Correcting each other
Normativity, agreement and the second person
DRAFT
Glenda Satne
University of Buenos Aires
Argentina
glendasatne@gmail.com
Even if it appears quite evident that we live within society and are bound together
by shared institutions and norms, the nature of this relationship is a source of
philosophical perplexity. One example of this perplexity is the famous debate on the
origin of a political order and binding norms and practices in terms of consent granted
by individuals.
Contractualists have often argued that what makes a political order legitimate, one
in which the norms are binding for the individuals that belong to a community, is their
consent – deliberately and consciously – to the law. But to quote a well-known text by
Hume,1 this strategy is problematic since
We are bound to obey our sovereign, it is said, because we have given a tacit promise to
that purpose. But why are we bound to observe our promise? It must here be asserted,
that the commerce and intercourse of mankind, which are of such mighty advantage,
can have no security where men pay no regard to their engagements (…) The obligation
to allegiance being of like force and authority with the obligation to fidelity, we gain
nothing by resolving the one into the other.
The problem at hand goes beyond the source of the normative binding force of the
authority granted to the sovereign. Although that question is a critical one here, Hume’s
point is not restricted to contractualism but can be extended to any attempt to account
for the normative force of law i.e. the possibility that we are bound together under the
same law. This is why we will not solve the problem by appealing to promises since
promises are binding in so far as we are obliged to keep them. The same question thus
returns: how are we bound within a norm that obliges us to keep our promises?
The problem at hand, as Anscombe has pointed out, concerns the very possibility of
rules, rights and promises.2 What they have in common is the fact that they involve,
first, a normative component, in the sense that they generate an obligation in terms of
1
2
Hume, D. (1748) “Of the original contract.”
Anscombe, “Rules, Rights and Promises.”
1
which actions can be assessed as correct or incorrect. Second, they presuppose the
sharing of an act and of its content among those who promise to be faithful to one
another or who consent and grant authority to a certain set of rules or rights. This is why
the question of normativity leads, in a somewhat direct way, to the problem of
agreement. This is clearly seen in Wittgenstein’s considerations regarding rulefollowing and the impossibility of private languages.
Wittgenstein’s most well-known argument against the possibility of a private
language focuses on how it is impossible for privatist conceptions of meaning to offer
an account of normativity. A language—the meaning of which is by definition only
accessible to the individual, unknowable by anyone other than she who ‘has’ it 3 —
would prove incoherent.
In order to account for the capacity to speak and understand a language, no matter
how this last notion is to be understood, we need to explain the speaker’s capacity to
‘follow semantic rules’ i.e. the rules that specify the correct application of a term in
different situations 4 . If there were no distinction between correct and incorrect
applications of a term, then there would be no meaning at all, since the very notion of
content would fade away: if anything is correct, nothing is correct (see PI 201 and 258).
Accounting for what makes it possible for someone to speak and understand a language
requires shedding light on what it means to follow rules and how we are able to do so.
This is exactly what the privatist model cannot account for. In such a model, what is
correct collapses with what seems correct to the individual and hence makes it
impossible to establish any correction criteria for the individual’s behavior: anything
that seems correct to the individual would be correct. Accounting for normativity
demands accounting at the same time for the possibility of error. In order to do that,
contents should be thought as such that binds the individual’s behavior externally, and
that means that contents are objective and in principle shareable, as opposed to private.
On the other hand, as a number of authors have emphasized5, norms should be self-
A private language is a language whose words “are to refer to what can only be known to the person
speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.”
(IF243)
4
Wittgenstein’s argument may be better described as raising a problem about the nature of meaning than
as concerning our capacity to speak a language. In this formulation, I am following Sellars (“Some
reflections on language games”) who presents the problem of the nature of the rules as one that concerns
our coming to understand our capacity to follow semantic norms (Cfr. Satne, 2005).
5
Starting with Kant’s conception of self-consciousness as giving form to every rational rule (Anscombe,
Rödl). Rödl expresses this requirement in the following way: “The subject has consciousness of itself as
following a rule.”
3
2
consciously underwritten by the agent, i.e. something to which the agent gives her
consent and not something that anonymously or non-voluntarily obliges her.
To account for normativity, then, means responding to the following conditions of
adequacy:
1. First-personal character of rule-following. This amounts to accounting for the
difference between acting according to the norm and acting in virtue of the
norm. Following a norm means that one’s action is internally connected to a
norm in the lights of which it is to be assessed: norms are patterns of assessment
for one’s own behavior. In this sense, following a rule requires selfconsciousness and thus the subject’s awareness that he is following a rule.
2. Objectivity of norms. What is to be agreed on is what is correct (whereas what is
correct is not just correct because it is what is agreed upon)6. In this regard, the
norm functions as an external binding on one's behavior.
This means that the norms are both external bindings and patterns for the
individual to assess her own behavior as well as that of others who are supposed to be
bound by the same norm. In this manner, we can see that normativity is intrinsically
social, and norms are shared things through which we bind ourselves together to act in
specific ways.7
However, once we accept that normativity is intrinsically social, the following
question immediately arises:
How does social interaction exhibit the normativity of meaning as an
external binding and a pattern of assessment for each individual’s
behavior?
This question is crucial to a proper understanding of normativity and leads us
directly to the problem of agreement. The agreement in question is not merely the
ability to share reasons that is at issue in the objective condition of adequacy mentioned
6
McDowell (1984) has emphasized the importance of the objectivity requirement, pointing out that what
is at risk is our capability to discuss matters as such-and-such independently of what we say about them,
and, more importantly, that what is at risk is not merely the factual content of norms but a central trait of
normativity i.e. that the norm is an external binding on us and is independent of our opinion.
7
The stopping modals (must, can’t…) are the language through which we come to learn common norms
from others who train us in the use of language (See Anscombe…)
3
above (2). Instead, it is the understanding of how and when norms are actually shared
by those who bind themselves by them; this is why, as we will see, the agreement in
question is an agreement in judgment.
Wittgenstein, and others who agreed with him on this point, claimed that agreement
was key to understanding rule-following in a non privatist way. When understood in
this way, agreement provides the necessary framework to account for rule-following.
