The notion of explicitation
Martin Ahualli (U.B.A – Conicet)
This paper is an attempt to investigate the notion of explicitation as it is developed in Brandom´s framework. Although this notion gives title to his main book 1 , we don’t find in it one (‘the’) single definition of it. Instead, Brandom offers a number of characterizations and many examples that illustrate it. The basic topics that I will consider are the following: (a) which is the correct characterization of the notion of explicitation; (b) What is (the implicit) it that is made explicit; (c) are there grades of explicitness –can something be more or less explicit; (d) are all cases of assertion also cases of explicitation.
I will start by exploring some of the multiple connections among the different
‘formulations’ and ‘uses’ of the notion of explicitation, hoping to grasp the genus of which those are only partial aspects. However, I will show that there are serious differences among the candidates. If this purpose is not accomplished, due to the difficulties that will appear, it will still provide a better understanding of the notion that guides and articulates the development of the framework as a whole. As the different candidates are presented, the question about that which is made explicit will arise: whether it is a specific inferential commitment, or a pattern of inferential commitments, or more generally a form of inference. Working on these possibilities will show that there is no clear correlation among what is implicit in the practice and what is made explicit through language, but instead a certain gradation of explicitness –at least in many cases.
When the question of whether there is such a core genus among the different characterizations mentioned above is left aside, it will immediately appear that they do have something in common. They all presuppose the notion of assertion –among other few. Confronted with this, a decisive question arises. One possibility is to characterize the notion of explicitation presupposing that of assertion, and to offer an independent account of this notion. In this case, assertion would sometimes have an explicitating function that
1 R. BRANDOM, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment , Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1994
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would be absent in the basic cases. This could suggest that explicitation is if only a derivative feature of our language.
Another possibility is to consider all assertions as cases of explicitation. For this to be so, we should understand what is made explicit in the basic cases of assertion, and how the ‘explicitating function’ works at this level. Brandom favors this focus at different times (MIE 586, 616)
2
, putting forward the idea that it is conceptual content what basic assertions make explicit. This is the interpretation that I will defend and shortly develop in this paper.
Before starting, a few things should be said about the framework. The general project
3
is an attempt to explain
4
the meanings of linguistic expressions in terms of their use . Normative vocabulary is used, at the basic explanatory level, to give an account of certain social practices. The strategy is to start by specifying certain things we do, using a few normative-pragmatic notions (i.e. practical scorekeeping attitudes of attributing and acknowledging deontic statuses of commitment and entitlements
5
), and to specify what structure a practice must have in order to qualify as linguistic . Once this is done, an inferential semantics is developed in such a way as to explain how practices that have a certain structure can confer different kinds of semantic and intentional content.
Consequently, semantic and intentional notions are introduced in terms of these normative-pragmatic ones, and there is no attempt to reduce the latter to naturalistic or non– normative notions. An account of assertion
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is given, using normative-pragmatic notions, in the following lines: to assert p is to undertake commitment to p , to attribute to others entitlement to p , etc. That is, the content of an assertion is given in terms of how that speech act affects the commitments and entitlements acknowledged or acquired by those who perform them. The project is to explain propositional content and other kinds of conceptual content (i.e. singular terms and predicates) in terms of different types of
2 Assuming talk of assertion as “explicit acknowledgment of discursive commitments” (MIE 639) to be a deviant use.
3 Cfr.
“Prècis of Making it Explicit”, Philosophical and Phenomenological Research , Vol. 57, No. 1. (Mar.
1997), pp. 153-156.
4 Brandom will sometimes talk about ‘explain’ and others of ‘explicate’.
5 Exactly which of these notions are the primitive ones is an important matter. Cfr.
J.MACFARLANE,
“Pragmatism and Inferentialism”, unpublished.
6 It attempts to explain as well perception and action, but I will leave this aside for the moment.
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inferential articulation. Basic normative notions are grounded on implicitly normative practices.
With an account of a minimal linguistic practice in place, the function of particular vocabularies
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(‘if-then’ locutions, negation, identity, semantic locutions such as
‘is true’ and ‘refers’, etc.) is explained in terms of the commitments and entitlements – implicit in the practice– that can be made explicit once that vocabulary is introduced.
