Robert Brandom

Richard Rorty challenged (and outraged) traditional philosophers with the anti-representalitionist message of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, back in 1979. Beginning in that book and in later writings, he went on to try to spell out the way forward from representationalism. He called on help from American pragmatism in particular in constructing a social pragmatist account that promised to provide a non-foundationalist footing for a theory of knowledge.

Brandom’s lectures present his show more account of Richard Rorty’s social pragmatism, laying out in the first lecture his understanding of Rorty’s proposal and then, in response to a weakness he finds there, calling upon Hegel’s historicism to fill the gap in his second lecture.

Rorty’s thinking takes off from what he calls the “foundationalism-or-skepticism oscillation.” Traditional accounts of knowledge take knowledge to be representative of reality, built on some foundation (e.g., sense perceptions or experiences) and built into full-blooded representations via logical manipulations (e.g., inferences). The foundationalist account begins with the British empiricists, reaches a crescendo with Kant, and, arguably, a denouement with Carnap in the 1920s.

Skeptical arguments find room to inject doubt into either the immediacy and infallibility of the foundational elements or the inferences tying them together. Skeptical arguments have proven remarkably resilient, a “scandal to philosophy” in Kant’s words.

What is needed, by Rorty’s argument, is another construction, either of knowledge per se or of something that takes its place in our accounts of our relationship with and understanding of reality.

And for Rorty, that new construction is to be built on pragmatist grounds and constitute nothing less than a “second Enlightenment.”

Critical to this second Enlightenment is that it be a thoroughly human dynamic, not an appeal to any external, non-human authority, such as a god or “Reality,” as Rorty calls it, with a “capital R,” denoting a reality independent of and external to human thought. There is no such standard against which to judge our beliefs and knowledge claims according to this approach. There is only the human activity of making our own standards, embedded in social practices, for what is true and what is justified. This is the germ of Rorty’s humanist anti-authoritarianism.

Rorty’s pragmatism is an extension of the work of the American pragmatists, especially C.S. Peirce. Brandom makes an especially interesting point about the historical context in which Peirce’s thinking emerged. In 19th century industrialization and manufacturing, technology acts as “the arm of science” transforming science as theory (“knowing that”) into science as doing (“knowing how”). This development is going to set the stage for a construction of knowledge as non-representational in the sense of its being engaged and embedded in practical activities rather than observational and representationalist.

But Peirce himself didn’t go so far as to propose an engaged conception of knowledge. Rather his conception was an evolved version of the (first) Englightenment’s science-derived conception. Peirce evolved that conception by giving it a dynamic, a proposing-testing-refining-proposing-testing-refining (”Test-Operate-Test-Exit”) model that took, as Brandom has it, a “selectionist” dynamic for its driving force. As the progression of knowledge on this conception proceeds, what is “known” is what is selected by testing.

This dynamic is, by contrast to the “first Enlightenment”, a thoroughly human one. The first Enlightenment retains the ideal of a world of truth, Kant’s things-in-themselves, towards which our theories approach (setting aside some considerable nuances in Kant’s actual account of knowledge). In Rorty’s extension of Peirce, there is no such thing as the thing-in-itself as standard or criterion for knowledge, only the human dynamic.

Rorty is by no means leaving Kant behind, though. In fact he is, by Brandom’s account, radicalizing Kant’s own notion of the autonomy of reason. One of Kant’s most provocative insights was what he called the “two standpoints” under which we must understand our actions and our wills. One is the “phenomenal world,” ruled by (physical) causality, the world of Newton’s physics and the physicalistic accounts of human behavior. The other, though, is the “noumenal world,” where it is the autonomy of reason that determines the will and generates human action. Needless to say, this is a complex distinction, and I won’t try to expand on it (even if I could confidently do that!). Suffice to say that Kant’s notion of rational autonomy propels Rorty’s account forward.

The picture Rorty paints is of thorough self-governance. A community of mutually assessing and mutually standard-setting, rationally driven persons — the social practices of standard setting embedded in our practices of asking for and giving reasons for our beliefs and knowledge claims. Those practices determine what counts as true and justified.

But now the specter of groundlessness is going to raise its head again. Isn’t Rorty’s account itself skeptical? Doesn’t it separate the human from the natural or real, even make a virtue of that separation?

This is where the appeal to Hegel comes. Brandom himself thinks that Rorty needs an appeal to Hegel to make the social practices Rorty is talking about compelling, to answer the question, what binds us to our social practices?

First it’s important to recognize that a standard version of the skeptical argument can’t find a hold here, at least in any simple way. That skeptical argument depended on doubting that our knowledge claims mirror a separate reality. Rorty hasn’t so much cleared away the very notion of a “separate reality” as changed how we are to understand knowledge claims in the first place.