Thus, by considering different accounts of agreement as a leading thread, we may shed
light on the problem of rule-following and provide an answer to SI.
In this paper, I will consider Wittgenstein’s own position as well as what I will call
the communitarian and the interpretationist ways of understanding agreement that are,
at least partially, inspired by it. I will propose a third one, different from both, a secondpersonal conception of it. The paper will thus proceed as follows. First, I will examine
the notion of agreement as defined by Wittgenstein. I will then examine the
communitarian reading of agreement and the interpretationist one. It will become
apparent that the understanding of agreement in such accounts is restricted to the mere
similarity of responses or to the attribution of similar propositional attitudes. I will
argue that agreement, when understood in this manner, provides a picture of what is
involved in rule-following that is inadequate insofar as it cannot satisfy the firstpersonal and the objectivity requirements. I will then put forward a richer notion of
agreement that is exhibited in a specific kind of second-personal interaction. Departing
from such interaction will allow us to describe the dynamic character of social
interaction in terms of mutual recognition. I will argue that being part of a shared space
of reasons requires being able to engage in this kind of interaction; this requirement is
an a priori condition of possibility of our capacity to share norms. In particular, I will
claim that intercorregibility is the basic practice that exhibits the shared character of
norms. The very practice of correcting one another and the principles governing it
provide a way of overcoming the explanatory insufficiency of the accounts examined
and allow us to understand what it is for subjects, i.e. members of a single community,
to be bound by the same norms.
I. Some reflections on agreement
It is well-known that the key notion that Wittgenstein puts forward to replace the
usual picture of rule-following as a grasping of private entities is the notion of
4
agreement. It is, as we will show, not an agreement in opinions but an agreement in
form of life. When understood in this way, agreement provides the necessary framework
to account for rule-following.
Wittgenstein says in PI 510: “Make the following experiment: say ‘It’s cold here,’
and mean ‘It’s warm here.’ Can you do it? And what are you doing as you do it? And is
there only one way to do it?” The possibility explored here is that of a mind to which
the contents were presented as isolated graspable items that required interpretation to
bridge the gap between them and their application. Wittgenstein is emphasizing that if
this were the case, there would be no way to reach a correct interpretation for any term
or rule since, as he points out, “every course of action can be made out to accord with
the rule.” That is suggested in the final question of the above quoted passage: “And is
there only one way to do it?”. “(I)f everything can be made out to accord with the rule,
then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor
conflict here,” (PI 201). Wittgenstein then concludes that following a rule is not a
matter of associating an interpretation to a set of words or mental items that would be
otherwise inert. On the contrary, what is involved there is “a way of grasping a rule
which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’
and ‘going against it’ in actual cases,” (PI 201). Hence, Wittgenstein can claim that
agreement plays a crucial role: “The word ‘agreement’ and the word ‘rule’ are related.
They are cousins. The phenomena of agreement and of acting according to a rule hang
together.”8
Wittgenstein thus remarks that the agreement essential to rule-following should
be understood as an agreement in form of life. Against the Augustinian model of
8
Wittgenstein, L. (1956), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees,
G.E.M. Anscombe, transl. G.E.M. Anscombe, Blackwell, Oxford, VI, 41. RFM onwards. This notion of
agreement is further specified in RFM; VI, 39:
It is true that anything can be somehow justified. But the phenomenon of language is based on
regularity, on agreement in actions. Here it is of the greatest importance that all or the
enormous majority of us agree in certain things. I can, e.g., be quite sure that the color of this
object can be called ‘green’ by far the most of the human beings who see it. It would be
imaginable that humans of different stocks possessed languages and all had the same
vocabulary, but the meaning of the words was different. The word that meant green among one
tribe meant same among other, table for a third and so on. We could even imagine that the same
sentences were used by the tribes, only with entirely different senses. Now in this case I should
not say that they spoke the same language.
We say, that in order to communicate, people must agree with one another about the meaning of
the words. But the criterion for this agreement is not just agreement with reference to
definitions, e.g., ostensive definitions—but also an agreement in judgments. It is essential for
communication that we agree in a large number of judgments.
5
language based on understanding words as labels for things, Wittgenstein claims that
“to understand a language means having mastered a technique” (PI 199) inserted in a
form of life9. It is indeed a social activity inserted in institutions, a habit characterized by
the agreement of men when practicing it. This counts as the step towards the community
that Wittgenstein claims is what makes the very idea of rule-following intelligible.
Wittgenstein provides us with two indications on how to understand the concept
of form of life. The first concerns the relationship between form of life and natural
history; the second the relation between consensus and agreement in form of life.
One way in which agreement can be understood is in the light of the relationship
between form of life and natural history. In PI 25, for instance, Wittgenstein says:
“Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much part of our
natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.” Wittgenstein thus indicates that
the possibility of rule-following is based on sharing a form of life that is at least
partially constituted by our reacting in the same way, as a result of a shared natural or
biological history. 10 In this sense, Wittgenstein claims that a form of life involves a
shared natural history.
Nevertheless, Wittgenstein also argues that the relevant notion of agreement at
stake in the elucidation of rule following is not describable in terms of a statement of
natural history, even if such history is part of its necessary background:
What you say seems to amount to this, that logic belongs to the natural history of
man. And that is not combinable with the hardness of the logical “must”.
But the logical “must” is a component part of the propositions of logic and these are
not propositions of human natural history. If what a propositions of logic said was:
Human beings agree with one another in such and such ways (and that would be the
form of the natural-historical proposition), then its contradictory would say that
there is here a lack of agreement. Not, that there is an agreement of another kind.
The agreement of humans that is a presupposition of logic is not an agreement in
opinions, much less in opinions on questions of logic. (RFM, VI, 49)
9
See also PI 19, PI 23, and pp. 174 and 226-27.
