The Space of Reasons
As 'rational' people, we ought to regard the warranted claims of others and justify our own. Sometimes commitment to one claim deontically necessitates a commitment to others, such as those which can be inferred from the former, even if one is not yet aware of those further commitments.
This ideally happens in philosophy all the time. I make a point. Someone else shows me how my point implies something absurd or contrary to another of my commitments, so that I ought to give up my point. If I don't, I lose face, for witnesses as well as participants are keeping score. "All the world's a stage,' and rationality is perhaps essentially social. The self is a kind of source and locus of responsibility for claims and actions that only makes sense in the context of many selves, in a space not only of reasons but also of memory (to keep score is to remember and hold ourselves and others accountable to what has transpired so far.)
This line of thought seems to simply make explicit what we more or less vaguely understand by rationality. There's an anti-skeptical thrust here, for a 'rational' (morally binding) skepticism seems to only make sense within a context like this which is already richly social. There's quite a tangle of themes here, and I'm hoping conversation will help me tame my developing understanding of what Brandom's getting at. I'll finish with a quote for context.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/
Here's a taste of 'reasonable' (analytic?) pomo too:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/
This ideally happens in philosophy all the time. I make a point. Someone else shows me how my point implies something absurd or contrary to another of my commitments, so that I ought to give up my point. If I don't, I lose face, for witnesses as well as participants are keeping score. "All the world's a stage,' and rationality is perhaps essentially social. The self is a kind of source and locus of responsibility for claims and actions that only makes sense in the context of many selves, in a space not only of reasons but also of memory (to keep score is to remember and hold ourselves and others accountable to what has transpired so far.)
This line of thought seems to simply make explicit what we more or less vaguely understand by rationality. There's an anti-skeptical thrust here, for a 'rational' (morally binding) skepticism seems to only make sense within a context like this which is already richly social. There's quite a tangle of themes here, and I'm hoping conversation will help me tame my developing understanding of what Brandom's getting at. I'll finish with a quote for context.
Brandom adds that the normative relations between "representeds and representings" -- the things known and the knowing of them -- are "a special case of the authority of normative statuses over attitudes" (p. 753). Claiming to know something, therefore, is attributing a certain status to ourselves -- the status of being bound by what we know. Yet this status, like all others, is instituted by our normative attitudes. Knowing is thus not simply finding ourselves, but taking ourselves, to be bound by reality, and indeed taking reality to be a certain way. The empirical concepts we judge to be objective are formulated in response to "noninferential observation reports" (p. 616) -- to what we perceive -- but they are not simply read off the world. They are instituted by our attitudes and practices. This is Brandom's "pragmatism about semantics" and cognition (p. 753).
How, though, can we be bound by the norms and normative statuses that we institute? This is made possible, Brandom contends, by "a social division of labor". It is "up to me" whether I claim the coin is made of copper; but if I do so, then what I commit myself to, "what is incompatible with it and what its consequences are, is administered by those I have granted that authority by recognizing them as metallurgical experts" (p. 704). Norms are thus instituted as binding norms in social processes -- processes involving claims by some and assessment of those claims by others, as well as reciprocal recognition between the individuals concerned. This is true whether those norms govern cognition or action.
Yet this is not the end of Brandom's story, for what is also needed, if we are to establish genuinely binding norms, is a way to vindicate those we now endorse, to regard them as truly objective. We do this, Brandom claims, by retrospectively "reconstructing" the social experience that led to our current endorsement of a norm. Specifically, we have to reconstruct the past process of instituting new norms -- through the experience of error and its "repair" -- as one in which the norm we now endorse has become progressively more explicit and thereby been discovered (pp. 370-1). This in turn requires us to regard that norm as having implicitly governed our cognition "all along" and in that sense to be "objective" (p. 680). Note that such "recollective" reconstruction of experience does not give us direct access to the "truth". It is, rather, how we come to understand ourselves now to be knowing something objective: for we regard our currently accepted norm as objective by taking it to have been found through the process of making new norms. It is through such recollection, therefore, that we justify to ourselves our conceptual realism; and the thesis that the latter requires the former is what Brandom calls "conceptual idealism" (p. 369). Like objective idealism, conceptual idealism does not claim that the world exists only insofar as we do something. It claims only that we must do something -- recollectively reconstruct our experience as progressive -- if we are to take ourselves to know the world. Conceptual idealism is thus not what Hegel would call a "subjective" idealism, but rather a pragmatist thesis about cognition.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/
Here's a taste of 'reasonable' (analytic?) pomo too:
In premodern societies, Brandom maintains, norms and normative statuses are held to be found in the world or in the nature of human beings. Such statuses thus have priority over subjective normative attitudes. By contrast, in modernity norms and normative statuses are taken to be instituted by normative attitudes, so the latter have priority over the former. Modernity, however, fails, to a greater or lesser degree, to explain how we can be bound by the norms we institute, so it slips into various forms of "alienation", for which attitudes are not bound by norms at all but are governed, for example, by natural desires or the self-justifying convictions of "conscientious" agents (pp. 543, 552). In the postmodern age -- which is yet to come -- normative attitudes and statuses will be understood explicitly to be in balance, since such attitudes will be understood to be genuinely bound by the statuses (and norms) they institute.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/
Comments (85)
Excellent idea! I love it! An argumentum ad consequentiam is a fallacy they say...naaah!
