A Very Bad Argument for Skepticism

This post irritated me. Ignore the following if you don't think Jon Cogburn's thoughts are worth your time; continue reading if you do think they're worthwhile. (There is no big payoff at the end.)

The bit in the post that I think is most egregiously confused is what Cogburgn labels "2b", which is supposed to be one horn of a constructive dilemma.

Here we are assuming that the kind of sense dependency Brandom describes (between mind and world) holds. And, by the law of excluded middle, either the relevant reference dependency claim is true, or it is false.

A preliminary clarification: Sense-dependency is a relation between concepts; mind and world cannot be sense-dependent on one another, though MIND and WORLD can (to adopt the convention of using capslock to indicate concepts). Brandom is clear on this in the quote Cogburn cites before his argument:"The determinateness of the objective world and the structured process of grasping it are reciprocally sense dependent concepts, each intelligible only in terms of the other"; Brandom regularly underlines terms for concepts in "Tales of the Mighty Dead", and I will follow him in quotation). Cogburn on the other hand does nothing to distinguish mind and MIND. Also, I'm assuming that the sense-dependency Cogburn mentions is the one he just cited, between "the determinateness of the objective world" and "the structured process of grasping it".

I don't think the disjunction has any problems; I don't think McDowell would hesitate to endorse the sense-dependency claim Brandom makes, or to assert one of the disjuncts Cogburn mentions: The "determinateness of the objective world" is not referentially dependent on "the structured process of grasping it". The world could have a determinate structure even if there were no structured processes capable of grasping it. For instance, this was the case before the dawn of life (if not before the dawn of sentience or sapience), McDowell would surely say. (And probably does say somewhere or other; he's been asked some silly questions about "idealism" before -- I would check "Reading McDowell" and "Experience, Norm, and Nature" if I felt like hunting for a reference. Dinosaurs may've been mentioned in this context.)

Cogburn:

If the world is not reference dependent upon the mind, then the determinateness of the objective world could exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. And remember (crucially) that this denial is a denial of pantheism! The world could exist without possessing the mental properties that we are forced (by sense dependency, which we are assuming to be true) to attribute to it. But this is just to say that we have no idea what the world is really like, because we are forced to understand it in such a way that we have no idea if it really is. This is skepticism.

Cogburn's argument seems to be this:
Assume (A) The world could have a determinate structure without a mind which grasps that structure -- i.e., the world could exist without anything bearing mental properties.
(B) Given the sense-dependency of MIND and WORLD, we are forced to attribute mental properties to the world.
Assume (C) MIND and WORLD are mutually sense-dependent.
ergo (D) We are forced to attribute mental properties to the world. (from B and C)
(E) The world could exist without anything bearing mental properties, but we are forced to attribute mental properties to it (from A and D).
(F) Skepticism (supposed to somehow follow from E, I suppose because E shows there is a possibility we can't rule out. This step strikes me as a non sequitur, confusing epistemic and metaphysical possibilities, but I don't need to touch it to dissolve this argument so I'll just ignore it.)

Let's substitute in for some variables to see what the dependencies in question here amount to. Brandom defines "reference dependence" thusly:

Concept P is reference dependent on concept Q just in case P cannot apply to something unless Q applies to something

So the claim that Cogburn says leads to skepticism is "It is not the case that "determinateness of the objective world" cannot apply to something unless "the structured process of grasping it" applies to something".

Brandom defines "sense-dependency" thus:

Concept P is sense dependent on concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q

Substituting in, we get "One cannot count as having grasped "determinateness of the objective world" unless one counts as grasping "the structured process of grasping it", which gives (C) with trivial steps.

Where does (B) come from? Brandom's claim is that we cannot think thoughts involving MIND or WORLD unless we can think thoughts involving both. This doesn't mean we have to be able to think true thoughts involving both -- that would be to confuse sense and reference at the level of sentences (thoughts vs. truth-values). Nor does it entail that we have to endorse thoughts involving both concepts; one of the reasons Frege introduced the sense-reference distinction in the first place was to handle cases where a thought was entertained without being endorsed (in quotational contexts), and this is a central case in his later papers "Thought" and "Negation". Nothing about the mutual sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD commits Brandom to the existence of minds or worlds. (B) is simply false, and so the rest of the argument falls apart. Cogburn's argument "2" fails; the reciprocal sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD entails none of the weird consequences Cogburn thinks we need to choose between.

And now for a short bit about "quietism". Cogburn:

This is precisely where McDowell backs into Wittgensteinian quietism (according to my somewhat impoverished understanding of Mind and World). His denial of "bald naturalism" seems to return us to a kind of enchanted/pantheistic world, but it's not clear if it really does.

It is apparently quite an impoverished understanding indeed; McDowell wouldn't think that the sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD entails anything bizarre, so there's nothing to "back away from". This is genuine quietism: The supposed philosophical problem is seen to be nothing, so there's nothing to say about it.

Also, McDowell's "partial re-enchantment of the world" has nothing to do with pantheism; the only things McDowell ever considers as minded are humans. (Non-human animals are minded in a derivative sense. Non-animals are never said to be minded in any sense at all.) This is what makes it "partial": the only things in nature that are "special" are humans, not stars or rivers or clouds. Humans can do things meaningfully; stars just do whatever they do with no significance (contra the "enchanted world" where the movement of the stars mean something, i.e. astrology is supposed to not be a load of hokum). McDowell never gives any comfort to astrology or shamanism or any such superstition, and his "Hegelianism" does not include anything about a Weltgeist or Hegel's "Lectures on World History". (Incidentally, the best thing I've read on McDowell and "bald naturalism" is this paper.)

I want this to be true so badly

To be fair, when Russell was in full propaganda mode for the new logic he was quite capable of blaming subject-predicate logic for the oppression of women, famine in China, and the First World War.

From Brandom's "Hegel and Analytic Philosophy". Sadly, no footnotes to the relevant Russelliana are provided.

Counterfactual Wittgenstein

From section 3 of the epilogue to Brandom's Between Saying and Doing:

"One constant in Wittgenstein's thought, early and late, is his denial of methodologically monistic scientism[, the idea that the only way knowledge can be gotten is the way the natural sciences, especially physics, give us knowledge]. "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences," he says in the Tractatus, and this view seems to be part of what lies behind the theoretical quietism of the later work. In fact, I think Wittgenstein thinks that if systematic philosophical theorizing were possible, it would mean that philosophy is an empirical science. Since it is not, philosophers must eschew theorizing, restricting themselves instead to light, local descriptions of discursive practices, where such descriptions might provide helpful reminders in freeing ourselves from the sorts of misunderstandings and puzzlements that arise precisely from the theories implicit in inherited pictures of what is going on when we talk and think. Whether or not Wittgenstein himself reasoned in this way, I take it that it is common for his admirers to see him as presenting us with a forced choice: either embrace scientism about philosophy of the methodologically monistic sort -- that is, take philosophy to be an empirical, scientific discipline -- or give up the idea of systematic philosophical theorizing once and for all.

I think this is a false choice. Rejecting scientism of the methodologically monistic sort does not entail giving up the possibility of systematic philosophical theorizing about discursive practice.... I want to claim that what is objectionable about the methodologically monistic form of scientism is its exclusivity. Rejecting that at least leaves open the question of whether, and which, features of natural scientific investigation, explanation, knowledge, and understanding ought also to be counted among those useful and appropriate in philosophy. After all, description is also a central and essential element of scientific methodology, and even the most rigorous versions of Wittgensteinian quietism allow philosophers to describe features of our linguistic practices.

I've bolded the part that struck me; I've quoted the rest for context, and because I liked the passage.

My initial response to Brandom's hypothetical was to agree: Wittgenstein probably did think something like this. The natural sciences (including the social sciences) are engaged in theory-building, hypothesis testing, etc.; philosophy doesn't do this sort of thing (and when it tries to, it does so out of confusion). But it's a weird counterfactual. You have to imagine that what Wittgenstein took philosophy to be also involved what Wittgenstein categorically thought philosophy was not. Tricky business, if you can manage it at all.