Thompson (2008, p. 79) agrees with this inasmuch as this agreement could not be captured by
propositions of natural selection and hypothesis about the past. The proposition that constitutes a natural
historical judgment is defined by its peculiar use of the present tense, its teleological form and by its
interconnections with other propositions of the same form all of which characterize a system of natural
history. It is clear that Wittgenstein in RFM is objecting to an empirical understanding of agreement,
including the hypothesis of natural selection. But it is also the case that he is rejecting the understanding
of agreement in terms of a mere fact. He is thus pointing towards an understanding of the conditions of
possibility of our agreements in judgment and action.
10
6
This passage refers us to the second pair of concepts mentioned above: agreement
is not a consensus in opinions; the agreement at stake is prior to the possibility of any
opinion. As he says in PI 241: “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is
true and what is false? – What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their
language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form
of life.” Wittgenstein thus notes that there is a relationship between natural history and
form of life but clarifies that the agreement in form of life does not take—and could not
take—the form of an agreement on a proposition; strictly speaking, since such an
agreement is presupposed in the very use of language, in every expression of opinion
and in the very possibility of conceptual experience, it cannot be expressed in an
empirical proposition. Agreement defines the very essence of what following a rule
involves; it is what makes conceivable the logical “must” as such and cannot be
expressed by a contingent proposition that could be asserted or denied in language.
Wittgenstein points out that the relationship between agreement and rulefollowing is grammatical, meaning that agreement defines what following a rule
involves (see RFM, VII, 39/40). Agreement cannot be accounted for independently of
the very practice of rule-following. In this sense, it cannot be identified with a natural
historical judgment if this is understood as the cause of us having shared practices. It is
only through the practice of following rules that the agreement Wittgenstein is
interested in is exhibited as the condition for the possibility of such practices. From
there emerges a methodological principle that grounds SI: in order to account for
agreement and the shareability of norms, we need to pay attention to the actual practices
where this shareability is exhibited.
A central question is then how to understand agreement as constitutive of rulefollowing in a way that does not collapse with the notion of consensus or agreement in
opinions. Nor is agreement reduced to a mere natural-historical description of human
behavior, even if natural history is a necessary background for it.11
In the next section, I will explore different philosophical descriptions of the
notion of agreement in connection with rule-following to point out their limitations. I
will then present my own proposal on how to understand agreement in a way that
One might think that this challenge finds a counterpart in M. Thompson’s “A Puzzle about Justice.”
Even if the Aristotelian case which Thompson seems to be more sympathetic to presents natural-historical
judgments in which one tries to describe the agreement that underlies the validity of moral laws, one still
has to explain how the content of the concept of the human life form is epistemologically accessible so it
may ground a priori norms for each subject. This is why Thompson excludes field work as a way to
answer such normative questions. See Thompson, pp. 377-8.
11
7
avoids such difficulties. In this paper, and in following with the authors examined in the
next section, I have no intention of providing an exegetical account of Wittgenstein’s
position but rather attempt to find inspiration from some of his remarks to provide an
appropriate answer to the problem presented here.
II. Conceptions of Agreement in Human Interaction
A way in which the question of agreement can be addressed is through the distinct
understandings of who is the actual subject of agreement. In this regard, there seems to
be at least two alternative positions that need to be considered. The first is that which
conceives agreement as something that a community does and hence characterizes the
community as such. According to this position, it is as a we that we agree with each
other and it is through our becoming a we that we can be assured of sharing the same
norms. Overcoming the plurality of first-personal perspectives through the constitution
of a we is part of the path taken by what I will call the communitarian strategy to
respond to SI.
The second strategy involves understanding agreement in terms of the way in
which each of the subjects examines the behavior of others to see if it agrees with their
own, i.e. by being interpreted as agreeing. In that sense, the assessment of the conduct
of others from a third personal perspective characterizes agreement. This is what
distinguishes what I will refer to as the interpretationist strategy to respond to SI.
In this section I will explore the communitarian reading of Wittgenstein’s
agreement as exemplified by Kripke’s interpretation of the rule-following paradox, and
the interpretationist reading of agreement developed by Davidson and Brandom, as
alternatives strategies to respond to SI. Even if all of these authors agree with
Wittgenstein’s remarks on the need for understanding interaction in order to
comprehend normativity, I will try to show they all fail to provide an adequate account
of the kind of interaction that exhibits the agreement that constitutes normativity.
Providing such an account requires conceiving of agreement in terms not of a first (we
agree) nor of a third personal (you agree with me) perspective but of a second-personal
one (you and I agree with each other). This will prove to be the kind of thought that
establishes a relationship between the agents in the way required by the SI conditions of
adequacy.
8
A. Agreement as Consensus. The Communitarian Approach.
Communitarian accounts of rule-following claim that it is a social fact about us that
we are subject to the same norms. According to this line of thought, this very fact—that
we agree on most of our judgments—can explain the nature of the normativity involved
in our common normative practices.12
One account that has been presented as an interpretation of rule-following is
Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein;13 his skeptical solution is paradigmatic of what may
be called a consensual understanding of the content of rules.14 According to Kripke, the
kind of agreement that is required to account for rule-following can be captured in the
following lemma: you should act as the community does. Agreement is understood as
how the individual’s responses to a certain event resemble those of most community
members. According to this reading, the community accepts a member, i.e. deems that
she follows rules in general and a given rule in particular, if she acts in accordance with
the way in which the community would act in those circumstances. For Kripke, then,
this leads to a reformulation of the conditionals that attribute meaning to a given
conduct (for instance, “If she is adding, she would say four as a response of two plus
two,”) in terms of its opposite (“If she does not answer four when asked ‘What is two
plus two?’ then she is not adding,”). If an individual does not do what is expected of
her, the community concludes that she is not following the rule; if the individual passes
enough tests successfully, the community would accept her by categorically asserting
that she is following the rule (see Kripke, 1982, pp. 91ff.). Kripke characterizes these
as conditions of assertability for attributing meaning but not as truth conditions since
there are no facts of the matter to which the community is responding. Finally, Kripke
argues that such attributions make sense insofar as they “are part of our form of life,”, in
his terms, this means that such attributions play a role in the life of the community and
are useful within it, allowing hence for predictability and trust in social interaction.