What we are doing when we say, “I know . . . “, is pragmatic, not represenational. We are performing some action, e.g., assuring someone of a fact, settling a dispute, making progress on solving a problem or making a decision. In other words, we are truly “doing” something, interacting with each other and with the world, not reporting some external reality — “coping, not copying,” as Rorty says.

But that still leaves us with a question. If all that sustains our structures of and claims to knowledge is our adherence to social practices of asking for and giving reasons, why these particular practices? And couldn’t we just change them? How do we know that they won’t just change somehow tomorrow and everything we’ve claimed to know be thrown up in the air?

Brandom finds the answer in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, not in Rorty’s own thinking. It is not only the social character of practices and norms that bind us to them, that make them “actual” in an Hegelian term, it is their historical character.

(For convenience to Brandom’s account, I’m going to switch here from talk of social practices to talk of “norms.” Norms are standards, standards of knowledge and truth as well as of right and wrong, enacted in social practices, such as those Rorty cites, of asking for and giving reasons for beliefs and knowledge claims.)

Brandom takes the concept of “recognition” (“Annerkennung”) from Hegel, the mutuality of norm-giving and norm-abiding persons, and the resulting mutual responsibilities to ask for and give reasons, matching closely to Rorty’s thinking about social practices.

Brandom also takes from Hegel the concept of “recollection” (“Erinnerung”) something he believes missing in Rorty’s account. The product of this recollection is tradition, a reconstruction of the path we have taken with our community of norms to arrive at the here and now. The here and now of socially enacted norms (Rorty’s social practices) doesn’t stand entirely unsupported. It has the support of history, of a past of norms constructed, tested, and learned from, in that same selectionist process that Brandom talked about in Peirce’s thinking.

This appeal to history is still rational, in Brandom’s account, because the tradition it yields provides reasons for holding to and applying norms in the present.

That Hegelian turn allows Brandom to attempt to square the circle — accounting for the norms of knowledge and justification as humanly produced while at the same time accounting for their ability to bind us as if from outside us, as tradition.

Brandom’s account of Hegel’s notion of recollection is a discursive account, as is Hegel’s own perspective in the Phenomenology. By this I mean that Brandom adheres to his own theme of “making explicit,” as when recollection allows us to tell the story of how our current norms came to be historically, thus, by Brandom’s account, providing us with reasons to hold to them.

There is another element to be taken from Hegel that I think is just as important, though. That is Hegel’s concept of “Bildung,” “Bildung" is translated as “education” or “formation,” which don’t really capture his point. What is important is that Hegel means by the term to distinguish our history as something we “have” from our history as something we “are.” That history of norms and social practices that take us to the here and now is itself, in keeping with Rorty’s anti-authoritarian stance, something constitutive of who we are, not something we just cleave to as the story of how we got here.

That more thorough historicism allows us to make a much stronger claim about how we bind to our current social practices. It’s not just that we adhere to practices of giving and asking for reasons, those practices just are what reasons, or rationality, are for us. We cannot divorce ourselves from them and adopt other practices, as if on a whim or for advantage. They are inescapable. That inescapability is not “psychological,” or at least not so in its essence, it is social, maintained by day to day informal and formal practices and institutions.

On this account then, it is not the explicit historical narrative we can tell about our norms that makes them binding so much as the inescapability of those norms as constitutive of who we are as knowers, reasoners, etc. We have no way of reasoning, judging, or knowing outside of the ways in which we have any sense or experience whatsoever of such things. These norms are for us, simply what knowing, judging, and reasoning are — as constitutive of us, they are inescapable (unless brought to the fore by conflicts, discrepancies, inadequacies, etc.).

I think this last point, the importance of Hegel’s notion of Bildung, is missing in Brandom’s account, and, so far as I can see, in Rorty’s as well. Rorty was certainly made aware of the difficulty Brandom discusses — the question of what binds us to our social practices. And certainly Rorty had a deep understanding of Hegel’s historicism. But he doesn’t seem to have put the two together.

Okay, all of that said (and I know this is a long review even though I’ve compressed the arguments), Brandom’s lectures are provocative in the way that philosophical discussions should be provocative. If you’re anything like a student of Rorty, or of what we could (cringingly) call “post-representalism”, it’s got my recommendation. show less

Brandom apresenta aqui sua visão particular do que há de mais frutífero nas obras de Wilfrid Sellars, assim também argumentando contra a insistência de Sellars em ter a ciência como medida das coisas e em sua peculiar reabilitação da diferenciação kantiana entre fenômeno e númeno. Nisso, é construído um Sellars de Brandom e talvez isso leve a balança muito para os desdobramentos propriamente brandomianos a partir da obra de Sellars, além da insistência de Brandom num show more problema difícil e obscuro; daquele sobre a diferença entre dizer o que se está a fazer quando se diz algo (postura pragmática quanto ao uso da linguagem) e sobre o que se está efetivamente dizendo, em um entendimento semântico da mesma, relacionado mas irredutível a essa pragmática. E nessa insistência, como no capítulo sobre o nominalismo, que acaba sendo pouco claro e muito condensado. De fato, aqui e ali há passagens condensadas demais, muito embora no todo a reconstrução da complexidade frequentemente desnorteadora dos textos de Sellars ajude. A recriação da ideia de categorias de Kant na de um arcabouço metalinguístico é brilhantemente explorada, bem como a de uma normatividade das razões que desarma tentativas empiristas clássicas de fundar a linguagem na experiência, e dão conta de lidar com as modalidades aléticas (necessidade, possibilidade) e de colocar problemas nos categoriais envolvidos em identificações cruzadas fortes (como aquela entre "passageiro número 11" e "Henrique", embora esse ponto seja o que menos me convença no livro inteiro). show less