After thinking about it a bit more, I'm inclined to say that Brandom skips over the therapeutic nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy -- therapeutic is opposed to constructive in roughly the way quietistic is opposed to theorizing, after all. It's not just that Wittgenstein doesn't give general accounts with theoretically posited entities as explananda; it's that he's not interested in doing that, even if it is possible. Or rather, stronger than that: even if Wittgensteinian philosophy does provide general accounts, with theoretical posits, the point of doing so is to ease some antecedently felt philosophical tension. To keep us from feeling obliged to answer other sorts of philosophical questions, Wittgensteinian philosophy asks and answers questions of its own. (The questions may be rhetorical, the answers obvious. But they are still posed, and they have right and wrong answers. And the therapy can misfire if the questions become points for debate, when they were supposed to be anodyne.) So he's wrong to think that Wittgenstein thinks there's a forced choice between anti-theoretical "quietism" and scientism. (To be fair, he hedges his claims here. But he seems to do so not because he's unsure that they do justice to his understanding of Wittgenstein, but because he wants to avoid offending those who read him differently.)

In any case, I thought his discussion of the issues was interesting. It's a good epilogue.

An Idle Thought on the History of Analytic Philosophy

Sellars claimed to be trying to move analytic philosophy from its "Humean phase" to its "Kantian phase". Brandom takes the next step, and wants to move analytic philosophy to its "Hegelian phase". The next logical step would be: Kierkegaard phase. Which is presumably when we start making fun of the very idea of analytic philosophy, and recognize that the very attempt shows that there's something wrong with us. (Rorty clearly saw this coming. Brandom also mentions McDowell's remark about grafting "perfectly healthy pragmatist organs" onto the corpse of analytic philosophy in the afterword to his Locke Lectures, where he defends his attempt to keep the beast alive. I need to find a copy of that so I can finish the afterword. Incidentally, the Amazon reviews for that book are crazy.)

I'm not sure who comes after Kierkegaard. I suppose Heidegger lifts more than he acknowledges from Kierkegaard, so maybe we synch up with the Continentals. (First as tragedy, then as farce.) I for one look forward to analytic philosophy's Derrida Phase.

Recent posts at The Valve are what brought Kierkegaard to mind. Incidentally, I just tracked down a copy of "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity" this afternoon. It is apparently Valve Nostalgia Week.

"There are here hugely many interrelated phenomena and possible concepts."

First off, Brandom's Hegel course has started, and so his website has been updated with several handouts, sets of notes, and some new readings of parts of the Phenomenology by Brandom. I'm linking this at the top of the post so that I can remember to check it for updates; I have no idea how long the class website will stay up once the term ends.

For a similar reason, I've added links to the websites for various workshops to my sidebar. It's surprisingly hard to google up the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop's blog. (Incidentally, the Philosophy of Mind workshop is wonderful, and someone should update their blog. This year it appears we're reading various articles on referring to oneself -- so far we've read Anscombe's "The First Person" and Strawson's "The First Person and Others", plus an extract from "The Bounds of Sense". Finkelstein is great. Also at the last meeting a female grad student yelled "CHICKEN SEXERS!" at an inappropriate time. It is a good workshop!)

I just finished listening to the McDowell-Davidson interview again, and it's still good. I picked up on a lot of things that I'd missed the last time I listened to it. For instance, I'd missed the point of the chicken-sexing discussion here (or at least I'd forgotten it was about just this point). One thing that leaped out at me was that, in an attempt to get Davidson to see what his story was missing about perception & the first-person, McDowell opposed the thing he thought was missing to what is "discursive". Davidson was saying that he could see the guy behind the camera, but that there was a guy there was a belief he held, and he couldn't see what was missing from his story about perception, since it looked to him like there was just his being caused to form a certain belief, here. McDowell tried to draw attention to the fact that Davidson was talking in third-personal terms of himself, and mentioned that anything he could say that way would be "discursive". (He just said it as an aside, it seemed to me -- this part of the interview has McDowell struggling noticeably to find a way to put the point.) I had thought that the opposition between "intuition" (in the Kantian sense of what McDowell thinks Davidson needs to account for) and the "discursive" (in the sense of what's articulated) was something recent -- new to "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" -- but it's present in this interview, which (according to a citation in "Reading McDowell") is from 1997.

Recently I've been re-reading some of Davidson's stuff from the nineties, i.e. post-Mind and World, with an eye to making sense of McDowell's revisions to his views in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given". It's easy to miss just how subtle the issue of what McDowell thinks is wrong with Davidson's picture is.

Incidentally, I've finally gotten a copy of "John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature" via ILL; some of the things McDowell says in his responses there do nicely resolve some of the things I found puzzling about the book's lead-essay; McDowell refers to "Avoiding" in several of his responses. For instance, from his response to Houlgate's paper, p.232/233

But [that sensory experience takes in that things are as they are represented to be by the sensory content of experience] does not eliminate the possibility of a position according to which we do not strictly see cars and trees. Sellars distinguishes what we see, as common ways of talking would have it, from what we see of what we see, the proper and common sensibles that what we see instantiates. For instance, when in ordinary speech we would say we see a car, what we see of the car is something other than the car itself, perhaps its colour, shape, and motion or lack of it. It would be possible to introduce a notion of what we see, strictly speaking, that coincides with this notion of what we see of what we, ordinarily speaking, see. And for some purposes it would be a useful notion. Houlgate cites Hegel[*] saying one can bring something's qualities before the eyes, but not the something itself. I think that belongs in this kind of context, not the kind of context determined by Houlgate's explication of Hegel's talk of 'positing'. What we see of what we see is not something taken in by our visual sensations, from which we would need to go on, in an act of 'positing', in order to arrive at something with the form of thought. In seeing what we see of what we see, our seeing is already informed by our conceptual capacities. What is in question here is a restriction, well motivated for some purposes, on what conceptually informed content can count as strictly speaking sensory content -- not a gesture in the direction of content that is not yet conceptually informed at all.

I think this sort of example is very helpful in making sense of Avoiding the Myth of the Given, since it gives another example of how McDowell wants to distinguish between the conceptual capacities he thinks are involved in the content of an experience (the common and proper sensibles) and those he doesn't (those involving recognitive capacities). I'm inclined to find this example problematic -- I don't think that "the car itself" is something other than what one sees when ("ordinarily speaking") one sees a car, except in the sense that there is always more to see -- more perspectives one might take in of the car, more ways one might view it. What one sees in the "color, shape, motion or lack of it" sense is just the color of the car, the shape of the car, the motion or lack thereof of the car. One might not see the car as a car, if all one sees of it is describable in this manner, but I still want to say it is the car that one sees. (If one's perception is of a "red thing", and a red car is what one is looking at, I don't see what could possibly be the object of one's perception if not the car. I suppose one could say "the paint on the car" or somesuch, but i) I'm inclined to count that as part of the car, and so perception of it is perception of the car and ii) this sort of answer seems to tempt one into saying things like "all we ever perceive are the surfaces of things", which strikes me as bad phenomenology.) Suffice to say, I think that the only reason to say "we don't strictly see cars or trees" is that one has been lead astray by philosophy.

(I remember this came up in the discussion of Boyle's "Sortalism and Perceptual Content" paper at the workshop last week, and he clearly thought the issue was a mess -- he wanted to avoid saying anything one way or the other (the example was whether one can see a beach when one looks at it, since after all there is a great deal too much beach to take it all in with a glance). The fact that McDowell doesn't seem to hesitate like Boyle did gives me pause. Incidentally, Boyle was great the second time, too. I've not yet finished this paper -- it's longer than the logic one was, and I'm tripping up trying to get through the ending sections. He mentioned in the discussion period that his paper is "programmatic"; perhaps that's part of why I'm finding it so damned hard to follow. I should probably read Evans.)

Perhaps I'm just reading McDowell with the wrong emphasis -- certainly there are some purposes for which a "restricted" view of what's sensed makes sense. (See PI section 11, especially p.196 on putting the "organization" of a visual impression "on a level with colors & shapes". To be able to say what stays the same when you see the duckrabbit shift from a duck to a rabbit, you have to draw some such distinction as this.)