As we will see, however, this shift towards the shared nature of rule-following is
incorrect, since Kripke’s notion of agreement amounts to a merely external behavioral
coincidence. An important feature of rule-following that the notion of agreement is
Examples of Communiatrian accounts of normativity are. Rorty’s ethnocentric account of norms.
(Rorty (…)) and Charles Taylor (…) and Martha Nussbaum’s (….) conception of moral norms. Hume
(…) can also be understood as endorsing this conception of norms.
13
Kripke, Saul (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. An Elementary Exposition, Harvard
UP, Cambridge.
14
In this section I will not address Kripke’s problematic reading of the Wittgenstein paradox (Cfr.
Haddock….) but instead focus on his skeptical solution as an example of the communitarian approach to
the nature of rules.
12
9
intended to account for is the idea of “acting in the same way” that seems to be
presupposed in the very idea of following a rule. But, as Brandom has pointed out, it is
not enough to account for acting in the same way; we additionally need to explain how
we know how to go on, i.e. how we know how to continue the series in the same way
(for instance, knowing that two must be added to the previous number in order continue
the series “2, 4, 6, 8…”). According to Kripke, the norms can be derived from one
general rule: “Act as the community does.” If we want to understand what the
individual is supposed to know, according to Kripke, we can then assume that in spite
of his primitive tendencies to act in a certain way (Kripke, 1982, pp….), each individual
must notice if the conduct of someone else is the same as hers, if he carries on as she
would. But this would amount only to an external matching of observable behavior—
and this is clearly insufficient. First, because, as Brandom has shown, it amounts only to
the idea of acting conforming to what one ought to do but not in virtue of what one
ought to do.15 That leaves open the possibility of multiple ways in which we can follow
the series departing from the behavior the other exhibits and could thus imply that the
subject does not really know what to do.16 But, more seriously, it also shows that the
subject is acting for the wrong kind of reasons. He is not acting in virtue of what the
norm requires of him but merely because this is what other people do.
However, this also shows that the individual is not really sensitive to the distinction
between what she ought to do and what she is doing because she is free to interpret the
conduct of the other as in agreement with hers by merely interpreting her own behavior
as responding to a different norm than the one the other person is responding to (say, he
is quuing and not adding). This is why this description of what is involved in
normativity cannot distinguish between what is correct and what one actually does in a
way that allows the former to be a criterion for the assessment of the latter. And thus,
this not only shows that the individual cannot be sensitive to the distinction between
what she is required to do and what she simply does but also that this view of agreement
completely obliterates the objectivity of the norms involved, since in this view
individuals do not act in virtue of the norms but instead they merely act: what is correct
collapses with what seems correct in the eyes of the community17.
15
See Brandom, R. (1994), Making it Explicit, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 26ff.
Notice that Kripke cannot say that the subject already knows how to interpret the other person’s
conduct because that would presuppose that she sees the meaning of this conduct, which is discarded with
the acceptance of the skeptical conclusion. See Satne (2005). Goldfarb (1995).
17
See McDowell, J. (1984), “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Synthese 58 (March): 325-364.
16
10
Some could posit that even if Kripke’s proposal fails, a communitarian approach
that conceives the meaning of the rules in terms of social facts, i.e. facts constituted by
the consensus of the members of the community in the judgments they accept, may
succeed in answering SI. Yet, this movement restates some of the problems Kripke’s
position raises – the problem concerning the objectivity of the norms -the impossibility
to account for the individuals acting in virtue of the norm instead of merely in
conformity with the norm. It is apparent that, the lack of an account of the objective
character of norms, the fact that they have an external binding on human behavior, is
not independent of their first-personal character, i.e. of the fact that they are presented to
the subject as demands on their thoughts and actions. The central problem of the
communitarian approach, in its different versions, is that it does not account for the
reasons of the subject as reasons, the conception of which, the subject is selfconsciously responding to. Instead, it views the individual as directly responding to
others. This, however, obliterates a crucial distinction between someone answering to a
norm, in virtue of what it demands of her, and someone merely responding to the
other’s conception of what he is doing.
Moreover, as we have already noted, the appeal to social communitarian consensual
facts would amount only to concurred opinions and it will thus still require an account
of what makes those opinions meaningful and, if so, correct or incorrect.
B. Agreement through Interpretation. The Interpretationist Approach.
The notion of agreement plays an important role in a widespread account of
language and rationality, whose most important representative is Donald Davidson, This
could be referred to as an interpretationist model.18 According to this model, being a
conceptual creature is being a language user. Both notions are accounted for in terms of
interpretation: being a conceptual creature means being able to interpret other creatures’
actions as meaningful, the interpretation of language is a part of the global task of
attributing meaning to other creatures’ behavior.
To interpret someone is to attribute meaning to her conduct, conceiving of it as
oriented by desires, beliefs and other propositional attitudes in the context of a common
perceived world. In summary, interpreting someone implicitly involves constructing a
18
Others that can be considered representative of this model are Stalnaker and Grice, among others. I will
focus on Davidson’s and Brandom’s positions but a similar objection can be raised to their proposals,
with the corresponding adjustments to their particular arguments. See Satne (2010).
11
theory about the content of their beliefs, desires and the like, in the context of a world
where both the interpreter and the one interpreted are commonly situated.
In this case, agreement is shaped through what Davidson calls the principle of
charity, which imposes on interpretation the methodological demand of optimizing
agreement between the beliefs of the interpreter and those of the interpretee. In his
“Radical Interpretation”, Davidson already describes this principle not as an
“assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false,” 19 but as that in
which taking the other to be rational consists in. It is a principle constitutive of
rationality: it is simply impossible to interpret someone else as being rational without
assuming at the same time that most of her beliefs are true, generally coherent and
caused by the same objects (understood as distal stimuli) that usually are the source of
our beliefs.20
We can thus find in Davidson’s account the transcendental perspective that
seemed to be implicit in Wittgenstein’s conception of agreement: agreement among
human beings is a condition for the possibility of rule-following and for the very use of
language. It goes beyond mere agreement in natural history and cannot be expressed in
an empirical proposition that could turn out to be false. 21 It is constitutive of what
makes us rational beings.
