Brandom's John Locke Lectures Online

Words and Other Things links to Brandom's John Locke Lectures from 2006. So far I've listened to Brandom's first lecture, and McDowell's response. A few scattered thoughts:

Brandom is much easier to listen to than to read. I'd actually seen the John Locke lectures were online before (in text), and got bogged down in the first lecture. Audio's pretty clear, too; I had to crank Winamp to max volume for it to be loud enough, but at least it was intelligible when it was audible. This is often not true of lecture recordings.

I kept wanting Brandom to provide some more examples of his "PV" relations between vocabularies. If he had any examples other than the indexical one (or the merely-alluded-to project of Huw Price, or the Laughing Santa bit), I've missed them. While listening to the lecture I was skeptical of just what McDowell later said he was skeptical of: both the desirability and the possibility of saying "what needs to be done" to count as making use of some particular vocabulary without making use of that very vocabulary (at least in many cases, including all of the interesting ones Brandom mentions). As I recall, this was just what was at issue in McDowell's "In Defense of Modesty" and its sequel, "Another Plea for Modesty", where McDowell was arguing with Dummett about what we should want from a "theory of meaning"; McDowell came out in defense of the adequacy of basically Davidsonian mock-ups (true-in-L and all that) as being perfectly satisfactory for doing what we should want a theory of meaning to do. I am pretty sure these were also some of the essays where McDowell argued with Crispin Wright about the Investigations; Wright seems to be footnoted in every other essay I've read from McDowell's two books. Good stuff.

Another point related to the "Modesty" essays and McDowell's response to Brandom: I can't say I have any idea what Brandom finds attractive in resuscitating "analysis", at least in the handling-one-vocabulary-with-another sense in which he wants to breath new life into the beast. Various attempts at this have certainly produced interesting creatures in analytic philosophy (and in philosophy in general, reduction being not a recent invention), but I can't say I can think of any cases where the undertaking has proved successful. Nor am I sure why we should lust after such a success when the empiricist and naturalist projects are dead (which Brandom takes them to be).

Brandom mentions the AI functionalism program (which he, rightly, thinks is a hugely important part of the trajectory analytic philosophy's taken in the past century). I suspect that one of the big "pay-offs" for Brandom's project is supposed to be that it shows how we can get an automaton to use intentional vocabulary (or at least get an automaton to use some interesting sort of vocabulary). If so, I suspect that seeing why Brandom's attempt fails might be illuminating for seeing why functionalism should join empiricism and naturalism on the scrapheap of the twentieth century. (If Brandom's attempt does not fail, then hey, get some engineers clued in and start cranking out R2 units and positronic brains.)

I am inclined to think that the success of something like Brandom's program is not needed for AI (or whatever the current descendants of AI are calling themselves). If robots aren't "really" capable of using some vocabulary or other (in that they don't do what we do when we use that vocabulary), but can do a fair enough job of passing for doing so, then I don't know what is supposed to go wanting. If a vocabulary which an automaton can understand is not PV sufficient for some vocabulary V, this doesn't mean we can't construct an automaton such that we comport ourselves naturally with it as if it had mastered vocabulary V. Which is good enough for government work. Conversely, I don't think AI work is going to lead to any amazing revelations about human psychology; if we get a robot that can mimic some aspect of human behavior, there's no reason to think it's doing the "same thing" we do when we behave in the relevant manner in the sense that we can use our deeper understanding of the robot we made to understand how humans work. It may very well be "doing the same thing" in the sense that we comport ourselves with the robot as if it were, say, asserting that the weather's turning grim, but there "analysing" what the robot is doing when asserting won't be any easier (or more productive) than analysing what a human does.

Brandom does seem to have some sort of argument to the effect that any discourse which supports assertion (and some other things I'm forgetting) will have to support modal terms, and normative terms, as well. That might be interesting. I still feel the hairs on my neck raise when modal talk comes up; it still looks suspicious to me. Don't trust the stuff more than I have to. I'm fine with "necessarily", "possibly", "maybe" et al as ways to modify the strength of one's doxastic commitments on a particular point; I suspect that something more sinister than this is often afoot. But perhaps I just haven't had cause to need to speak of necessity, and if I do then I'll warm up to those strange little boxes and diamonds.

I've noticed that McDowell quotes Wittgenstein (chapter & verse) rather often when writing (or speaking) about him. I notice that Brandom's longest actual quote from Wittgenstein is "look to the use" or "language is a motley", and I do not believe he gave the citations; generally, the only direct liftings from Wittgenstein are two- or three-word slogans. Brandom also notes that what he gets from Wittgenstein is something Wittgenstein wouldn't have found interesting or worthwhile, and which he would not want to encourage in others. On the plus side, at least Brandom is self-conscious about the fact that his reading has to be seriously, seriously wrong about what Wittgenstein is getting at -- not that he seems to care. I suspect N.N. got annoyed at these bits of the lecture.

I should probably listen to Brandom's reply to McDowell's reply while it is still fresh in my mind, but I should also have started the reading for Property about two hours ago. Hopefully writing a little something helps me to recall what the devil I just spent two hours listening to.

It would certainly be nice for the John Locke lectures to get more attention in general.

I need to get a copy of the current issue of Inquiry. McDowell responding to Dreyfus's APA address sounds awesome and is exactly the sort of thing I want to see happen over and over again.

Huh, I have somehow spent almost an hour and a half tooling around with this post. Hopefully the Property reading's short! ;_;