October 2, 2012
Week Six Questions
In chapter 4 of Making it Explicit, Brandom introduces perception as a
“language-entry move” in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Empirical
content, although itself standing in inferential relations, is the result of
noninferential elicitation. Observation, Brandom argues serves to function as a
regress-stopper or is foundational since it is given default entitlement status (in
virtue of the way in which the report tokening is elicited through the exercise of a
reliable differential response disposition). Although it seems as though the notion
of observation as justified without justification stops the regress of entitlement
to premises (since one’s entitlement to an empirical claim can be taken for
granted) it does not appear to stop the regress of entitlement to inference.
Brandom argues that we can end the regress of inference by “taking or treating
inferences as correct in practice” (205). He seems to have something like the
following argument in mind: we start with practical deontic attitudes (normative
attitude) which are manifest in our practices (nondiscursive norms implicit in
practice). In other words, we take something to be correct according to a practice.
It is these pragmatic deontic attitudes which institute deontic statuses (the status
of being correct according to a practice). However, there seems to be a problem with
this supposed regress-stopper. Our practical deontic attitudes are themselves
essentially normative. Insofar as these attitudes function as an assessment of
correctness, they must already have a normative status. Since normative statuses are
instituted by normative attitudes, it seems that we require a further normative
attitude to explain the initial normative attitude, presumably this would continue
on infinitely. This regress could possibly be circumvented by accepting primitive
rules of inference (as Brandom later argues we should). But these primitive rules
cannot, for the reasons just recounted, be derived from norms implicit in practice.
It remains to be seen where these primitive rules have their origin.
Laura Davis
Here is a question about the optionality of acknowledging material inferences in the
order of being versus in the order of explanation:
In a characteristically permissive tone, Brandom says (Articulating Reasons, p. 86)
that it is optional whether or not one accepts material inferences as good
inferences independently of the formal criterion of validity. It is clear that his
choice to accord explanatory primacy to material inferences over formal ones is
fundamental to the explanatory strategy running through his philosophy. Yet I wonder
whether there is an analogous but mandatory ontological (metaphysical) primacy
independent of this optional explanatory primacy between the two types of transition
one can make between claims (or claims and actions).
For the way in which the regress of rules argument motivates the project of Making
It Explicit essentially involves constraints not only on what counts as a feasible
approach to the topic of conceptual contentfulness, but also regarding the
conditions for there being a normative space of reasons at all.
It specifically rules out the option of understanding concepts as rules of reasoning
that are explicitly formulated as statements of rules, because the normative force
of concepts could not exist under such conditions alone.
Now, in holding that material inferences are but enthymemes, is not a formalist
relying precisely on this ruled-out conception of reasoning? The "missing" premises
in material inferences, the formalist maintains, must be made explicit at the outset
or else one drawing the inference is not following rules. On the general conception
of reasoning as acting on the basis of conception of rules, then, such moves between
claims (or claims and actions) are not rational. Against this train of thought,
however, it seems that one, including Brandom, ought to say that it is not optional
whether or not one allows for material inferences in reasoning, because the regress
of rules argument shows that without such implicit transitions between claims (or
claims and actions) there cannot be reasoning at all in the more demanding sense of
rule-following.
In other words, does not the regress argument work as a transcendental argument for
accepting material inferences? Seen from this perspective, the status of material
inferences emerges as an ontological (or metaphysical) question regarding a
dependence between two kinds of transition one can make in reasoning. Unlike in the
case of variously expedient strategies in the order of explanation, here, addressing
the order of being, is not acknowledging material inferences not optional but
indispensable?
P.S. To add some historical depth to this question, one could raise the same issue
by asking how Sellars understood the connection between the position he defended in
"Inference and Meaning" and the regress argument he expounded at the outset of "Some
Reflections on Language-Games". How, after all, does he *defend and motivate* the
notion of material inference in the paper? As you undoubtedly can see, there are
many threads to elaborate here, but I suppose I should leave them for another
occasion.
Tuomo Tiisala
MIE, chap. 4:
In the former part of the chapter 4 of MIE, Brandom points out an interesting parallel structure
between two important paradoxes in semantics and epistemology, that is, Kripkenstein’s rulefollowing consideration (discussed in the chapter 1) and the traditional problem concerning the
foundations of empirical knowledge. In both cases, there are two familiar types of approach: (1)
Regulism in semantics and justificatory internalism (of non-Sellarsian kind) in epistemology; (2)
Regularism in semantics and reliabilism in epistemology. According to Brandom, each approach
in (1) suffers a sort of regress problem, while each in (2) suffers a sort of “gerrymandering”
problem. This structural parallelism between the semantic and epistemic paradoxes is not so
surprising, once we recall that in each of them, an analysis of a normative status, though of
different kind, is at stake --- that is, the correctness of concept-application (associated with the
concept of truth) in the former, and the entitlement (the “J” condition of the JTB model of
knowledge) in the latter.