More from PI section 11:

Then is the copy of the figure an incomplete description of my visual experience? No.—But the circumstances decide whether, and what, more detailed specifications are necessary.—It may be an incomplete description; if there is still something to ask.

This seems just right: An account of the content of an experience solely in terms of "common & proper sensibles" seems both an exhaustive account and to leave something out. ("And now just look at all that can be meant by 'description of what is seen.'")

At a minimum, McDowell's modification of Davidson needs to be able to distinguish chicken-sexing from perception -- this is just the thing McDowell used as an example of what Davidson couldn't account for, in the interview. It seems to me that McDowell's setting of "recognitive capacities" outside of the passive actualization of conceptual capacities which he conceives experience to be leaves seeing a chicken as a chicken on the same level as chicken-sexing. It's a belief which is causally formed by having the chicken in view, but there's no way to give a justification for the claim by appeal to anything which is given in experience.

"Here we are in enormous danger of wanting to make fine distinctions", says Wittgenstein; it appears to me that McDowell has succumbed to the danger in his limitation of what conceptual capacities can be involved in the content of an experience.

(It occurs to me that I still don't know what to do with the Thompson-inspired bit about "intuitional forms". I still need to finish "Representation of Life"; I set it aside when I had to reboot a while back, and haven't thought to finish it. I doubt it answers the object I put here, but perhaps it'll shed more light on what motivated McDowell's revision.)

*Houlgate's Hegel quotation is from Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie des Geistes, which doesn't appear to have been translated into English yet, so I can't tell if context changes its import. It sounds like the sort of thing I think Hegel shouldn't say -- it sounds to me like the sort of thing one would say in a reductio of the idea that what one is given in experience is "sensible qualities" of objects rather than the objects themselves. But Hegel says a lot of things in "Subjective Spirit" that I don't think are quite what he should have said; Houlgate brings a lot of them up, and McDowell spells out why he doesn't want to follow Hegel on those points. McDowell claims that holding on to a lot of Hegelian insights requires jettisoning some of the stuff Hegel says about (e.g.) what Hegel calls "sensations" and "intuitions", and I think he's right about that, for the reason he gives (among others). When reading "Subjective Spirit", the relation between "Thought" and the earlier chapters which referenced it (i.e. nearly all of the chapters in "Subjective Spirit") was often a bit mysterious; Hegel seemed to both insist that everything before "Thought" could only be on the scene when thought was (since the "content" of sensations/intuitions/representations was of the sort proper to thought -- only in thought did the form fit the content), but also allowed that it could be on the scene (in infants for instance) when thought was not. He also seemed to offer a psychological account of how thoughts were to be built up from representations (and representations from intuitions, and intuitions from sensations) through habits & various secret workings of memory, and that seems like that has to fall prey to the criticisms of the Myth of the Given. It's one of the thornier patches of Hegel's system. Lots of good stuff in there, though; definitely not like the "Philosophy of Nature".

Some Brandom Links

Robert Brandom's faculty webpage has a whole lot of downloadable content that I hadn't noticed before. The "Untimely Review of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit" is pretty cute. The conclusions Brandom's Hegel ends up drawing strike me as pretty agreeable (and genuinely Hegelian). Brandom's idiosyncratic reading of "mediation" and "determinate negation" (as, respectively, material inferential relations and relations of incompatibility) continues to irk, but otherwise I like the little essay. It probably helps that it's only nine pages long. No room for detailed misreadings; sufficient room for high-altitude cleverness.

The class page for his Making It Explicit seminar features a pretty ridiculous number of papers responding to Brandom/papers where Brandom responds to his critics. If anyone out there is interested in Brandomism but lacks institutional access to journals: There you go.

Several of his scattered Hegel papers are apparently being reworked as chapters of a book titled "A Spirit of Trust", which he's teaching as a course. All of the papers are available via the class website; the ones I've read are certainly interesting. At least his book-title is good. "A Spirit of Trust". I like that.

Brandom's also put several extracts from the Miller translation of the Phenomenology online. I don't know why he did this, since the book's a cheap paperback, but if you want to have Sense-Certainty/Perception in .doc form, well, you can get them like that this way!

I have to admit that I'm impressed: Chapter eight of "A Spirit of Trust" is 236 pages long. Looks like Brandom's Hegel-book might rival MIE in sheer hugeness.

The full title of that chapter is "From Irony to Trust: Modernity and Beyond". Certainly a nice speculative-sounding title to stick on top of two hundred and thirty six pages of material. Oddly, Rorty's name doesn't appear in the chapter. Rameau's nephew doesn't show up, either. I'm curious how Brandom actually discusses "irony", now. Not going-to-read-236-pages-to-find-out curious (well, not right now), but curious nonetheless.

On an unrelated note, John MacFarlane's "What Does It Mean To Say That Logic Is Formal?" is pretty good so far. I've just started the Kant chapter. It's a quicker read than I was expecting.

More on Brandom's "Sketch"

Brandom's "Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel" really is a pretty good article. I don't want to give the impression that calling it "Brandom's best article on Hegel (that I've read)" is meant as faint praise; it really does have some insightful things to say about Hegel. Some rambling, possibly incoherent thoughts hidden behind Fuuko:

Warning: this post was written in lieu of sleeping, and may show signs of its origin.

For instance, Brandom notes that there's no reason to think Hegel held that the empirical sciences were "complete", or would be soon at any rate, even though he clearly thought his own philosophical system was "complete" in some sense, and further thought that history had reached its end. Nature, for Hegel, is a realm of contingency and arbitrariness, even while also being a realm of necessity and lawfulness:

Although it follows from discussion so far [in the Logic] that contingency is only a one-sided moment of actuality, and must therefore not be confused with it, still as a form of the Idea as a whole it does deserve its due in the world of ob-jects. This holds first for nature, on the surface of which contingency has free rein, so to speak. This free play should be recognized as such, without the pretension (sometimes erroneously ascribed to philosophy) of finding something in it that could only be so and not otherwise.

(Zusatze to ss143 in the Encyclopedia Logic.) In this same passage, Hegel urges that we "have to be careful that we are not misled by the well-meant striving of rational cognition into trying to show that phenomena that have the character of contingency are necessary, or, as people tend to say, into 'constructing them a priori'." "Scientific endeavors which one-sidedly push in this direction will not escape the justified reproach of being an empty game and a strained pedantry." Hegel gives as further examples of things in which "chance indisputably plays a decisive role" art, law, and language ("the body of thinking, as it were"). So Hegel is innocent of the charge which is sometimes made of him, that he thinks everything is (or can be) reduced to or drawn out of his system (which confusion prompted one of his contemporaries to charge him with the task of "deducing his pen", or some other such arbitrary phenomena, or else confessing to being all talk). Brandom is right to draw attention to this aspect of Hegel, since it can go overlooked pretty easily if one focuses too closely on bits of the system like the Logic and the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel does seem to think that he's figured everything out as well as can be done (or somesuch similar boast).

But I think Brandom draws the distinction in the wrong place: for Hegel, the distinction is not between "empirical" and "logical" concepts, but between Nature and the other two moments of the Idea. For Spirit, too, has the sort of self-foundedness that characterizes the Logic; if Hegel is a "semantic optimist" about Logic, he is just as clearly an optimist about Spirit. The areas in which Hegel does not think his system gives a final account are those related to Nature. In the Philosophy of Spirit, the contingent elements are those which belong to finite spirits as natural beings, beings existing externally to one another, with their own peculiar desires, thoughts, etc.; these subjective, arbitrary elements are moments of Spirit. But the peculiarity of these elements is irrelevant -- as an example, the laws of economics, of "civil society", apply wherever various individuals have desires which they individually & mutually seek to satisfy, regardless of what the objects of these desires & values are. Nobody actually exchanges "widgets"; whatever particular widgets someone values at a given moment is a contingent matter, and there need not be any "necessity" lying behind it. This contingency is present in economics, but it need not motivate pessimism about the veracity of our economic concepts. As the aufhebung of Nature, Spirit is autonomous; it produces itself out of itself, and this sort of self-grounding in the Logic is what motivated Brandom's calling Hegel a "semantic optimist" about his logical concepts.