It is, of course, controversial exactly what resources a minimal linguistic practice must possess to be in fact autonomous –one that agents can develop even if they developed no other linguistic practice. It is Brandom’s claim that in the minimal case assertion is the only speech act required, and that those assertions need not be structured by the ‘copula-form’, nor have a conditional or a negation operator. To resume, there are six consequential relations among commitments and entitlements, definable in deontic terms, that are sufficient for a practice exhibiting them to qualify as a practice of giving and asking for reasons –this is, a practice of assertion. The three fundamental semantic ones are consequential commitment, consequential ( prima facie ) entitlement, and incompatibility entailment. The three social pragmatic consequential relations are language-entries through observation, language-exits through intentional action, and the testimonial structure of authority and responsibility that defines the basic pragmatic significance of assertional speech acts.
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In the basic practice agents assert and infer, but they lack the expressive resources to codify their inferences in the form of new assertions. When ‘if-then’ vocabulary is introduced, it allows agents to make explicit the inferences implicit in the practice. This could be thought of as the paradigmatic case of explicitation Brandom elaborates in his framework. Indeed, this is what Brandom often suggests. The case presents two assertions whose inferential relation becomes the content of a new assertion. For example, in a linguistic practice that lacks ‘if-then’ locutions, agents will be able to assert
‘Kant is a man and ‘Kant is mortal’, and to infer the second from the first, but they will not be able to assert ‘if Kant is a man, then Kant is mortal’.
7 The idea of a ‘vocabulary’ is used by Brandom in quite a peculiar way. Cfr.
R. BRANDOM, “Extending the project of analysis” in Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism , John Locke
Lectures, 2006. Unpublished. A copy can be found at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/locke/index.html.
8 Cfr.
BRANDOM, R. “Conceptual Content and Discursive Commitment”, unpublished.
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As new vocabularies are plugged into the language of that imaginary basic practice, the expressive power of the language increases. Among these ‘vocabularies’
Brandom presents
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‘if-then’ locutions, negation, identity, modal operators, universal quantifiers, normative locutions (i.e. ‘want’, ‘ought’, ‘must’), practical commitment locutions (i.e. ‘shall’ and ‘should’), semantic locutions (i.e. ‘is true’ and ‘refers’), locutions used to express recurrence of expressions (i.e. ‘Recur (/a/ i
, /a/ ii
)’), propositional attitudes as ‘claims that’ and ‘believes that’, ‘is committed to’ ‘is entitled to’, strong and weak de re and de dicto ascriptions, quasi-indexicals, scare-quotes, anaphorically and ascriptionally indirect definite descriptions, the notion of objective truth conditions
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. It is commonly accepted that these vocabularies will enlarge the expressive power of the language. In contrast, the task of this paper is to capture the more elusive but essential aspect that Brandom unfolds by thinking of this role as an explicitation of something implicit. But how should we understand this peculiar notion?
The notion of explicitation in Brandom’s framework is many times presented as making explicit as the content of an assertional commitment, inferential commitments implicit in the practice (MIE 116).
A first deviation emerges when the expressive role of some vocabularies is presented in terms of its role in making explicit as the content of an assertional commitment the endorsement of ‘patterns’ of inference implicit in the practice (MIE
267). The introduction of patterns of inference in the characterization can either respond to a peculiarity that pertains to certain cases, or it may be a trait of the structure of explicitation itself.
In addition to this, Brandom will often talk about ‘making explicit’ as ‘making assertible’ –an inferential commitment implicit in practice– and will take ‘explicit’ to be equivalent to ‘assertible’ (MIE 422). This use of the notion of making explicit involves a modal aspect that is absent in the variants presented above.
9 This aspires to be a complete list of the explicitating locutions that Brandom presents throughout the book. More recently, it has been argued that ‘meaning claims’ should also be thought of as explicitating locutions. Cfr.
M. N. LANCE – J. O’LEARY HAWTHORNE, The Grammar of Meaning , Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
10 The inclusion of ‘objective truth conditions’ might surprise us. A possible development of this thought can be found in H. PRICE, “Truth as convenient friction”, Journal of Philosophy , 100, 167-190.