Impressed with this parallelism, I would like to pursue some further consequences of it. Let us
focus on the gerrymandering problem for the second type of approach (i.e., regularism and
reliabilism). According to Brandom’s diagnosis (pp. 211-2), the culprit of this problem is that the
second type approaches are naturalistic and thereby too conceptually austere to make the
required distinctions: Regularists/reliabilists cannot distinguish the privileged
regularity/reference class from an infinite number of irrelevant others, and thus gerrymandering
follows. Contrastively, Brandom claims that his normative pragmatism does not suffer the same
problem, since he helps himself to the normative concepts that enable him to make the
distinctions required. Having said this, I would like to raise two interrelated questions, aiming to
compare naturalism with normative pragmatism similarly in semantics and epistemology.
(a) Is it really the case that naturalists cannot avoid the gerrymandering problem? Isn’t there any
naturalist substitute that can simulate the behavior of the normative distinction at issue?
In the semantic side, one of the relevant resources at hand for naturalists is consideration of
evolutional history. At least as far as a primitive level of “concept”-application concerns, the
concept of proper function developed in teleosemantics, the function in virtue of which its bearer
has been selected through the process of evolution, seems to do a good job in determining the
boundary of such a primitive kind of “concept.” Although it is not so clear how such an account
can be extended to the more sophisticated kind of concept-applications as we do, such a line of
explanation still seems to be a possibility.
In the epistemic side, it seems that naturalists can pursue a similar line. For example, they might
be able to specify the relevant reference class based on which the reliability of an organism’s
behaviors should be assessed, in terms of something like a living sphere that the organism
usually resides in and moves around. And this concept of living sphere might also be applicable
to us, human being, though such an application would require a further sophistication of that
concept. (Here, I temporarily set aside another more serious flow of reliabilism, which is
discussed in pp. 214-5, that reliabilism hardly respects the propositional contentfulness of
knowledge (i.e., the “B” condition of the JTB model of knowledge).)
(b) Has Brandom’s normative pragmatism really offered a fully satisfying answer to the
gerrymandering problem by itself?
In the semantic side, I am worrying about how at most a finite number of normative attitudes
concerning the past applications of a concept can finally institute the correct application
condition of that concept that demarcates the infinitely many individual things to which that
concept is potentially applicable. In other words, I wonder how normative pragmatists can stride
over the gap between the finiteness of our practice and the infiniteness of the meaning it
institutes, which is one of the essential sources of the gerrymandering problem. At this stage, I
have a suspicion that normative pragmatists might need a help of such a modal concept as
disposition, which the teleosemanticists in (a) prefer to use. (I think this whole question is very
relevant to the one Billy raised in the third lecture.)
Similarly in the epistemic side, normative pragmatists seem to leave it unanswered how the
privileged sort of reference class can be chosen in each individual situation. The only thing that
Brandom says about this issue is that it is a “pragmatic” matter, and therefore the answer can
vary depending on “the interests and goals of those performing speech acts” (p. 213). Certainly,
this view seems to be plausible. However, it does not seem to be sufficient, if necessary, to
substantially answer the original question of how to pick out a particular reference class from
those irrelevant.
Shuhei Shimamura
*My question is essentially a follow-up to questions I've asked before,
which I hope can be made a bit more precise now that we've moved further
along. You've mentioned cases where two interpreter of a community might
disagree about attributions of practices, such that they could even, in
principle, disagree about whether or not a particular supposed instance of
the practice was successful or not. I take it that there will even be
instances in which the interpreters disagree about whether or not
the community has properly assessed some instance of a practice as
a successful or unsuccessful instance of that practice. I'm still unsure
whether or not you think these disagreements will be faultless or not, and,
if they are, if there will always be exactly one correct interpretation. *
*
*
*This line of thought leads me to wonder if two interpreters could
(faultlessly) disagree about whether or not a given reporter in a community
was reliable. I assume the use of scare quotes and would allow trivial
cases to drop out (I have in mind cases where the two interpreters disagree
about the reporter because one or the other is unwilling to undertake
certain substitutional commitments attributed to the community or
reporter.) Is it a consequence of refusing to naturalize reliability that
there may be cases where there is no fact of the matter about whether or
not a given reporter is reliable, at least to outsiders of the culture? If
so -- is this a good thing?*
-Billy Eck
Question:
Suppose my whole life I have been working the railroad tracks, trapped in a
windowless perch just above them. When my boss tells me to move the track
to the left I simply push a button. I am told that if I don’t, then the
train cannot run on the correct track; and if the train cannot run on the
correct track, food cannot get to the town on time etc. So, when I am told
to move the track to the left, I understand the command in virtue of
understanding the inferential lattice it belongs to. Suppose that I now
escape my perch armed with RDRDs. *What do I learn when I expose my RDRDs
to the outside environment?* I think I learn what it is in virtue of which
I use and understand language as I do, and so learn what it is in virtue of
which the inferential relations among propositional contents hold. In
exposing my RDRD to the contours of the bit of track I have thus far never
observed, I gain observational knowledge of what it is in virtue of which
the track must be moved to the left, and not to the right etc. *What is
the status of this observational knowledge? *This cannot be a gain in
semantic knowledge since, by hypothesis, I understood the language
perfectly well when I was cooped up in the windowless perch. It seems to
me that what I now have is *meta-semantic* knowledge: I know the reason
that the inferential lattice takes on the form it does. The lattice I had
once understood *sola fide* is now, in some sense, grounded by the proximal
upshots of RDRDs exposed to my outside environment. Brandom may want to
take a different route: he may want to claim that when I was trapped in the
perch the contents I understood were propositional, and only when I escaped
the perch did they slowly transform into something empirical (221). On
that view, I undergo a shift in semantic knowledge: I understand the
contents differently. But the identity conditions of an empirical way of
understanding propositions are vague, e.g., what exactly controls the shift
from propositional to empirical contents?; how many observationally bound
contents must be connected to a content in order to make it empirical?;
does this number depend on the contingencies of speakers? If, as I am
recommending, the knowledge I gain is meta-semantic, this would suggest
that in addition to logical vocabulary, the *RDRD* organ is one aspect of
the “organon of semantic self-consciousness”. I am probably confused about
some part of your view here; if so, please disabuse.