Hegel thinks that we have reached the end of history with the realization that "man as such is and ought to be free" and the development of modern civil society, the nation-state, Protestantism, etc.; he doesn't think that dialectical "contradictions" will lead us to abandon these notions at any point in the future. We might kill ourselves off ("in our age we have found we can make everything totter", as Hegel says in the Lectures on Logic, perhaps referring to the Terror of the French Revolution), and in that way we can prevent the realization of a genuinely free society, but Hegel does not think it possible that there will turn out to be a problem with the idea of a "genuinely free society" itself. What "progress" is left in history is (so to speak) an administrative matter, that existing states need to organize themselves as they ought to be (for instance, Hegel thinks that his Prussian state ought to recognize a right to trial by jury), and Hegel thinks that we can figure out, in broad strokes, what that organization should look like. (That poverty remains a problem in the Philosophy of Right is thus not a merely empirical matter, revealed to us by experience, but a problem within the system; by Hegel's own lights, there ought to be a remedy to the difficulty he sees, but he just can't figure out what it would be. Similarly, the fact that Hegel's proposed "corporations", which are more or less guilds, would be a pretty bad way to organize regulations of the market is not a place where "experience" has shown Hegel's concepts to be flawed, but a sign that Hegel's account of "civil society" in the Philosophy of Right has some problematic aspects considered in itself. Hegel simply does not carry the task he sets for himself to a satisfactory completion -- this not for philosophical reasons, but rather for the homely old excuse that he was not quite as adept a philosopher as he would have liked to be.)

Brandom attributes to Hegel the claim that our empirical concepts are necessarily inadequate; our present conceptual scheme will give rise to contradictory commitments given continued use. Brandom offers no explanation, that I can see, for why this should be a necessary feature of the empirical part of our conceptual scheme, or for why Hegel should think it is. Given that this necessity claim is given as what distinguishes empirical concepts from logical ones, and this sort of revision is supposed to be the place where "experience" plays a role in Hegel, this seems like a problem. (I suspect this is related to Brandom's own avoidance of "experience" in MIE -- it's "not one of [his] words". That Brandom misreads the role "experience" plays in the Phenomenology has been argued by McDowell in multiple places, for instance in his response to Brandom's "Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel".)

Hegel clearly does think that continued empirical inquiry leads us to revise our concepts as well as our judgements; Brandom is simply right in aligning Hegel with Quine on this point. Consider, for instance, Hegel's remarks about Leibniz's wish for a "universal hieroglyphic", where each term in the language was q solidly fixed symbol, as a remedy for confusion in thought:

At any rate a comprehensive hieroglyphic language for ever completed is impracticable. Sensible objects no doubt admit of permanent signs; but, as regards signs for mental objects, the progress of thought and the continual development of logic lead to changes in the views of their internal relations and thus also of their nature; and this would involve the rise of a new hieroglyphical denotation. Even in the case of sense-objects it happens that their names, i.e. their signs in vocal language, are frequently changed, as, for example, in chemistry and mineralogy. Now that it has been forgotten what names properly are, viz., externalities which of themselves have no sense, and only get signification as signs, and now that, instead of names proper, people ask for terms expressing a sort of definition, which is frequently changed capriciously and fortuitously, the denomination, i.e. the composite name formed of signs of their generic characters or other supposed characteristic properties, is altered in accordance with the differences of view which regard to the genus or other supposed specific property. It is only a stationary civilization, like the Chinese, which admits of the hieroglyphic language of that nation.

Hegel's reference to "mental objects" here should not be taken in a Cartesian sense; he means things like universals and Vorstellungen, which for Hegel are present in the world in addition to being "in the mind" subjectively. As an attempt to interpret this passage: Hegel thinks it is possible to have a "permanent sign" for a sensible object because such a sign is nothing but an arbitrary name; the permanence of such a sign demands nothing more than that we use the same name for the same sensed object*. But any description of that object which is supposed to pick it out will take account of its "generic character", its genus, "and other supposed characteristic properties", and the sense of this description will thus be different depending on what the person doing the describing happens to think about the genus & properties of the object (which it falls under, which apply to it) and the nature of that genus and those properties themselves (how this particular genus & these particular properties are related to other genuses and other properties; what particular properties of the object are "characteristic" and not accidental). For to assign an object to a given genus, or to attribute to it some particular properties, is to rule out alternatives genuses and alternative properties, and what one takes oneself to be ruling out determines what one takes oneself to be doing in making a determination that some particular description holds of the object: Omnis determinatio est negatio; to be determinately some way is to not be determined as some other way(s).

Hegel complains about this demand for "a sort of definition" because it shows that people are confusing names (which are arbitrary and fixed) with judgements about an object (which depend on what one happens to think, and so are neither arbitrary nor fixed). So someone asks "What is this?" while pointing at a lump of gold, and wants an answer which is not a mere name ("Gold", "Aurum"), but neither do they want to merely be told various facts about the thing they're pointing at -- they want something like a "true name", a description which doesn't depend on one's other conceptual commitments, but which can be relied on to hold come what may. As with "the progress of thought" our concepts change (since our views about the relations of genuses and properties change), so descriptions which we held to hold true of an object come to be rejected, and vice-versa, and so this request is impossible to answer, and betrays a lack of familiarity with the way in which thinking is needed for one to be able to tell what things are.

For Hegel a judgement is a determination of some of our concepts as relating in some particular way; continued exercise of judgement thus leads to continual alterations in our conceptual scheme, since the "internal relations" among our concepts just are the various "judgements" & "syllogisms" which connect them. For our concepts to be "fixed", Hegel thinks we would have to stop thinking, to make our civilization "stationary" (as he erroneously thinks China to be -- he is also in error about the Chinese language being "hieroglyphic"; though Chinese is not an alphabetic language, it does have ways to carry out the functions Hegel thinks only alphabets can provide, such as producing novel signs). Thus Leibniz's desire for a fixed language with which to carry out science is incoherent -- you can have a fixed stock of concepts, or you can have continued inquiry, but not both. You can have a sign which is irrevocably linked to some particular concept only if your concepts maintain constant in their interrelations; otherwise the sign's sense will shift with the reweaving of one's conceptual web, as the concept with which it was connected shifts in its inferential role. And so equivocation in our terms can only be made impossible if there are no possible adjustments in our conceptual web.

Brandom describes the process in which our empirical concepts are revised in terms of his incompatibility semantics, and attributes something similar to Hegel: Continued "lived experience" is supposed to lead us to realize that our current commitments are incompatible, and so in need of revision; experience is supposed to show that our concepts are "contradictory". This is supposed to be necessarily true of all our empirical concepts, but it's not supposed to lead to skepticism about our access to truth because "truth" is supposed to just be this process of making and revising claims, "the bacchanalian revel in which there is not a soul sober." I think Brandom misreads Hegel's "true" as "correct" here; Hegel's normal use of "true" is in the sense of "a true friend". The "bacchanalian revel" which is said to be "truth" is the continual rising-from-the-ground and returning-to-the-ground of actuality, the "shining" of essence in appearances -- this is what Hegel means in this passage by "the evanescent must be regarded as essential", that "essence must appear". (See Robert Stern's "Did Hegel Hold an Identity Theory of Truth" for a nice discussion of this sort of thing, or ss24 of the Encyclopedia Logic for Hegel explicitly apologizing for his use of "truth".) I think the actual reason the revision of our concepts should not lead to skepticism is simply that there isn't any necessary fault with our current concepts. And when we do revise our thinking, our old thoughts are not discarded, but are incorporated within the new way of thinking, at least as an abstract or one-sided view of the matter, in which case the old thoughts may still be judged to have been correct.