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Another interesting feature of explicitation becomes visible when Brandom uses the notion in the adverbial form (MIE 381). For example, he will refer to the defining job of the conditional as making possible to express inferential commitments ‘explicitly’ in the form of assertional commitments. The dichotomy ‘implicit-explicit’ is thereby thought in the light of a wider phenomenon of expression.
Another general clue to understand the notion is captured in the opposition between ‘explicit knowing-that’ corresponding to ‘implicit knowing-how’, where the former is taken to be a theoretical formulation or expression of the latter, paradigmatically related to practical abilities (MIE 23).
Lastly, the notion presents a distinction similar to the one involved in the notion of assertion –i.e. asserting and asserted. We can focus either on that which is ‘explicit’ or on the ‘making explicit’ of it, where the latter suggests there is some kind of process involved. If there is such a process, it should be asked whether it allows degrees of completion and/or if it can be fully completed.
The difficulty to capture a genus of which the different characterizations of the notion of explicitation are in some sense derivative becomes manifest by considering some differences among them.
The notion is sometimes presented as making explicit as the content of an assertional commitment, inferential commitments implicit in the practice. As has been said, in a linguistic practice that lacks ‘if-then’ locutions, agents will be able to assert
‘Kant is a man and ‘Kant is mortal’, and to infer the second from the first, but they will not be able to assert ‘if Kant is a man, then Kant is mortal’. When ‘if-then’ locutions are introduced, this sentence can be asserted, and the inferential commitment can be made explicit. When the sentence is in fact asserted, the inferential commitment is made explicit.
However, in another of the characterizations presented above, Brandom considers
‘making explicit’ as ‘making assertible’, and ‘explicit’ as ‘assertible’. Any case of explicitating vocabulary will do to show the perplexity this characterization might engender. Let’s take the example of identities to illustrate this. The idea seems to be that once an identity locution has been introduced in the basic linguistic practice to allow identity statements, all identity claims, including false ones, have become explicit - this
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is, assertible. It is uncontroversial that in our linguistic practice, most agents are committed to the identity claim that Immanuel Kant is the author of the Critique of Pure
Reason , but they are not committed to the claim that Immanuel Kant is the author of The
Catcher in the Rye. If both true and false identities become equally explicit in this sense of making explicit, then it is not the case that implicit inferential commitments are made explicit by the introduction of this vocabulary. There is no restriction, of what is made explicit, by those substitutional inferential commitments that are in fact implicit in the practice.
The same observation can be put through taking the case of conditionals. If the introduction of this vocabulary makes explicit (i.e. sayable, assertible, judgeable) all the inferences among the assertions in play in the practice, it is not the case that what is made explicit are the inferential commitments implicit in the practice. Agents will not endorse
(explicitly nor implicitly) most of those inferences. The fundamental connection between making explicit and what is already implicit in a normative practice seems to vanish away. In this respect, the second characterization strongly diverges from the others, and it could be tempting to leave it aside as a perverse use.
Or we can read this aspect of explicitation as making explicit not a specific inference, but a form of inference implicit in the practice. The introduction of ‘if – then’ vocabulary would work, under this reading, as a schema that makes explicit a form shared by many of the inferences in the practice. The introduction of identity locutions, in the same way, would make explicit another form of inference.
However, it is not completely clear how this proposal would deal with the general criteria by which the introduction of this ‘vocabularies’ should comprise a transformation of an implicit ‘knowing how’ into an explicit ‘knowing that’. Under the interpretation being offered, the ‘knowing how’ that is made explicit should not be understood as knowing how to infer ‘The author of the Critique of Pure Reason was a man’ from
‘Immanuel Kant was a man’, a particular inference, but as knowing how to make a general form of substitutional inference. Namely, knowing how to make substitutions of singular terms in sentences, and how to evaluate (implicitly) the correction of those substitutions. But what is the corresponding knowing-that? The first characterization does not face this problem. ‘Jacob knows how to infer ‘The author of the
Critique of Pure
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Reason was a man’ from ‘Immanuel Kant was a man’, and he knows that ‘Kant is the author of the Critique of Pure Reason
’.