Shivam Patel
*MIE, Ch. 4:*
In 4:V:3, you claim that normative vocabulary (“broadly evaluative words”),
much like logical vocabulary, play in an expressive role by “making
explicit material properties of…reasoning”, where the former makes explicit
those properties in *practical* reasoning and the latter reasoning in *
general* (245ff). You exploit an analogy between the cases to justify your
claim. First, you observe that:
Just because the endorsement of *p* → ¬*q* would bar the inference from *p *to
*q* does not show that *p* → *q* is a suppressed or implicit premise in the
material inference from *p *to *q* (248).
To gloss: We need not countenance that *p* → *q* plays a role in the above
reasoning, though we can appeal to it *to make explicit* the practices of
material inference endorsed by a given player in a GOGAR who adopts
*q*from her commitment that
*p*.
You then claim that pro-attitude statements, which on some accounts are
used “to bridge the gap between what one believes and what one decides to
do” (247), can be treated much like *p* → *q* in the previous example. To
spell it out:
Just because the claim (*a*’) “I don’t want to keep dry” would bar the
inference in chain of practical reasoning (a) “Only opening my umbrella
will keep me dry, so I shall open my umbrella” doesn’t mean that the claim (
*a*) “I want to stay dry” is a suppressed or implicit premise in the chain
of practical reasoning (a).
The idea here is that (a) is a completely valid material inference by
itself. (*a*) can be appealed to *to make explicit* the practices of
material inference endorsed by a given player in a GOGAR. Attributing
claim (*a*) to an agent “is just to take inferences” like the one in (a)
“to be entitlement preserving” (249). In short, normative vocabulary, like
logical vocabulary, plays an expressive role in making explicit the
material properties of reasoning, where the former makes explicit those
properties in cases of *practical* reasoning.
I’m inclined to think that these vocabularies are not in fact analogous,
and that we cannot treat (*a*) in the case of practical reasoning as
analogous to *p *→ *q* in the case of general reasoning. A way to get at
why I think so is to say that the reasoning in (a) is *not* a materially
good inference without bringing in (*a*). Here are some good material
inferences for contrast: from “Berkeley is west of Pittsburgh” to
“Pittsburgh is east of Berkeley”; from “This is copper” to “This conducts
electricity”. Roughly, in both cases, communally shared inferential
articulations of the concepts warrant the move. But nothing about the
those articulations in “Only my umbrella will keep me dry” warrants the
move to “I shall open my umbrella.” Why should it follow from any belief
that I shall (or should) do something?
Well, there are *some* beliefs from which it does follow that I shall (or
should) do something. These are evaluative beliefs, like “I want” or
“ought to keep dry,” that express in their content why they are to *motivate
* my action. If we accept this, then it seems to me that normative or
broadly evaluative notions must play more than an expressive role in the
case of practical reasoning. In fact, they play *the* central role. As I
see it, no reasoning can be rightfully called practical unless it purports
to preserves an evaluative element through material inferences. It’s true
that no suppressed conditionals need to be countenanced in cases of
practical reasoning. But such reasoning always starts and ends with an
evaluative judgment.
A caveat: Someone could perhaps object by saying that practical reasoning
always starts and ends with judgments containing “I shall…” rather than “I
should…” This would be to deny that normative/evaluative language even
plays the expressive role of making explicit the material properties of
practical reasoning. I think there are reasons to reject such a view in
favor of a view that takes evaluation to be crucial to practical reasoning.
This is a large discussion, but a brief response is that it is hard to see
how an action could belong to an agent without appealing to that agent’s
evaluation of the action. Even some belief, intention or commitment to
bring about a state of affairs that indeed causes that state of affairs to
come about seems insufficient to attribute and an *action* rather than
an *accidental
behavior* to an agent because of deviant causal chains considerations. And
if the conclusion of chain of practical reasoning contains an evaluative
element, it’s hard to see how it could have gotten into the chain in the
first place unless the chain began with an evaluative belief.
This discussion leads me to think that if the GOGAR is to have language
exits, then it must also contain normative vocabulary (or at least
concepts). Normative vocabulary would then be more than merely
explicative, but central to any autonomous discursive practice and also
thus to who we are.
Chuck Goldhaber