And now, some more complaints about Brandom's article. As another howler, on p.157 Brandom refers to "the only two books [Hegel] published during his lifetime", "both of the works in which he presents his systematic thought", meaning the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic. This is the sort of error editing -- or perhaps simply writing while fully awake-- should catch. Brandom is clearly familiar with the Encyclopedia volumes and the Philosophy of Right, since he quotes from both of them repeatedly in the article; his forgetting that Hegel published other four books is thus absolutely mindboggling. I also have no idea how Brandom could think that these four books did not constitute works in which Hegel "presents his systematic thought", even if he somehow thought they'd been published posthumously (despite the Encyclopedia having three separate introductions, due to its multiple editions).

Brandom also claims that the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology present essentially the same "system", only presented in different modes:

Thus in the Phenomenology he selects from the actual history of the development of philosophical concepts a sequence of transformations each of which can be seen, retrospectively, as conceptually epoch-making, and as cumulatively determining and revealing to us the systematic idiom – the constellation of philosophical claims-and-concepts – whose use is the final form of semantic self-consciousness he calls “Absolute Knowledge.” In the Logic, what is essentially the same system(fn) is presented as the culmination of a course of development that begins with the very simplest form-determinations of concepts – metaconcepts codifying a semantic self-consciousness so rudimentary that without it no concept-use at all is intelligible at the ground level – and progresses in a trajectory that does not at all pretend to track or be drawn from the empirical-historical tradition of thought by which the systematic concepts actually developed.

In the footnote he adds "So I claim; of course this is controversial." Well, yes. To say the least.

If anything, I think Hegel pretends to "track" the "empirical-historical tradition of thought" more closely in the Logic; if one looks at his History of Philosophy lectures, the beginning of philosophy matches the beginning of the Logic, and the progress of philosophy pretty well tracks the categories of the Logic. Philosophy starts with Parmenides's "What is, is, and what is not, is not", which Hegel identifies with his category "Being", not with sense-certainty. But in both the Logic and the Phenomenology, I think that pretending is an apt word for Hegel's historical discussions; the actual progression of the text is determined by the internal reasoning of the text, and not by the sequence in which Hegel's examples occurred temporally.

*I think Hegel slips here, if this is what he is saying. For that some singular object is the singular object it is depends on how the sort of object that it is is individuated. But I don't see that this particular claim is important for Hegel's general account of signs, names, thoughts, etc.

Double-Checking References Is Good

I'm reading Brandom's "Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel". So far, it's the best bit of Brandom-on-Hegel I've come across; I can more-or-less see how Brandom could think that what he calls "determinate negation" is actually what Hegel calls "determinate negation".

But I was pretty surprised to see this:

When [Hegel] says, for instance, that “In this motley play of the world […] there is nowhere a firm footing to be found” (EL, § 123) he might not mean just that we can’t be sure that what seems now to be firm won’t at a later point slip. Some of his formulations
suggest that he is putting forward the much stronger claim that the very idea of an adequate, stable system of determinate empirical concepts is deeply incoherent.

Now, EL §123 struck me as a weird place for Hegel to say something about this, and the claim itself struck me as odd. So I looked it up. It's from the second part of "Essence", "Existence" -- as a first complaint, Brandom gives the citation wrong, since the remark is from the Addition, not the paragraph proper. Here's how Geraets/Suchting/Harris give the passage:

This is the general shape in which the existing world is presented initially to reflection, namely, as an indeterminate multitude of existents, which, being reflected simultaneously into themselves and into something else, are in the mutual relationship of ground and grounded with regard to each other. In this motley play of the world, taken as the sum total of all existents, a stable footing cannot be found anywhere at first, and everything appears at this stage to be merely relative, to be conditioned by something else, and similarly as conditioning something else. The reflective understanding makes it its business to discover and to pursue these all-sided reflections; but this leaves the question of a final purpose unanswered, and, with the further development of the logical Idea, the reason that is in need of comprehension therefore strikes out beyond this standpoint of mere relativity.

"At first" seems like the sort of phrase that modifies Brandom's quoted sentence in an important way: Hegel is not saying that this is how things are, but that it appears that this is how things are, from the standpoint of "Existence". That this is patently unsatisfactory is blamed on "reflection", on the Understanding, and is said to be left behind by "the reason that is in need of comprehension". Specifically, the "pan-relationalism" of §124 is aufgehoben in the movement to categories like "substance and property", "contingency and necessity", "causal relation" etc. The appearance that everything is "merely relative" is overcome by realizing that not all relations are of equal standing; the endless play of conditions becomes the orderly proceedings of mechanical, chemical, and organic happenings, where the "bloomin', buzzin' confusion" of existents show themselves as related in determinate ways. Hegel's problem, at this point, is not that we might be wrong about how things are; his problem is that the standpoint of "Existence" can only comprehend the relations between events as a sort of vapid holism: "Everything is related to everything". At this point in the dialectic, there's not yet anything sufficiently determinate that we might get it wrong.

You may notice that Brandom's quoted phrase is not present in this passage in the form in which he quotes it. Googling reveals that he's actually quoting the Wallace translation, not Geraets/Suchting/Harris, despite the fact that only the latter occurs in his bibliography. Tut, tut, Professor Brandom.

But that is not the only problem. For here's the Wallace translation, with what Brandom omitted in bold:

In this motley play of the world, if we may so call the sum of existents, there is nowhere a firm footing to be found: everything bears an aspect of relativity, conditioned by and conditioning something else.

So: Here Hegel's "motley play of the world" is just "the sum of existents". It's a very restricted sort of "world"; it's the "world" that can be in view if one is restricted to the categories so far introduced in the Logic. Brandom makes it sound like Hegel is here talking of the world as experienced; Hegel doesn't even have things in view yet. ("Thing" begins in §125.)

I don't know how a misreading this severe can happen. The only explanation I can think of is that Brandom works from notes he's made, or something like that, rather than actually looking at the texts he's citing.

But even with all that, it's the best Brandom-on-Hegel article I've yet seen.

In Which I Complain About Things I Like

Lately I've been looking for articles that try to tie in Heidegger and what came after him with current "analytic pragmatist" philosophy. This strikes me as a potentially very fruitful area of research, but I keep being frustrated by how little fleshing-out a lot of claims are given.

"What Does The (Young) Heidegger Mean By The Seinsfrage?" is a nice example: Despite what the title might lead one to expect, most of the article is devoted to discussing Marburg neo-Kantianism (especialyl Cassirer and Cohen) and relating their concerns to those of Rorty and Brandom. (It's enlightening to see how easily one can be lead to Rortyan views from an explicitly scientistic starting-point. In an attempt to revise philosophy to be "in tune" with modern science, Cohen is said to have rejected the correspondence view of truth, limited the world's contribution to our knowledge to a "merely causal" one, adopted an explicitly social notion of "reason" as the various ways in which we justify and revise our beliefs, severely limited all claims to a priority (leaving only a vague imperative to understand nature as law-governed as genuinely a priori), delimited "reality" to just whatever our best physical theories talked about, and denied any epistemic role whatsoever to experience. And he billed all of this as "Kantian"!) Sellars is mentioned once or twice in the paper; Davidson a little more often. None of these four analytic-type figures is quoted in the paper; they don't even make it into the bibliography. They are all mentioned in the article abstract, though!

The author likes to throw in lines like this: "With this, the neo-Kantians have basically adopted the thoroughly coherentist conception of experience currently advocated by Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom." At no point in the paper are the various views on "experience" held by these philosophers discussed; they are merely gestured at, and associated with the figures Heidegger is about to be introduced as overcoming. Also, by the point this paper was written, Sellars hadn't advocated any sort of view for a good decade. He’d been dead since '89.