On the other hand, it is uncontroversial that when agents incorporate new explicitating vocabulary they enlarge the expressive power of the language. By those means they can say things that previously remained ‘ineffable’. The conditional ‘if – then’, for example, will allow agents to make assertions with an inferential structure.
They will make explicit inferences that were implicit in the practice. Notice, however, that if a language lacks words that stand for colors, agents will not be able to make the assertion ‘A is red’, or an equivalent one with the same content. Why not consider that the introduction of this vocabulary –or any other– has an explicitating function?
The response should be that even if that content (corresponding to ‘A is red’) cannot be asserted before words for colors have been introduced, it is possible in that practice to make assertions with the same form –i.e. ‘A is a planet’. It is in this sense that there seems to be a difference between ‘if – then’ conditionals and vocabulary for colors.
But the question about the criteria that gives unity to the list of locutions that have an explicitating function should still be carried further.
This observation, in contrast with the one that introduces the distinction knowingthat / knowing-how, seems to imply that there is some priority of the ‘modal’ characterization of explicitation –explicit as assertible– over the others. It is not a particular assertion, nor a certain group, what has an explicitating function in the first place, but a general form of assertion. Another more relevant consequence, I think, is that it allows us to consider that assertion itself is one of these ‘forms’, and in fact, the basic one; the question being, from this perspective of what making explicit amounts to, which is that form.
Talk of a ‘form of inference’ should then be understood in terms of the normativity implicit in the practice 11 , and by that elucidation we will gain access to the
‘form of the practice’. It should be kept in mind that the notion of inference is itself normative. It comprises a relation between two (or more) assertions –arguably other
‘things’ too- where one is reason for the other. Since the inferential relations between
11 For a critical analysis of the connection between explicitation an implicit norms see E. A. BARRIO,
“Reglas, Expression y Objetividad”, Manuscrito 2002.
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assertions that are made explicit by the introduction of these vocabularies (‘if – then’ locutions, identity locutions, etc.) are conceptual relations, temptation arises at this point to consider that the norms implicit in the practice are themselves conceptual, and that making explicit is just ‘extracting’ a form from the practice. This temptation, however, should not uncover the arduous path that leads from norms implicit in the practice to conceptual norms explicit in language and thought.
A second divergence in the notion under query is found when patterns of inference are called in. One of the characterizations presented at the beginning invokes them, while the other two don’t. Following the latter ones, we could think that agents make explicit as the content of an assertional commitment an inferential commitment implicit in practice. Following the former, we should say that agents make explicit as the content of an assertional commitment, patterns of inferential commitments implicit in practice. The idea in one case could be exemplified by the introduction of the assertion ‘if
Kant is a man, then Kant is mortal’ in a practice where there is an implicit commitment to infer ‘Kant is mortal’ from ‘Kant is a man’. But this idea is not so easily illustrated by other ‘forms’ of inference. Identity locutions, for example, allow agents to codify substitutional commitments of a specific form. The identity claim ‘Kant is The author of the Critique of Pure Reason
’ is codifying a number of commitments implicit in the practice, of which the one from ‘Kant is a man’ to ‘The author of the
Critique of Pure
Reason is a man’, is just one among many. Instead of codifying these multiple inferences implicit in the practice using many assertions with conditional form, agents can use one identity claim to make all these commitments explicit. Of course, opaque contexts won’t allow this type of substitution. So there is still more to be said about what is the exact set of inferences that are made explicit by an identity claim.
Quite the same point can be stressed with normative vocabulary. Locutions as
‘wants’, ‘prefer’ ‘obliged’, ‘ought’, etc. allow agents to make explicit commitments to patterns of practical inference. Practical inferences have doxastic commitments as premises and practical commitments as conclusions. Examples are ‘Only opening my umbrella will keep me dry, so I shall open the umbrella’, ‘I am a bank employee going to work, so I shall wear a necktie’ and ‘Repeating the gossip would harm someone, to no purport, so I shall not repeat the gossip’. These are all appropriate material practical
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inferences. ‘Shall’ is used to express the significance of the conclusion as the acknowledging of a practical commitment.