In this same sense, the Davidsonian triangulation is transcendentally conceived
as a condition of the possibility for thought and language. The model of triangulation22
precisely presents a conceptual dependence between linguistic interaction with someone
else and the distinction between belief and objective truth. Such notions are mutually
dependent. Triangulation presupposes the existence of causal relations between two
people and a common environment (causal origin of beliefs) and an interpretative
relation between them (communication) governed by the aforementioned principles of
Davidson, “Radical Interpretation” in Davidson, Donald (1984), Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation, Oxford UP, Oxford, p. 137.
20
The principle of charity can be described as involving two principles: the principle of coherence and
the principle of correspondence. The first involves treating the beliefs attributed to the speaker as
logically consistent; the second involves assuming that the speaker is responding to the same features of
the world that the interpreter would respond to under similar circumstances. Features of interpretation are
then: (i) it is holistic; (ii) it is coherentistic; (iii) it involves conceiving a large number of beliefs shared by
the speaker and interpreter as true. According to Davidson, successful interpretation invests the person
interpreted with basic rationality and that means that there is a shared interpersonal standard of
consistence and correspondence, one which contains the very concept of rationality. See Davidson,
“Three Varieties of Knowledge”, in Davidson, Donald (2001), Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective,
Oxford UP, Oxford, p. 211.
21
See Thompson…..
22
See Davidson, “Thought and Talk” in Davidson (1984) and “Rational Animals” and “Second Person”
in Davidson (2001), for the first re-elaborations of his theory in terms of triangulation.
19
12
rationality, through which they conceive of each other as reacting similarly to the same
world.
That being said, the kind of agreement constituted in triangulation is
nevertheless insufficient as a criterion for the truth of contentful states. The principles of
rationality state that most of the beliefs have to be treated as true but do not clarify
which beliefs should be so treated. Thus the question as to how the interpreter’s
contentful states are contentful and have a normative status remains, i.e. how is it that
these states provide the subject with criteria to assess and correct her own behavior.
Moreover, since agreement between the interpreter and the speaker is accounted for
from the point of view of the interpreter, this implies that the criteria for the
interpretation of the speaker’s states and words are also devoid of any normative
content. As a result, we fall back into privatism since the very possibility of accounting
for the external binding of content is lost23.
Furthermore, as a principle of interpretation, agreement can be attributed to any
creature or artifact24 and hence does not capture anything specifically related to what
Wittgenstein has called an agreement in form of life; it fully depends on the thirdpersonal interpretative attitude of the interpreter. Attributing beliefs to another person or
to a non-rational creature or artifact is perfectly admissible and the only relevant
discrepancy in such cases arises from behavioral differences that can be observed from
the third-personal perspective. So when attributing beliefs to others, the attributed
concept of rationality does not involve sharing a common structure of responsiveness
towards reasons that are first personally shared. But treating someone as rational cannot
consist solely in interpreting him as responding to my conception of what constitutes a
reason for what. If that were so, there would be no distinction between acting according
to the norm and acting in virtue of the norm that it is.
23
The first remark concerns the first-person acknowledgement of what she is doing, the second the
knowledge and assessment of the other person’s behavior.
24
Davidson addresses this criticism in several places (…) purporting to distinguish between humans,
artifacts and other animals by describing a set of things humans can do and other creatures cannot. But
the problem does not concern the act and activities that each of these beings can perform. One can
imagine a case where the creature we are considering is exactly like us in all behavioral aspects even
though it is an artifact or an alien. If asked whether this being would agree with us in our form of life, we
would not necessarily answer “yes.” See Thompson, “A Puzzle about Justice”, pp. 378-9. In Davidson’s
theory, the answer would have to be “yes”, but as Thompson has underlined, it would be possible for such
beings not to be bound by our same norms, even if they would be interpreted as being bound by them. So
the question would still be whether they are bound by our norms. And the fact that question is still open
in itself reveals that we’ll need a different answer.
13
Brandom enriches the interpretationist treatment of normativity by including in his
account the dimensions of authority, which is bestowed onto someone who is treated as
someone entitled to a belief, and that of responsibility, which is properly demanded on
someone when she is interpreted as committed to a certain belief. In the author’s
proposal, interpretation then depends on the attribution of normative attitudes such as
commitments and entitlements and the relation of incompatibility among the contents
attributed. In his account, unlike Davidson’s, agreement is not a primitive notion but a
contingent result of the interpreter’s theory, that may or may not hold true when
comparing the speakers’ attitudes.
The notions of authority and responsibility in Brandom’s theory seem to provide a
vocabulary that could contribute to the understanding of the nature of mutual
exchanges, exchanges that govern the way in which speakers consider that the other is
responding to normative contents. However, the issues that affect Davidson’s account
seem to also hinder Brandom’s treatment of such notions as far as his use of them relies
on a conception of social interaction that conceptually depends on the third-personal
stance of an interpreter.25 Once again, the point of view of the interpreter jeopardizes
the normativity of conceptual contents and brings the risk of obliterating the crucial
distinction between rational beings and other beings to which rationality is only
attributed.26 Hence, neither Davidson nor Brandom can respond adequately to SI, i.e. to
the question of what form social interaction must take in order to exhibit the normativity
of meaning as an external binding and a pattern of assessment for the individual’s
behavior.
As I have presented it, SI requires a characterization of social interaction capable of
showing how norms have an external binding on us and, at the same time, function as
criteria of assessment of the individual’s behavior. Interpretationist accounts such as
Davidson’s and Brandom’s stress the mutual assessments involved in normative
behavior but since they conceive of them in terms of interpretation, they lose the
external binding that reasons must exercise on the subject’s states. There is no coherent
account of the external binding of the interpreter’s mental states or of how she can asses
25
Brandom himself acknowledges this proximity of his own notion of a deontic scorekeeper and
Davidson’s notion of interpreter in Brandom, Robert (Ms), “Conceptual Content and Discursive
Practice”, available online at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/mie/2421-w3.html, p. 32, and in the final
chapter of Making it Explicit, where he argues that the external interpretational stance taken towards a
foreign community coincides with the internal stance of the members pertaining to the community.