Um livro condensado, brilhante, abordando questões formais-técnicas da filosofia da linguagem, mas tirando delas ideias incríveis, em 6 palestras-capítulos, com um apêndice lógico no cap. 5 ilegível de tão técnico (mas que pode ser ignorado), um resumo pelo próprio autor ao final do sexto, mais um surpreendente adendo, mais solto e de sobrevôo, sobre o projeto e sua relação com a tradição da análise lógica-analítica e com o pragmatismo (que renova os ares e dá uma show more perspectiva maior às aspirações do livro). Aqui Brandom avança o programa de conciliar pragmatismo e a tradição analítica, trabalhando tanto o uso e o que fazemos quando empregamos um vocabulário, quanto o quanto certos vocabulários explicitam nossas práticas discursivas. Avança assim relações formais de elaboração e decomposição algorítmica (de uma prática a outra), diagramas de análise do significado-uso, com relações de suficiência de uma prática para empregar um vocabulário, e de um vocabulário para especificar uma prática. Chega assim à formulação de metavocabulários pragmáticos, quando um vocabulário especifica uma prática que é suficiente para empregar outro vocabulário. Com isso e os resultados que obtém com as noções normativas de comprometimento, autorizações e incompatibilidades, fornece ligações tanto esperadas quanto inusitadas entre os vocabulários lógicos, modais e normativos, mostrando como a discursividade liga o vocabulário modal da necessidade e possibilidade a um pólo objetivo e o vocabulário normativo ao subjetivo. Com isso resolve genialmente o dito de Sellars de que a linguagem da modalidade é uma linguagem das normas transposta. Recomendo. E digo que não é tão árido quanto pareceria (e bem mais direto ao ponto que Making it Explicit). show less

Um volume extenso contendo alguns dos ensaios mais importante de Sellars, com clássicos como Some reflections on language games e Philosophy and the scientific image of men, três bons ensaios sobre Kant, um bloco inteiro onde seu nominalismo é exposto, um bloco com contribuições para a filosofia da linguagem, outro que coloca esta em contato com a crítica ao empirismo, a relação representativa pré-linguística com o mundo, a filosofia da mente; por fim, um que lida com a ciência e show more algo da posição naturalista do autor. Há em tudo isso uma pletora de ideias instigantes e desenvolvimentos geniais. Alguns: a defesa das inferências materiais contra o logicismo que quer dispensá-las; a extração das consequências de possuirmos uma linguagem na qual os condicionais subjuntivos são essenciais - a linguagem modal tem caráter metalinguístico; significados são relações internas à linguagem e há transições de entrada e de saída da linguagem; na primeira disposições de resposta são essenciais; devemos modelar pensamentos em termos linguísticos, mas o pensar é adquirido logicamente a partir de um pensar em voz alta, modelado na prática comunicativa da fala; a diferença entre seguir padrões e obedecer a regras; uma visão funcionalista da significação; redução nominalista do discurso sobre propriedades ao de categorização sintática; a operacionalização de significados como funções-uso (com o uso das "citações ponto"); o espaço de razões e a ordem conceitual/da significação; a dependência de discursos sobre algo aparentar ser, da de discursos sobre ser; o caráter pré-linguístico de representações animais e o que esse tem em comum com nossa representação das coisas (e um realismo possível em que há uma mediação causal das sensações para a percepção, mas em que esta última já contém elementos de outra ordem - conceitual); as duas imagems contrastantes do humano e a dificuldade de integrá-las...

Entretanto, como é comum ao autor, muitas vezes essas benesses estão escondidas sob um texto muito técnico e ao mesmo tempo esquivo, onde o excesso de discriminações e e bifurcações que dizem procurar tornar mais precisos os problemas acabam por tornar a posição do autor difícil de captar e dão uma impressão labiríntica; é normal sentir que a condução é errática, ao mesmo tempo sabendo que há algo de bastante preciso que emergirá dos confrontos ocultos dos textos. Assim, há uma clara escolha aqui de privilegiar o que o texto proporciona e não dizer simplesmente que podem ser problemáticos. É preciso gostar deles, de todo modo, para esperar o momento da segunda leitura. show less