An important structural difference with doxastic commitments is due to this fact.
As Brandom puts it, committing oneself to a claim is putting it forward as true, and this means as something that everyone in some sense ought to believe. Committing oneself to a course of action need not be like this. It need not involve putting it forward as something that everyone else ought to do. To illustrate this, notice that it is clear that when an agent explicitly commits herself to some of these inferences (i.e. by saying out loud ‘Only opening my umbrella will keep me dry, so I shall open my umbrella’), she is not committing herself to the appropriateness of the claim under any substitution of the agent, as is the case for inferences made explicit by conditionals ‘if – then’. She is not endorsing the inference ‘Only opening your umbrella will keep you dry, so you should/shall open your umbrella’. She might endorse it or she might not. On the other hand, she might endorse the inference ‘Only remaining in the car will keep me dry, so I shall remain in the car’. But again, she might not. The introduction of normative vocabulary allows agents to make explicit the pattern of inference that they are committing to. In the example just presented, the pattern becomes explicit by the claim ‘I want to stay dry’. The introduction of this claim entitles a reporter to attribute her commitment to the permissive inference ‘Only remaining in the car will keep me dry, so I shall remain in the car’, and ‘Only walking on this side of the street will keep me dry, so I shall walk on this side of the street’, but not ‘Only opening your umbrella will keep you dry, so you should/shall open your umbrella’. Instead, on the ‘I shall wear a necktie’ example, if Ann introduces the explicitating claim ‘Bank employees are obliged to wear neckties’, she is thereby restricting to ‘bank employees’ the range of substitutions of agent for which she will endorse the inference ‘X is going to work, so X should wear a necktie’. And arguably, as Brandom has put the example, the claim introduced should allow Ann to endorse the claim ‘X is a bank employee going to the theatre, so X should wear a necktie’.
Still, the pattern is not made explicit in the sense of explicitation we’ve illustrated with the example ‘If Kant is mortal, then Kant is a man’, if only because no pattern seems to be in play there. It is important to notice that we are not putting as the content of the
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assertional commitment all the inferential commitments implicit in the practice –this is, the pattern. As it has been said, the explicitating claim provides reason to attribute entitlement or commitment to other inferences that are not explicitly stated, but that are implicit in the practice. But exactly which other inferences the agent that asserts the explicitating claim thereby becomes committed to is not completely determinate. In the example offered above, the agent might endorse the inferences ‘Only opening my umbrella will keep me dry, so I shall open my umbrella’ and ‘Only walking on this side of the street will keep me dry, so I shall walk on this side of the street’, but not the inference from ‘Only staying in the car will keep my dry, so I shall stay in the car’. Or in the other example, the explicitating claim ‘Bank employees are obliged to wear neckties’, suggests that the agent that asserts ‘I am a bank employee going to work, so I shall wear a necktie’, is committed to the claim ‘You are a bank employee going to work, so you should wear a necktie’. But she is not committing to the claim “I am a bank employee going to the cinema, so I shall wear a necktie’. Should we conclude on this ground that the explicitation was incorrect, and that the explicitating claim should have been instead
‘Bank employees going to work are obliged to wear neckties’? This explicitation is definitely more precise. But then, what about casual Fridays…? To stop the regress, we should conclude that the first explicitation is correct as it is, even if the second is more precise. Absence of a cut-off point that will determine whether an explicitating claim is correct or not, seems to be an essential trait of the explicitation of practical commitments.
This is not meant to imply that there is a problem with the notion. A more difficult question is how to understand the implicit norms of the practice if this aspect of explicitation is in place.