I actually really like this article; I am inclined to agree with most of the unsupported claims the author throws out, and often find them insightful. For instance, take this footnote: "Hegel, of course goes a step further than Fichte, claiming to demonstrate philosophically that this Anstoss does not just factically occur, but rather for the sake of initiating Reason’ s process. Consequently, Fichte, not Hegel, is the more appropriate precedent for neo-Kantianism, and indeed for Brandom’ s social pragmatism." I find this a very suggestive remark: Both Brandom and Fichte want (in some sense) to found their systems on practical reason; both (in some sense) ground objective purport in the imperative that others should agree with a judgement; Brandom distinguishes perceptual judgements from others by their being casually, but not epistemically, distinctive (they are judgements which arise as the result of reliable differential responsive dispositions); Fichte's account of the genesis of consciousness is that it is "ocassioned" by a "shock" (Anstoss) which stimulates the Ego to posit both the Ego and the Non-Ego (but the "shock" is neither Ego nor Non-Ego; it is outside of cognition generally, a "noumenon in the negative sense" which Fichte uses to justify his claim to being a "realist"). In all of these, Brandom is closer to Fichte than to Hegel -- Hegel doesn't want to give primacy to either thinking or doing, objectivity or intersubjectivity, and his understanding of the world's "causal" role in our epistemic lives is one that lets it contribute genuinely conceptual matters for us to take up.

For Hegel on Fichte's "shock", see the second addition to ss60 in the Encyclopedia Logic. This is the last section before Hegel moves on to "The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity: Immediate Knowing", wherein Jacobi is taken to task in a way that is strikingly reminscent of "Mind and World" -- Jacobi manages to both affirm the Mythical Given and spin frictionlessly in the void. On Jacobi's account, our only true knowledge is of what is immediately given without mediation; all mediation is a form of ungrounded speculation. This is a form of the Myth of the Given, since our knowledge of particulars is supposed to be independent of all other sorts of knowledge (which we just don't have, on Jacobi's account; he takes Hume to have refuted all claims to knowledge of anything beyond bare sense-data). To compensate for denying that we can have knowledge of anything beyond these barren particularities, Jacobi attributes tremendous import to Faith, which includes both everyday beliefs which are unable to be grounded in our knowledge of particulars (such as whatever Hume believed when he stopped philosophizing) and more particularly religious doctrines, all of which are "immediately" held to -- they are not held for any reasons; reason cannot speak to matters of Faith. It is this Faith that Jacobi holds to actually be important; what we can know is nothing for us, is of no use in living. Hence in Jacobi Hume becomes a Fideist, and the Myth of the Given is tied to a "frinctionless coherentism" among our beliefs. (It's a good section. Hegel even argues against Jacobi by reminding us of the role of education in what is "immediate", as McDowell does, and as Sellars did in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind". And unlike McDowell & Sellars, Hegel goes on to use his line of argument to object to Fideism in religion, which is something I'm always in the market for.)

But in the article, the remark is just hanging there. Not even a footnote to other work which discusses it, not even a “(forthcoming)” or “(manuscript)". The literature is seriously gappy, and name-dropping is a real problem.

The article doesn’t actually get around to giving much of an answer to “What does the (young) Heidegger mean by the Seinsfrage”; the neo-Kantians eat up most of the space, and then the Heidegger stuff is mostly just about his criticisms of them. Certainly I don’t have a better grip on what “the question of Being” is supposed to be than I did before reading the article. But I like the article. It’s fun. But it’s becoming clear that some of the stuff I’d like to read still needs to be written.

Brandom Lectures Update

The full audio of Brandom's fifth lecture, along with the reply and the full Q&A section, has been posted to the place the old version was at. I figure this is of interest to some, and wouldn't want it to get buried in an old comment thread.

Hopefully I'll get around to listening to the full version (and the final lecture) sometime before the sun becomes a cold, dark lump of coal the size of your forehead. But no promises!

edit: I have listened to the full version, and have started working through Priest's "An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic". Which has been my first formal introduction to modal logic (though I was of course not entirely ignorant of the stuff before now, my "Logic" course didn't go past the predicate calculus, so I'd been neglecting actually sitting down and working textbook problems for anything more than that). I get what Brandom's been saying about "the modal revolution" now; this stuff is neat.

I'm not sure how much Brandom's claims about "the intrinsic logic" of e.g. intuitionist logic being classical S5 really amount to. The claim seems to boil down to saying that for any autonomous discursive practice, even one in which "Not not A, ergo A" doesn't generally hold as a form of valid inference, you can say how to draw inferences according to classical S5 rules; any autonomous language game is VV-sufficient for laying out classical S5's inferential rules through a semantics that speaks only of commitment and entitlement. But this does not strike me as particularly impressive; there would still be inferences in the discursive practice whose form classical S5 would countenance which the discursive practitioners would not recognize as valid, so it strikes me as odd to say that the "intrinsic logic" of the discursive practice is classical S5. Whatever purpose "intrinsic" logic serves, it doesn't seem to have much of a relation to the inferences reasoners draw, and so it seems like a rather beggarly "intrinsic" feature of their practice. If logic isn't behind the validity of inferences, I don't see what it can be said to do at all.

I don't think there's anything here that Brandom would disagree with; he said in an earlier lecture that he doesn't think the question of "Which is the true logic" is a good one, since various logics can be used to express various sorts of inferential commitments. But then I'm left wondering what calling classical S5 "the intrinsic logic of most familiar logics" is supposed to mean, if it's not supposed to be calling classical S5 "more true" than other logics -- more closely related to our inferential practices, or somesuch. For instance, on page 2 of the lecture handout:

Fact: The incompatibility semantics over standard incompatibility relations with these semantic definitions of connectives validates classical propositional logic.

What is that supposed to mean, if we're not interested in the question of "Which is the true logic"? In what sense can classical propositional logic be "validated" short of being "the true logic"? Is this supposed to be an explanation for why classical logic came along so early, and has been so widely-liked, or something like that? (If so, it strikes me as a bad effort -- classical logic has simple truth-tables, and both "the law of excluded middle" and "the law of noncontradiction" have the support of Aristotle (and most of the tradition), which I think nicely accounts for why non-classical logics always smell a little fishy. But I suspect Brandom doesn't mean to be addressing this question, either. I just don't know what "intrinsic logic" is supposed to signify. Perhaps he's claiming that classical S5 can be worked out purely from talk of commitment and entitlement (and not of truth etc.)? But then I still don't see why "intrinsic logic" should be a good title for this feature of classical S5.)

This is to set to the side that, as I understand it, paraconsistent logics don't have classical S5 as their "intrinsic logic". Whatever the "validation" of classical logic is supposed to amount to, I suspect that this is a serious barrier to it.

On a more positive note: I liked the stuff about holism. Fodor comes under attack from yet another front; suits me fine. I am curious what Brandom's argument for holism entails for a Tarski-style theory of truth (along Davidsonian lines), since in a Tarski-style theory the truth-conditions of a sentence are derived from semantic properties assigned to sub-sentential units, that of satisfaction; the satisfaction relations are the axioms from which the familiar T-sentences are drawn as theorems. Tarski-style theories of truth are compositional. (I think I have this right; I should probably go back and read some of the earlier Davison essays to brush up on this.) Brandom's semantics is not compositional, though it is recursive. "It is holistic, that is, noncompositional, in that the semantic value of a compound is not computable from the semantic values of its components. But this holism within each level of constructional complexity is entirely compatible with recursiveness between levels. The semantic values of all the logically compound sentences are computable entirely from the semantic values of less complex sentences." I suspect that this is not a difference which makes a difference. The Tarskian details that lie behind Davidson's "Convention T" do not seem to play much of a role in the interpretive process; ""S" is true-in-L IFF P, where "P" is a translation of "S" into English, or simply S if L=English" does not seem to need any adjusting if one mucks around with the axiom system Tarski used; McDowell argues in one of his essays ("In Defense of Modesty"?) that intuitionists can make use of a Tarski-style theory of truth as a theory of meaning despite their disagreements about logic, contra Dummett & Wright, and I should think the same holds here: The important part of "Convention T" remains unassailable, though some of the things Davidson wrote about compositionality might need revising.

Pragmatically Moe-diated Semantic Relations

I am only making this post because it seemed wrong to listen to a Locke Lecture and then not post on it. Philosophical content should be approaching absolute zero, here. But the series must be completed!!

There are some problems with the recording of Brandom's fifth Locke Lecture, "Incompatibility, Modal Semantics, and Intrinsic Logic": The recording of Brandom's lecture cuts out before the end, the appendix he keeps referencing is not included in the handouts online, whoever replied to Brandom was not recorded at all, and Bramdom's reply to them is almost entirely missing. And the Q&A seems to be largely building off of bits of the lecture that didn't get recorded. Less than ideal.