26
Note that Thompson’s puzzle would affect Brandom’s interpretationist account as well. See n. 24
above.
14
her own conduct in terms of correction. The problem is that the interpreter’s point of
view is incapable of being corrected directly by the way the world is presented to her
and the possibility of her being corrected by others is completely up to her. From the
point of view of the interpreter, there is no real assessment on the part of the person
interpreted of her own behavior since she can always interpret someone else’s conduct
and beliefs as agreeing with hers by merely making the relevant modifications
(remember that her interpretative task involves the holistic interpretation of language as
well as the different propositional attitudes of the speaker). It follows that, in this
account, there is no constraint on the interpreter’s propositional attitudes that could be
described as normative.
As previously noted, another issue that affects interpretationism —which is also
a consequence of the interpreter’s privileged point of view in describing rationality—is
that it is incapable of drawing a line that could distinguish rational beings (beings that
are subject to norms by conceiving of them as norms they are subject to) from beings
that merely act in accordance with reasons.
This account then fails to accommodate the conditions of adequacy, the need to
account for a first-personal presentation of norms and the one concerning its objectivity,
it is thus incapable of meeting SI in a way in which the individuals involved in the
normative relation could be said to be bound by the same norms, or have shared the
same normative act.
In order to provide an answer to SI capable of fulfilling these requirements, which
neither the interpretationist nor the communitarian strategy has fulfilled, I will claim
that it is necessary to abandon both the third-personal and first person plural perspective
that characterizes such approaches. If neither the third-personal standpoint nor the
appeal to a communitarian ‘we’ can provide an adequate account of what SI requires, I
will argue that introducing a second personal perspective is a better-fitted candidate for
the job.
In the next section, I will present my own proposal. In order to provide an adequate
answer to SI, we’ll need to pay attention to the way in which the norms that we share
may be intersubjective patterns of correction. As I will claim, the practice of correcting
one another is a suitable response to SI. It amounts to a kind of exchange that makes the
actual sharing of norms and conceiving of the other as a first-personal autonomous
subject a requirement for the possibility of an individual to be able to self-consciously
share norms. Hence, I will suggest, when we consider the practice of correcting each
15
other the first-personal and the objectivity requirement previously presented are
revealed to be themselves essentially second-personal.
III. Mutual recognition and the second person.
SI required specifying the form social interaction must have in order to exhibit
the normativity of meaning as an external binding and a pattern of assessment for the
individual’s behavior (the objectivity of meaning and the first-personal nature of rulefollowing conditions of adecuacy). As we have seen, thinking of human interaction in
terms of interpretation from a third-personal standpoint leads to a lack of responsiveness
of the first-person perspective to normative criteria either coming from the world itself
or from others’ assessments of her conduct. Furthermore, Interpretationism defines
rationality in a way in which the beings that are actually conceived of as rational do not
necessarily share reasons or any intersubjective patterns of correction in any substantial
way.
A communitarian we would not do the job either. It would not account for the
objectivity of norms since there would be no external binding on the community as a
whole – i.e. there will be no logical space for the community to be corrected in light of
the norm. Nor would it accommodate the first-personal requirement, since from the
individual’s point of view, there is no distinction between acting in virtue of the norm
and acting in accordance with what the community does.
It is thus apparent that sharing reasons involves treating them as intersubjective
patterns of correction and that in order to account for the shared character of norms, we
need a different account of such sharing.27 SI required that we specify the kind of social
interaction in which the first-personal character of norms and their objectivity is
exhibited. We could put the question another way and ask what it means for us to share
the space of reasons, i.e. what makes us both rational and social subjects.
There are several ways to answer this question. The most modest response – the
one Frege first suggested – is that we are capable of thinking the same thoughts. But as
has become apparent now, although this is necessary, it is not sufficient. The problem
There is of course more to sharing the space of reasons. See Sellars…, § 36 and McDowell,
“Autonomy and its Burdens”, p. Public Presentation, University of Valencia, 2007, unpublished. What is
being underlined here are only the conditions under which the shareability of reasons manifests itself as a
common norm in social interaction.
27
16
with this answer is that it presupposes that we are thinking the same contents without
showing (a) in which attitude that sharing is knowingly manifest for the subjects, i.e. the
fact that they both know that they are sharing a thought, and (b) how is it that this
sharing is not a mere possibility but something that is actually done. Hence, there will
be no way of showing that the thoughts we are thinking are the same thoughts and that
the very fact we are both thinking them is relevant to their normative force.28.
A possible way to address the problems of the position described above is to
include the fact that we can think that the other is thinking the same thought I am. This
is what Davidson’s interpretation accounts for. Yet, as we have shown, this does not
suffice to fulfill the required conditions for SI either. Again, this account does not
satisfy either (a) or (b) above, and only specifies what it would take to treat someone as
acting according to reasons but not in virtue of them. The latter requires the sharing of
the space of reasons to be exhibited in a way in which both subjects knowingly follow
the same rules and are aware that they are both following the same rules, i.e. exhibited
as something they are in fact doing and not merely being interpreted as doing. The
knowledge in question should be a shared knowledge.
The need for each of the subjects to know he himself and the other herself are
thinking the same thought is the central idea of Michael Thompson’s “You and I.”. This
work describes what it means for a plurality of subjects to be able to (self-consciously)
think that they are thinking the same thought.
In spite of the obvious advantages of Thompson’s account vis-à-vis the previous
one considered, his depiction still falls short of providing a comprehensive
understanding of what SI requires. Thompson can account for the fact that I think ( as
part of my very thought) that there is another conscious subject thinking the same
thought as I am (e.g. that in the act of marriage we are having a thought that involves
both of us consciously considering the act, i.e. she herself is marrying me myself when
I myself am marrying her herself). Thompson’s description seems to capture the fact
that it would be knowingly manifest for the subjects that they are sharing a thought
when they are so doing, because part of the content of the thought in question would be
that there is another self-consciousness thinking the same thought. But this awareness is
28
Anscombe and Castañeda (among others) have already critically noted that there are different thoughts
that can be expressed with “I”, “you”, “he” and other pronouns; some additions are needed in order to
capture these differences, differences that Frege overlooks entirely. What I am pointing out is not only
that systematic ambiguity that may still be present in Frege’s Begriffschrift but also that the problem at
stake here, i.e. the communality of norms, requires special devices establishing that the same thought is
that which is thought by two or more different people.