In fact, something similar has already been pointed out for the explicitating function of identity claims. If an agent endorses the claim ‘Kant is The author of the
Critique of Pure Reason ’, she is committed to the inference from ‘Kant lived in
Konigsberg’ to ‘The author of the
Critique of Pure Reason lived in Konigsberg’ but she is not committed to the inference from ‘Ann thinks that Kant lived in Konigsberg’ to
‘Ann thinks that the author of the
Critique of Pure Reason lived in Konigsberg’, nor is she committed to the inference from ‘Necessarily Kant is Kant’ to ‘Necessarily Kant is
The author of the Critique of Pure Reason
’. As in the case of normative vocabulary, the
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explicitating claim does not express propositionally neither the antecedent nor the consequent of the inferences that are codified. So again some qualifications are needed to determine whether the explicitating claim –the identity claim in this case- is or is not correct, and which inferential commitments are made explicit by it. A very relevant consequence is that evaluation of these questions will depend on which aspects of inferences agents want to preserve. This example shows that the indetermination pointed out in cases of explicitation of practical commitments is also present in cases where doxastic commitments are made explicit.
Reflection upon what is made explicit with the ‘if – then’ conditional may allow us to reach the same conclusion. Our first thought was that there is no pattern involved there. Indeed, the assertion ‘if Kant is a man then Kant is mortal’ makes explicit the commitment to infer ‘Kant is mortal’ from ‘Kant is a man’. It could be suggested that the same assertion is also making explicit the commitment to infer ‘Frege is mortal’ from
‘Frege is a man’, etc. But this is not always the case, as can be seen in the following example: ‘If Argentina lost yesterday’s match, then Argentina is out of the world-cup’ makes explicit a commitment implicit in the practice to infer one assertion from the other, even if there is no commitment to infer ‘Germany is out of the world-cup’ from
‘Germany lost yesterday’s match’.
However, once ‘if – then’ vocabulary has been introduced and inferences can be stated as the content of assertions, it is still not completely determined which are the inferences the agent endorsing the claim is acknowledging or undertaking, because it is not determined which conditional is the one being applied. Imagine a case in which an agent claims ‘if Kant is the man in the corner of the room, then all the people in the room are philosophers’. Is she thereby committed to the inference ‘if Kant had been the man in the corner of the room, then all the people in the room would have been philosophers’?
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On the other hand, imagine a case in which the agent says ‘If Kant is a man, then he is mortal’. In this occasion she seems committed to the claim ‘If Kant had been a man, he would have been mortal’. This ambiguity can be overcome by specifying or making explicit which is the conditional being used. Nonetheless, this is left open by the introduction of the ‘general’ form of ‘if – then’ conditionals, and it is extremely plausible
12 Both “Cross-world” and temporal modalities are relevant to this point.
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to think that in practice some of these specifications are many times absent. Negation, as well, will allow agents to make explicit certain incompatibilities. But the inferences that are endorsed by its use depend on how this operator is interpreted – i.e. how double negation is taken to work. A similar case can be illustrated by ascription locutions.
Imagine an agent who claims that Ann believes that the man in the corner is drinking a martini. Is she committing herself to the claim that Ann believes that Salinger is drinking a martini? She does if we assume that her original claim should be read as a de re belief ascribed to Ann. She does not if we interpret the claim as a de dicto ascription. The introduction in the linguistic practice of this explicitating distinction ( de re – de dicto ) will allow agents to make ‘more explicit’ what was made explicit by ascription locutions.
These examples raise the question of whether there is anything like a complete explicitation. Of course, in some sense this process cannot be fully completed, if only because it is not possible in principle to use explicit stipulations to eliminate the need for reliance on implicit capacities to recognize recurrences. But this doesn’t, on the other hand, impede the possibility of making anything explicit (MIE 641). We could think that even if ‘negation itself’ or ‘the conditional form’ may never be made completely explicit, each operator makes a ‘dimension’ or ‘aspect’ –associated with a certain pattern– of the implicit practice completely explicit. But this could be wrong headed. In this respect, it is quite relevant, though disputable, whether we should understand the norms implicit in the practice as fully determined within its varieties of ‘aspects’ or ‘dimensions’, or if the process of disambiguation involved in the progressive introduction of new explicitating tools should be thought of as rectifying a practice that, though normative, is not fully determined.
To resume, if the idea of ‘patterns’ of inference (what is made explicit) is brought into the picture, it becomes clear that there is no perfect correlation between what is implicit as inferential commitments in the practice and the explicitating claim. Our exam of identity locutions and normative locutions has shown that what they make explicit must be thought of as patterns of inference. ‘If – then’ locutions, on the other hand, don’t seem at first sight to make explicit patterns of inference in the same way.