Here's what I was able to get from what was recorded: Brandom thinks that any language-game which allows assertions and denials (any autonomous discursive practice) stands in some special relation to S5 modal logic, and classical logic among non-modal logics. Whatever the details of this are supposed to be is, I take it, explained in the appendix I haven't found. Brandom has some way of going from relations of commitment and entitlement among assertions to relations of compatibility/incompatibility among assertions, and then to modal terms (via set theory?); the modal terms are then used to define negation, conjunction, and logical consequence. The upshot is that negation & pals are supposed to be shown to be treatable without an anterior notion of truth; truth, representation, intensional notions, and intentionality all look to be able to be handled down-stream of practices of "giving and asking for reasons" which don't presume them. I'm not sure what to make of all this, given the level at which Brandom's handling it in this lecture. I think it would help if half the lecture material hadn't disappeared. Or if I'd read "Making It Explicit" ever. I get a feeling that there's something sneaky going on in the way Brandom "validates classical propositional logic" and S5 by introducing logical operators by drawing attention to specific sorts of semantic relations, and this appears to have been brought up in the parts of the lecture I didn't hear, but I can't put my finger on what's bothering me about it.

Here's what I can gather of what went on that wasn't recorded: Bramdom has some idea for what to do with intuitionistic logic, but no idea what to do with relevance logics. Whatever was said in the reply to Brandom here, it caught him off-guard. Brandom thinks this is a problem, but he hadn't thought of it at all before the question & answer section of this lecture. I'm curious what all I missed, here. I suspect that it fell out that Brandom's general strategy for handling logical operators won't work for handling certain non-classical versions of the operators, which is a problem given what Brandom's said earlier about wanting to avoid asking "Which is the true logic?"; I rather liked the latter, so I'm curious about the details of the former. Still one lecture to go; maybe it'll come up again.

And now it's glasses-time.

At one point Haruhi.tv had a hidden page with Mikuru images. That's where this pic is from. When I looked through my image directories, I was surprised to find that it's the only pic I have that's just Mikuru wearing glasses.


Thankfully, there is no shortage of Nagato images where she still has her glasses. <3


No shortage at all.


Plenty of glasses pics to go around.


I decided not to post any NWS ones. It just makes sense. And then it occurred to me that I should really save Yuki pics for future use. Don't want to end up using lame pics just because I want to put up a Yuki one.


I've gotten tired of having to hunt for pics that are small enough for my current template; I've had several that end up getting cut off, anyway. 400 pixels just isn't very wide. So I've resized a lot of pics for this post. But not this one. It was always a little small.


Asakura is love. <3


Why did she have to be killed off? She just wants to murder people to see what happens when she kills them. IS THAT SO WRONG?


I have no idea what any of the text on any of these images says. I actually edited out the text on some of the images I put up in earlier posts, just to avoid accidentally throwing up embarrassing messages unintentionally. Now I am THROWING CAUTION TO THE WIND. For all I know, this image reads "I AM A PEDOPHILE; RON PAUL '08". Or more realistically, it might just say something like "Meganekko Rape Doujin Adult-only 18+". Which, ceteris parabus, is something I'd prefer not to have on my blog. But that is just one of the risks you run from trolling imageboards for pics.


This was one of the only images I had of Tsuruya with glasses. What the hell? Tsuruya and glasses is like peanut butter and celery. Man, I haven't had that in years. I need to eat more vegetables. And buy some peanut butter.


She was a background character in Haruhi. There is fan-art of her. I found at least three or four pieces while selecting pics for this update. Good job, Internet.


Sometimes the internet frightens and confuses me. Why does this exist? ;_;


Whenever I hear someone say "megane", what comes to mind is a scene from "Ultimate Girls":
Big Breasts (this is actually what they called her; I forget her actual name) was fighting a giant robot/alien mangaka. The mangaka throws a pair of glasses at her, and they land square on her face. Big Breasts is confused by this attack.

Big Breasts: Megane?
Mangaka-alien: Megane-KOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And then he fires a giant laser from his crotch.

Ultimate Girls is one of the worst shows I have ever watched (in full). In my defense, you could view it online for free (legally), and I couldn't get BitTorrent to work at the time. Still, it had things like a magical-girl transformation sequence involving robot ejaculate. That's a special kind of terrible you can really only get from anime.


And now for some walls

to close out the post.

Brandom Again

Just finished off Brandom's fourth Locke Lecture. His interlocutors in the earlier lectures seem to have spoiled this one a bit; there had been questions asked about this lecture from the start. This gave the lecture itself the feel of a review.

Brandom's goal in this lecture is to offer a defense of modal talk (and so of the "modal revolution" -- the fact that no one is anxious about modal vocabulary anymore in the way that Quine et al used to be), but without recourse to the metaphysical bits of Kripke et al. The defense of modal language is tied to a defense of normative language, since Brandom's strategy for making modal language unobjectionable will also work for normative talk.

The claim is attributed to Sellars-Kant (and Brandom notes that he's often accused of not being able to distinguish between Sellars and Hegel) that non-modal, non-normative language is not an autonomous discursive practice; if you can use descriptive language, then you have mastered the skills needed to understand normative and modal talk. On Brandom's inferentialist picture, use of descriptive vocabulary requires acknowledging a difference between good and bad inferences. It is then argued that to be able to distinguish inferences in this way, one must be able to do things which are (in principle) sufficient to allow one to understand modal and normative vocabulary. The proof in the modal case is that revision of one's beliefs is only manageable if one's beliefs are regarded as having various degrees of counterfactual robustness -- otherwise one would face the task of not being able to tell ahead of time whether or not a belief would be likely to need revision in the light of some other belief. The proof in the normative case is that keeping track of inferential relations requires tracking commitments and entitlements, and these are both normative notions. Brandom offers this account as a fleshing-out of Sellars's claims that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms."

Brandom's project here strikes me as congenial. No criticisms of it leap to mind, nor do I have anything to add by way of commentary. I generally liked the lecture; Brandom may be growing on me.

Huw Price's response, and Brandom's reply to Price's response, focuses mainly on an issue which has been hanging around since lecture one, the desirability of trying to keep the old analytical-metaphysical beast alive; Price regrets that he was reading from an already-prepared lecture in his response, or else he would have stolen McDowell's "Frankenstein" metaphor. Here Brandom makes a wonderful case for his own views, against Price/Rorty; much of the same ground was covered that Duck went over in his wonderful recent post on Truth.

One of the points Price tries to attack Brandom on is "wanting to cross the word-world divide" and go from saying "We can talk of norms and modalities and numbers" to "There really are norms and modalities and numbers." Brandom's reply is exactly to the point -- Price (and Rorty) seem to be arguing for a "subjectivism" in opposition to the older "objectivism", when what really needs doing is a dismantling of the old subject-object/word-world framework. Brandom notes that we should have learned from Frege to think of a fact as merely being a claimable which is true, and so to not be able to understand what it should mean to move from talking of "true claims" to talking of "objective facts" about "the way the world really is". Brandom's pragmatist bona fides are on clear display, here. Good stuff.

This reminds me of a point Duck brought up a while back. To the questions "Is there a world out there, and if so, do the differences and similarities we see in it come from it, from us, or both?" Duck thinks the answer is (trivially) "Yes, and both". I agree that the answer must be trivially "Yes" in the first case, but I don't think I even understand the second. What does "come from" mean, here? I am inclined to say that any similarities or differences we notice are facets of the world which were there before we noticed them*, but of course no one need have noticed them as similarities or differences before we had, and there's no reason to suspect that we immediately notice all distinctions which we might apprehend. I suspect that this is the sort of thing which would be said to quiet someone's urge to ask "Where do the similarities and distinctions we notice come from -- the world or us?", but I really am not sure I understand the temptation to ask this in the first place.

One sour note: During the Q&A Brandom has occasion to speak of Hegel, very briefly. I haven't the foggiest idea how Brandom is reading Hegel as saying what he thinks he's saying; McDowell seems to have the same problem, so I suspect I am confused for good reason. (McDowell's review of Brandom's"Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism" is utterly withering.)