17
no more than the mere possibility that there is another subject who is actually sharing
the thought in question; in addition, the author’s description would require for this
thought to be an actuality and not a mere possibility (the satisfaction of the (b) condition
above). This means that in Thompson’s picture it is not essential for the norms to be
actually shared. But SI required an account of the way in which the sharing of the norms
exhibits itself in practice, i.e. in a practice that is already one in which the individuals
are following the same norms. Following Wittgenstein, if agreement is essential to rulefollowing, one may think that agreement involves not only the shareability of thought
but actually sharing norms, something which differs from mere shareability. The
question still remains as to what form social interaction must take in order to exhibit the
actual sharing of the space of reasons; the fact that the individuals are bound by the
same norms that goes beyond its mere shareability 29.
One essential feature of intersubjectivity as different from interpretationism and
communitarianism is that it involves a second-personal relation. This second personal
relation has been characterized in diverse ways by different authors. 30 Thompson
himself seeks to represent second-personal relations on the level of logical form.
Nevertheless, it seems that one essential feature of the second-personal relation involves
a distinctiveness of roles that is necessary to capture the essentially relational trait that is
distinctive of the social interaction. As Moran has pointed out, what is special about a
second-personal relation is that it involves some form of directionality from one person
to the other that cannot be accounted for in evidentialist terms as it would be in the
third-personal model. 31 This shows that in order to understand a second-personal
relation, the question is not only the communality of the thought or norm that binds us
together but also the distinctiveness of the person who is an “I” and the one who is a
“you.” What I will claim is that this distinctiveness plays an essential role in exhibiting
the normative force of the thoughts that we think together.
Hence, Thompson’s depiction could be enhanced by a characterization of social
interaction that does not merely show the other’s self-consciousness as a possibility but
instead as necessary in the very existence of shared norms. The latter, I will claim,
involves the distinctiveness of roles that, as it will be shown, accounts for the special
To put it in terms of agreement, from the point of view of Thompson’s picture, there is no difference to
be made between the mere possibility of agreeing and the fact that we actually agree by thinking the same
thought or by following the same rule. The latter is essential to account for social interaction in the
comprehensive sense SI requires.
30
See Moran, Rödl, Thompson, Darwall….
31
See Moran (2005)….
29
18
normative force of second-personal relationships, as we will see. The very idea of
rational demand is what must be included, i.e. the fact that the norms that she herself
binds herself to are the ones to which I must bind myself.
I have claimed that only a second-personal interaction is capable of exhibiting
the shareability of reasons in the sense required. More specifically, the interaction must
be one in which the very fact that the other is a rule-follower, i.e. an autonomous
rational subject, is exhibited. And that kind of interaction is none other than the very
practice of correcting each other32.
Intercorregibility seems to be the crux of our normative exchanges. When
interacting with others, acting rationally involves taking into account (i) the reasons that
others may present which conflict with ours and (ii) their assessments of our conception
of what constitutes a reason for what. We can describe what is involved in this kind of
intersubjective relationship in a twofold way: (1) the subjects must be responsive to
each other’s assessments of their conduct – they are mutually responsive to correction and (2) the subjects’ grounding of their mutual assessments is their conception of the
reasons as the reasons they are. So the practice of intercorregibility presupposes that we
are sharing the same norm and that we are bound to it by conceiving of it as a common
pattern of assessment.
Thus, intercorregibility as a form of interaction amounts to treating the other
person’s assertion as a reason for acting or thinking in such and such ways. That
involves treating the other who is assessing me as self-consciously following a norm—
and the same norm as the one we are following. Acting this way requires that the
individual grants authority to the other with whom she is interacting while holding her
responsible for her actions and reasons. Both attitudes should be understood as
constitutive of our rationality. As Moran (2005) has underlined, what is specific to
second- personal exchanges – ‘tellings’, for example - is that they cannot be accounted
for in third-personal evidential terms: the subject is presenting an assertion as a reason
to believe something and as such is taking responsibility for that very act. This of course
requires self-consciousness. Such responsibility lies on her being held responsible by an
audience which she consciously addresses.
Intercorregibility as such presupposes the notions of responsibility and holding
accountable as two distinct attitudes that the subjects assume towards one another. Such
32
I have developed this in relation with the capability of learning a language in Satne (2009).
19
distinctiveness is present in the case of telling, but it proves itself as a more pervasive
feature of our rational practice of treating one another. It is a practice that can be
directed towards any use of our rational capacity. We can correct each other in any case
in which we exercise our rational capacities.
Unlike the merely external similarity of responses characteristic of consensus
and the attribution that the action of the other concurs with mine, taking into account the
criticisms of others in the practice of correcting each other– both as a pattern of
assessment for my behavior and as a reason to act – requires thinking that THE OTHER
IS rational, i.e., that you have a self-conscious first-personal presentation of the norm
and, at the same time, that we are bound by the same norm. These two conditions are
precisely those we suggested SI required us to accommodate. The first-personal
character of norms and their objectivity are thus revealed to be essentially secondpersonal when we consider the very practice of correcting each other: it shows that we
are beings that may act in virtue of shared norms, norms to which we bind ourselves
together.
It is clear that considering someone else’s reasons as relevant to my own
conception of what is a reason for involves treating each other as rational in a way that
goes far beyond the mere interpretability of her conduct. It presupposes that she shares
the space of reasons and is as rational as I am, and hence is accountable for her conduct
and with the authority to assess my own conduct prior to any attribution of mine. This
means that to recognize someone as rational is to treat her as rational by assessing our
own conduct in the light of her assessments and the reasons she presents, and involves
the ability to change our conduct in the light of her criticism. This is why
intercorregibility is a pervasive trait of our rational practice and exhibits that to the very
possibility of such practice underlies an a priori structure of mutual recognition.33
Contrary to the communitarian approach, the order of reasons does not depend
on the subject’s attitudes. Instead, her actual acknowledgment of another subject is only
possible in virtue of sharing that order – cohabitating the space of reasons, as Sellars
would put it. That order is thus the grounding of factual acknowledgments and not the
other way around. Actual agreements are then not merely random – as the
33
This idea has been developed in detail by Brandom to understand the cohabiting of the space of
reasons. Nevertheless one of the points here made is that this structure is exhibited in second personal
non-interpretative stances.