However, I will argue, there is indeed a pattern of inference that is made explicit by any doxastic commitment in general, of whichever form, when it is asserted. Among
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these commitments we find assertions with a conditional form, as long as the two assertions whose conditional relation is codified, are doxastic. The idea, illustrated with an assertion that has a conditional form, is that when Ann acknowledges a claim of the form ‘if p then q
’ she is not just taking her inferential moves from p to q to be appropriate, but she is also taking other agents moves from p to q to be so, and hence endorsing prima facie their claims ‘if p then q ’. We could build the pattern of inference to which she is committing to, taking as the three elements involved in the claim: Ann, p , and q . Any substitution of ‘Ann’ for another agent will render an inference that Ann is also committing herself to take as appropriate when she claims ‘if p then q
’, whenever it is a doxastic commitments. In this sense, she would be making explicit a pattern of inference by asserting an inference that remains appropriate under any substitution of the agent whose inferring is under evaluation.
The same point can be made for the assertion of any doxastic commitment. The simplest case is the following: Ann asserts p . She thereby expresses her commitment to p .
What is the pattern that is made explicit? Properly seen, this ‘pattern’ is in fact the deferential structure of justification, claimed to be an essential feature of the social structure of language. As has been exposed, making an assertion implies entitling other agents to re-assert that claim. This is a crucial difference with practical commitments.
When an agent asserts p , she commits herself to it, and she commits herself to the assertion of it by any other agent –the alleged ‘pattern’. The same pattern is also present when identity claims are made explicit, as well as any other doxastic commitment. We should think, then, that assertion is by itself an explicitation of a pattern of inference.
As said before, the dimension of testimonial authority is an essential element of the pragmatic significance of the speech act of assertion. Brandom’s basic thought is that in asserting that p , one is doing two things. On the side of authority, one is licensing others to reassert one’s claim. On the side of responsibility, one is committing oneself to justify the claim if suitably challenged. The suggestion is then that it is the dimension of authority –a peculiar feature of doxastic commitments– understood as a pattern of inference, the form that is made explicit by assertion.
However, another possible reason to reject treatment of basic assertions as exercising an explicitating function would be the claim that they do not make explicit an
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inferential commitment implicit in the practice. Judging the appropriateness of this objection requires a more elaborate picture of what are commitments and inferences –the two fundamental normative elements present in Brandom’s framework. With a notion of inference that does not restrict this relation to propositions or assertions, we can think of the significance of the ‘things’ agents use as their appropriateness for various practical roles and their inappropriateness for others, and take this significance to be implicit in the behavior of the agents. The pragmatic structure of the ‘thing’ is then both inferential and implicit in practice. What assertion makes explicit as content may be found in this implicit inferential structure. This interpretation would allow –it is claimed here– a reading of the explicitating function of basic assertions in the lines of the characterizations that incorporate commitments to inferences or patterns of inference.
I will briefly present some problems to rule out other candidates. We could consider that what is made explicit in the basic cases are just facts. An apparent problem of this option seems to be Brandom’s commitment to explain assertion without introducing the notion of fact. The answer to this problem could be that even if it is facts what basic assertions make explicit, the characterization of assertion (and content) will be offered without introducing the notion of fact. Facts would be brought into play here only as an account of the explicitating function of basic assertions. But there is a harder problem for this proposal. If with an assertion we would make explicit a fact, in what sense would the fact be implicit before it was asserted? The idea that it is facts what is made explicit doesn’t seem to have a way out if this problem.
Another possibility is to think that what is explicitated by the assertion is the commitment one undertakes in practice. Asserting is attributing oneself a commitment, this is, acknowledging a commitment. The problem is that this undertaking is expressed through the assertion, but remains implicit. Only when an agent asserts ‘I am committed to p ’ she acknowledges explicitly that she holds that relation to what she asserts. At the basic level, it is not the undertaking of the commitment what is made explicit.