*In most cases. When I notice that (say) I am suffering from a stomach-ache, there's no sense in saying that I was already suffering (silently) before anyone noticed. It can't be a proper stomach-ache if I never feel it.

Concerning a Surprise

The first sentence of Zizek's For they know not what they do contains a Brandom joke:

There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although practically no one has read them page by page (John Rawls's Theory of Justice, for example, or Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit) -- a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us.

We are off to a good start, at least.

My copy of For they know not what they do arrived today. Sadly, looking at the index, Zizek doesn't appear to manhandle Davidson in the book; I know he's said some startlingly inaccurate things about the principle of charity before, and I was hoping I wouldn't have to do any real work to hunt them down. (Davidson is mentioned once in a footnote as a "recent analytic philosopher", but that's his sole appearance.) At least there are some decently-long Wittgenstein discussions in the book; one hopes to find some rough ground there.

I figure the worst case scenario is that I'll read for the jokes. Zizek's pretty good at delivering on such things.

Audio Links

Currence has passed along some audio links (via e-mail). I am sharing the love.

Two interviews with Davidson -- one by Dummett, and one by McDowell. I am a bit anxious about finding out what Davidson sounds like; for some reason I always read him as speaking with a British accent. Ironically, I was surprised to find that McDowell does have a British accent, since I had never read him as having that sort of voice.

A few Quine panels. I notice that one is labeled as involving Burt Dreben; given that it's impossible (seriously) to find anything Dreben's written, I look forward to finding out if he's as attractive a figure as he's been rumored to be.

And a huge amount of Brandom material, not all of which is audio. I noticed that the Locke Lectures shawn linked to are part of this site; it didn't occur to me to check out what else was hosted in the neighborhood.

Hopefully this does not end up killing some poor fellow's bandwidth; it occurs to me that I've grabbed half a gig of material from his servers. That could add up rather quickly.

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Education

Please note that I have posted some more thoughts on lecture #2 in the comments on the previous post. Also, shawn has had several nice posts recently on "Making It Explicit." Not that I suspect anyone will read this blog who doesn't already read "Words and Other Things" also.

Well, just got done listening to Brandom's third Locke Lecture. I don't know all that much about AI, and I know practically nothing about early childhood education, so I feel like I learned a lot from this. I had no idea that there was a serious problem with teaching fractions as compared to addition; this makes many old "Peanuts" comics even better than they already were. ¦3

I quite liked pretty much everything Brandom had to say about AI, the Turing test, education, and what they have to do with his concern for pragmatics. I'm not sure how much of what he was saying was supposed to be a summary of what everyone "already knew" about the state of the field, and what he was contributing as a novelty, but he acted like he was drawing attention to some neglected topics in computer science; I wouldn't have thought that pragmatics had been so broadly ignored, given the role it plays in the Turing test (we just need an automaton to act indistinguishably from a person to pass the test), but perhaps things are more badly in need of a shake-up than I'd thought.

That one practice was PP-sufficient for another by algorithmic elaboration meant that any creature which could do the first thing could, by following a prescribed algorithm calling for the performance of sub-tasks of the practice already mastered, do the other. It was noted that this is a bit of an idealization if you're trying to apply the model to humans, since there are psychological barriers to responding to certain inputs with certain outputs (even if one is bidden to by an algorithm). Brandom notes that there's a further problem with trying to find a practice which is PP-sufficient by algorithmic elaboration for discursive activity which didn't already presuppose discursive activity, one akin to the "framing problem." When one revises one's beliefs upon a shift somewhere in one's inferential matrix, every element is potentially in need of revision. There needs to be a way of determining what is and what isn't relevant for analysis, but the only way to do this that anyone is aware of requires using language. But, Brandom points out that there is another sort of PP-sufficiency relation we can work with, that of training. Apparently there are actually empirically well-supported algorithms such that anyone who can count can be taught to add -- but not to subtract; still working on that one. I'd be rather interested in reading more about this. This is an addition I didn't see coming; I was not aware that the study of pedagogy had come so far.

I don't have much to say about this lecture; it is simply very solid, enjoyable work. So, to make up for a lack of content: LOLRussell.

Addendum: I have now listened to P. Stekeler-Weithofer's reply, and Brandom's reply-reply, and the following Q&A, and I have to say: I don't have the foggiest idea what P. Stekeler-Weithofer is on about. He seemed to just be going off on tangents for pretty much the entire half-hour (what Hegel's notion of allgemeinheit as opposed to einigkeit, or Heidegger's critique of "humanism" has to do with AI, or with anything Brandom has mentioned, I could not even begin to guess, but P. Stekeler-Weithofer felt compelled to mention both). His criticisms of the Turing test seem entirely to miss the point of the test; it's a way to point out that manufacturing a passable simulacrum is the goal of AI. The claim that you can't know for sure if you're talking to a Turing machine unless you go and find out from the people who made it, and so the Turing test is structurally flawed, strikes me as the stupidest objection to the test that I have ever heard. I will note that Brandom's reply does mention a criticism of the Turing test, but it is not any of the ones P. Stekeler-Weithofer mentioned; I will also note that Brandom's reply was less than ten minutes long, so I am pretty sure I am not alone in thinking that P. Stekeler-Weithofer was a lousy commentator.

On the other hand, I am curious what N.N. will have to say about P. Stekeler-Weithofer's monologue. I know N.N. has some heterodox views on cognitive science, so he might be a more charitable listener than I've been.

A short note on Brandom's second lecture

John McFarlane's dissertation may not be published, but it is available here*. I'm half-inclined to see if I can rush through it this weekend, then listen to Brandom's second lecture again. I know I was not catching some of what Brandom was trying to say about logic there. It does come out (more explicitly) that the reason behind the PV/VP/PP sufficiency notions is to allow Brandom a way to show that anyone possessing a vocabulary sufficient for assertions possesses the necessary skills for employing logical vocabulary (and, I suspect, modal and normative vocabulary, though these topics are going to be handled in detail in a later lecture).

In lecture-form, it's not clear to me how this proof is supposed to go. Brandom notes that he's privileging assertions, and in general the capacity to give and ask for reasons for what one says (does?), but I'm not sure what his justification for this is. I know that Davidson holds that any language-user must have a concept of truth, since radical interpretation requires us to agree with the speaker about most of what is true (hence they must have thoughts that they hold true). I suspect that Brandom has some argument similar in form to this, but I've just missed it. I don't think Brandom is just privileging assertion because that makes for interesting philosophical work, since he speaks of philosophers being "proud of their logocentrism", of having an answer to Derrida, and of Wittgenstein being wrong that "language has no downtown." He seems to secure this point, though, by ruling some things which seem like language-games (such as the "Slab!" bit from PI 2) as "merely verbal." It is hardly revolutionary to find that, if only certain language-games are real language use, then real language has a "downtown" and that it is not arbitrary to privilege it. This does not seem like a satisfactory answer to Wittgenstein; I'll just set Derrida aside.

One reason I can think of for Brandom to be privileging assertion is that this lets him make bolder claims about the universality of logic: Rather than just being another case (for Brandom thinks there are many) where one vocabulary is PP sufficient for another, logic (and some other vocabularies, I think Brandom calls them "LX") is PP sufficient for any vocabulary. But this is just to say that logic is PP sufficient for any vocabulary which includes assertions as a subset. The universality is just the universality of assertion-vocabulary. Given that the universality of logic seems to be one of the things Brandom wants to explain, this can't be the reason for his privileging of assertions.

N.N. should be glad to hear that Brandom spends quite a bit of time in the Q&A clarifying what he means by "vocabulary"... after offering a "clarification" in the main lecture which he's forced to rather heavily amend. But at least the topic is broached.

I am going to give this lecture (and McFarlane's response) another listen before I move on. I am sure I am missing something important at the moment.

*I should mention that Paul Raymont's "An Idle Threat: Epiphenomenalism Exposed" is great, while I'm linking to that site anyway.

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! ;_;