20
characterization of merely similarity of responses may imply – but made possible by an
a priori structure of mutual recognition.
Thus, the a priori structure of mutual recognition makes agreement a
transcendental condition for rational behavior, instituting a normative principle
according to which we must agree on what constitutes a reason for what. Drawing this
transcendental
distinction
involves
differentiating
between
agreement
as
a
transcendental requirement and actual agreements in practice, one being the condition
of possibility of the other. This is what I believe Wittgenstein is be drawing our
attention to when he emphasizes that the relationship between agreement and rulefollowing is not empirical but grammatical, i.e. that it defines what it means to follow a
rule in general34.
The previous considerations have brought to the fore the idea that agreement
plays a significant role when trying to account for the objectivity of norms. The
communitarian idea by which this objectivity is understood to result from a factual
agreement reached by the community as a whole is nevertheless, as I have attempted to
show, misguided. The relationship between agreement and objectivity cannot be
understood as if a factual agreement were the criterion for the normativity of norms. Yet
that does not mean, as Davidson claims, that a shared language is not required in order
for interpretation to be possible. If there is to be both objectivity and normativity, a
shared order of reasons – and a shared language in which that order is exhibited – is
required35.
Hence, accepting the importance of agreement for normativity does not commit
us to accepting a reductionist view of norms that makes the objectivity of reasons
dependent on communitarian consensus. The community is not what warrants
34
Two observations are worth making at this point. My position can be characterized as a form of
quietism, if understood as the idea that it is not possible to account for conceptual practice in a way that
does not already presuppose it. This is so because the a priori structures and the principles that derive
from them are not to be conceived of as independent from that practice. On the contrary, their validity “is
only established with reference to their operation within the particular structure they are part of,”
(Malpas, 1997, 13-4). However, that does not mean, and this is the second observation, that it is not
possible to deploy a philosophical discourse on the conditions of possibility of such a practice. The
discourse on such conditions can be understood as explicitating the structures involved in the actual
practice. Although more should be said about the specific mechanisms of explicitation (see Satne, 2009),
our being participants in that practice is what makes us capable of making the principles that govern it
explicit ( see Brandom (1994) and Brandom (2008)).
35
This proves false Davidson’s claim that it is not necessary to learn how to speak as others do to become
a speaker. On the contrary, to be rational, to speak a language, or, as McDowell would put it, to be a
“potential participant of an encounter with others that leads to mutual understanding,” (McDowell, J.,
“How not to read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein”, in McDowell, J. (2009), The
engaged Intellect, Cambridge, Harvard UP, p. 143) is essential to learn and come to share ways of
speaking.
21
normativity in the sense that Kripke believes it does; instead, being a member of a
community is nothing more than sharing a set of reasons. The objectivity of reasons is a
condition of possibility for the sharing of reasons; this shareability manifests itself in
the community practices as factual agreements among its members and is as such an a
priori condition of the practice of exchanging reasons. That is why, as McDowell
pointed out, the community in question is potentially infinite, crossing cultural and
historical boundaries. Of course, how we actually share reasons and which reasons we
do share may depend on cultural factors since the understanding of reasons involves the
exercise of our rational capacities that, as such, is temporal and a part of the empirical
world.
To summarize, we can only account for thought as essentially social, and present
the specific way in which this social aspect of thought manifests itself through human
interaction, if we consider that the social interaction at stake is distinct from a merely
external similarity of responses and also different from the one resulting from an
observer’s attribution of beliefs.
The question I have stressed is what kind of interaction between rational beings
manifests the objectivity of reasons as a criterion that is shared for the correction of the
actions of each of the subjects involved in the interaction. I have claimed that answering
this question requires distinguishing the order of reasons and the way in which this
agreement manifests itself in social interaction. Secondly, I have argued that if the
specific sort of social interaction that is in question involves manifesting the shareability
of reasons, it cannot be understood as a coincidence in reactions or opinions that could
be characterized as consensus or as a third personal interpretation of one’s behavior as
conforming to the order of reasons. The practice in question presupposes the capability
of sharing the same norm, and thus a thought that involves a plurality of self- conscious
subjects capable of thinking it together, Nevertheless, we were seeking an account of
the actual shared character of norms. I have claimed that this should be understood
through a second-personal kind of interaction that involves both a transcendental and an
empirical dimension. The former is the a priori structure of mutual recognition that
corresponds to reasons as such while the latter amounts to the actual mutual
acknowledgement in practice as well as to the conceptions of what constitutes a reason
for what that emerge from it. The former counts as a condition of possibility for the
latter and, by the same token, of the distinction between what seems correct and what is
correct that lies at the basis of normativity.
22
We have departed from a puzzle about norms and institutions. It was a puzzle
about the notion of community i.e. of how to understand the sharable character of norms
and of them being actually shared by individuals. How is it that individuals bind
themselves together under the same norms? We can now see that community is a
primitive notion to be understood in terms of mutual recognition. To be a
communitarian subject amounts to exercising the capability of engaging in second
personal interactions that are themselves the manifestation of an a priori structure of
mutual recognition. At the same time, being part of a particular community requires
engaging in actual practices of mutual recognition that define that community in terms
of the conceptions of what constitutes a reason for what, i.e conceptions those
individuals endorse as shared patterns of assessment of their behavior. Mutual
recognition is exhibited in our actual second-personal exchanges of correcting one
another. These second-personal exchanges reveal our transcendental capacity for
sharing the space of reasons that is constitutive of rationality; and, at the same time, are
the means by which we autonomously assume that capacity as the most rational way of
inhabiting the world.
23