13
But instead we can think that it is the content of the commitment what is explicitly expressed. The commitment remains implicit in the doing of asserting. We
13 This argument holds for all the characterizations offered above; it demands, I think, a better understanding of the way commitments become explicit through explicitating vocabulary that is not normative in the strict sense of in which ‘commitment’ and ‘entitlement’ are.
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could argue that assertion is, as a doing, the expression of a commitment whose content is explicitly articulated.
The claim would then that what is made explicit in assertion is the content of a commitment. We can make sense of the content of a commitment being implicit before an assertion makes it explicit if we treat content as implicit in use. The notion of explicitation is presented by Brandom as making explicit as the content of an assertional commitment, inferential commitments implicit in the practice.
14 What agents are committed to in the first place are doings. Agents practically partition the space of possible performances into those that have been authorized and those that have not, and in this way determine the content of the commitment. The entitlement or commitment given and recognized in these practices has a content for an attributor insofar as she practically partitions the space of possible performances into those that have been authorize and those that have not, by being disposed to respond differently in the two cases (MIE 161). Some performances will be sanctioned and others will be reinforced. In the case of assertion, a performance (an asserting) triggers the attribution of a certain normative status (this attribution can be correct or incorrect, but we won’t consider this now), and the content of the asserting is determined by the partition of performances
(correct and incorrect assertings and other doings) that the attributor practically realizes in respond to the asserting.
A final clue to understand the notion of explicitation is captured in its adverbial form. Brandom repeatedly refers to contents, forces (i.e. asserting) and normative attitudes (i.e. commitments) as being ‘explicitly’ expressed. It is natural to query about the implicit mode of expression that is thereby implied. A performance, for example, can express a commitment without explicitating its content. Moreover, performances many times express a practical commitment whose content is also expressed by that same performance, in such a way that at one time the performance expresses both the commitment and the content of the commitment, that it simultaneously fulfills.
Assertions, on the other hand, express explicitly some content, while expressing
14 The question remains of how we should understand this transformation of an inferential structure constituted by use that is explicitated as the content of assertions. This is, I think, our best interpretation if we stick to the idea that basic assertions do have an explicitating function.
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implicitly commitment to that content, and commitment to other contents that are implied by it, though not explicitly expressed. These examples should make it clear that the
‘implicit’ mode of expression is essential to the framework. A quick look to any phenomena addressed in it will find both modes of expression in play. The sort of conceptual articulation –inferential relations among assertions and their contents– that is involved in speech and thought is typically conceived as characteristic of ‘the explicit’. It should be asked whether and how this conceptual articulation is operating in ‘the implicit’.
The core idea behind the adverbial form could be
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to understand ‘explicit’ and
‘implicit’ as two modes of what is expressed. In one case, expressed explicitly in language. In the other, expressed implicitly in practice. We should then view implicit norms as expressed in a practice that is constituted by them. Once more, the further thought that these norms are conceptual is attainable only if the phenomenon of expression is not prior to the realm of the conceptual. The path from the implicit to the explicit should be viewed as some kind of ‘transformation’ by which the conceptual is developed or expressed. Understanding the notion of explicitation should allow us to think of the essential traits of this process.
To sum up, the above observations suggest the following results. There seems to be an aspect of explicitation associated with the ‘extraction’ of a form of inference that is implicit in the practice, corresponding to the introduction of a new vocabulary. This allows agents to make assertions whose internal articulation instantiate the form – statements with that form become assertible. However, this aspect of explicitation does not imply commitment to any particular inference nor pattern of inference, and is not related to a theoretical knowing-that. A second aspect is found where that form is used to make a particular assertion whose content codifies (expresses explicitly) implicit commitments to patterns of inference. What is made explicit must be thought of as an implicit pattern of inference, though the exact set of inferences that conform the pattern does not seem to be completely determined. In this respect, comprehension of the mechanism of explicitation requires a better understanding of the path that leads from norms implicit in the practice to the explicitating assertions conceptually articulated. This
15 Although Brandom would probably be reluctant to accept this reading.
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path should be thought of as a process of progressive determination and expression.
Assertion, as a form of speech act should be considered the core case of explicitation.
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