were just a game of "Is
it a...", "Does it have..." there would seem to be no resolution. Again I
guess I'm wondering about the ways two people can nail down what they're
both talking about. And I continue to be bothered by the question of,
when someone enters a claim into the discourse, whether it is
understandable only to the degree it can be used, and if so, according to
whose set of commitments? If it comes to the end in its practical use and
material incompatibilities -- what of 'relatively immaterial' concepts,
like a sortal? One breaks the rules with them according to whom?
Also, much earlier in the class I asked something along the lines of
whether material incompatibility were a requisite to being able to say
anything at all; in class, you responded affirmatively. If we take
understanding as being given until proven otherwise, and any concept
beginning with an entailment of its being not 'whatever it is not', it
seems in terms of a word's semantic meaning that any concept originally
gives itself as a very rudimentary picture of "It's all this" or "It's all
that". And it is as though mistakes in use were what allows one's idea of
a concept to evolve, in a sense as though through a negative ontology of
the original material incompatibility dualism, finding the most that
something /cannot/ be, and the least that something /must/ be. I'm not
sure this bit is even a question, but I find it interesting to think of
this and wondering how it can start off: 'It is red', 'It is not red' -'not red is what?' Where evaluating 'not red' requires these other
concepts... each again being another dualism. Also, this example is only
with something directly observable and not a sortal concept. There might
be room for an analysis of what kind of commitment/entitlement/entailment
structure allows for the sortal concepts 'to grow', as it were, off the
ground.
Jacquet Kehm
BSD, chap. 6:
As the final step of his pragmatically mediated semantic analysis of discursive practices, in this chapter,
Brandom focuses on the issue how those discursive practices establish intentional relation between
words and the world, or, how the words used in those practices come to represent the world (i.e., be not
merely syntactic but also semantic). Following the traditional pragmatist order of explanation, Brandom
starts with a special kind of “thick” TOTE feedback process, and proceeds to explain what the subject
and the object are and what the representational relation between them consists in in terms of that
process. More specifically, Brandom claims that the representational relation is established in the
discursive updating process that essentially involves rational rectification of incompatible commitments
in the following two-step way:
(1) First, taking two commitments to be incompatible (along with taking one to inferentially entail
from the other) is to take them to refer to the same object. (pp. 187-8)
(2) More generally, taking two commitments to be incompatible in the normative sense that
undertaking both of them undercuts the entitlement for each is taking their contents to be
incompatible in the modal sense that they cannot be true simultaneously. Therefore, shouldering
the responsibility to rectify these normatively incompatible commitments is granting something
independent of those commitments authority over the correctness of those commitments, that is,
taking those commitments to represent a state of affairs obtaining in the objective world. (pp. 1934)
Having said this, let me ask two interrelated questions concerning this analysis of semantic,
representational relation resulted from the analytic pragmatist program of BSD.
(a) Is it possible that a solitary subject engages in a discursive TOTE feedback cycle involving the
essential element of rational rectification?
The first question aims to compare the analysis at issue with that of representational dimension of
propositional content as developed in MIE chap. 8. As I understand it, MIE claimed that one’s practical
understanding of the representational dimension of content consists in her ability to draw several de re
attributions from the de dicto attribution of the commitment to that content. This claim seems to imply
that in order for one to (practically) understand the representational dimension, she needs at least a
second subject to whom she can make some de re attributions, since the distinction between de dicto
and de re will lose its point if there is nobody else but herself. On the other hand, at least apparently,
even a solitary subject seems to be able to engage in the discursive TOTE cycle, which is claimed by BSD
to be the essential factor to establish the representational relation. Then, is it fair to say that BSD
suggest a weaker sufficient condition to establish and (practically) understand representational relation
than MIE?
(b) Is it possible for a discursive TOTE process to involve no non-inferential, causal route of gaining
a new commitment?
We can imagine such a discursive updating practice that contains no non-inferential, causal move but
still involves the essential element of rational rectification. For example, imagine an ancient
mathematician who believes that all numbers must be rational. In engaging in a mathematical practice,
he can come to find that it is self-incompatible to claim that a square root of 2 is rational. Is this kind of
rational rectification is sufficient for his mathematical practice to count as a discursive TOTE cycle, and
thereby to establish a genuine semantic relation between his mathematical claims and the
mathematical “facts” that those claims “represent”? Or are causal interactions between the subject and
the object essential for the discursive TOTE cycle?
Shuhei Shimamura