That's a nice issue to bring up. The fallacious version seems to point at practical consequences, so that an inconvenient truth is no less true for all that. But inferential consequences are something else. If 0 has a multiplicative inverse, then it's easy to prove that 0 = 1. I must abandon my belief that 0 has such an inverse or, far less likely, modify a vast system of related beliefs.
Something like that. While we figure things out, let's assume the least worst theory. In fact, on occasion, let's not...figure things out. The truth, who cares about the truth! I want to be happy!
Another good theme. The norm/ideal of rationality is not our only concern. It may be a detour the, invention of some darker need (such as to replicate without reason or excuse.) This is of course Nietzscheland, where the critical mind turns on itself.
It's conceivable that other animals have simpler versions of 'scorekeeping.' I can imagine a particular chimp being treated as an exaggerator or an understater.
The possibility of us not having sussed out the truth notwithstanding, we might as well treat ourselves to some irrationality every now and then.
[quote=Blaise Pascal]The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.[/quote]
I'm not all that familiar with Hegel or Brandom, but I cannot resist chipping in a little, and I will try to follow along and educate myself.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/
Reminded me of Umberto Eco : https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WPyz8ikWrsEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false
Lays eggs and has a beak = bird: suckles its young and has fur = mammal.
Aristotle starts with a classification system based on similarity and difference; a matter of aesthetics and a vague notion of what characteristics are more fundamental or superficial, and 2000 years later, Darwin proposes that this system is accounted for by literal common ancestry. And now we can measure that relatedness systematically such that our classification system has become the story of evolution.
Quoting igjugarjuk
They can lie!
This is surely the beginning of language and the beginning of morality? Communicative social representation gives rise to the possibility of deliberate misrepresentation in order to manipulate, but that possibility cannot become the norm, because the presentational meaning would be lost. When everyone lies, language simply doesn't work any more and becomes mere noise. Thus one can choose to deceive, but one cannot chose deception to be the norm, it has to be honesty.
Our task has always been, is, always will be to make the true (verum/satyam) synonymous with the good (bonum/shivam) and the good synonymous with the beautiful (pulchrum/sundaram). Presently, it ain't so - the 3 transcendentalia seem to be quite independent of each other and hence dukkha (dissatisfaction).
Thanks! Me too. And you are helping.
Quoting unenlightened
I need to read some Eco.
Quoting unenlightened
Indeed. Dawkins might add that it's not a stable strategy.
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-selfish-gene/chapter-12-nice-guys-finish-first
Quoting unenlightened
Well put! Our great strength as a species seems to be language, which implicitly means our honesty (and, to be fair, our ability to deceive enemies of the tribe.)
Oh I think we do.
Brandom likes to talk about taking true and making true, belief and action.
I imagine the slow swelling of a metacognitive vocabulary. The philosopher, among other things, makes the philosophical situation explicit. It's the aspiration to be rational that drives the explication of rationality. A relatively indeterminate goal can drive the further articulation of that same goal. Eventually a philosopher might make this making it explicit explicit.
What drives the aspirations to be rational? How and why do motivational-affective-valuative processes direct us toward rationality? Are you familiar with Brandonâs colleague at Pittsburgh, Joseph Rouse? He is attempting to ground meta-cognitive processes in biological niche construction.
:fire:
:lol: :up:
Good questions. My knee-jerk answer would be to mumble 'evolution,' since I tend to see us as continuous with the other animals, despite the great leap (perhaps we killed off the missing links out of shame.) Not familiar w/ Rouse, and couldn't find much info. Perhaps you could summarize/paraphrase a choice nugget?
Rouse takes up Sellarsâ distinction between the manifest
image and the scientific image , and shows
them to be inextricably dependent on each other. Iâm this effort , he has some problems
with the views of Brandom, Davidson and Sellars.
Thanks! That sounds good. I'm not terribly happy with the 'two images' view myself. In general, I don't philosophers have done (and maybe they can't do) a very good job in this domain.
I don't know how Rouse objects to Brandom, and I'm still exploring Brandom, but I feel like Brandom is mostly on dry ground. Folks can babble endlessly about mind and matter and mostly nobody minds, because it doesn't matter. There's very little semantic constraint. The words aren't put to use.
On the other hand, the norms governing such babble are more tractable, since they are primarily also employed in more worldly and arguably more worthwhile conversations. Indeed, these norms are involved in the making of these same norms explicit.
Hereâs more on Rouseâs disagreement with Brandom, McDowell and Haugeland:
âHaugeland, McDowell, and Brandom have further developed the âmanifestâ conception of ourselves as agents who perceive, underÂstand, and act within the world as responsive to conceptually articulated
norms. Their work thereby complicates as well as enriches the task of achieving a naturalistic fusion of the scientific and manifest images.
Each of them takes his account of conceptual capacities to block any stringent or (in McDowellâs 1994 phrase) âbaldâ naturalism. They enÂdorse a minimalist naturalism, arguing that nothing in their views is inconsistent with what we learn from the natural sciences. Conceptual
normativity nevertheless remains autonomous in their view, without need or expectation of further scientific explication. This opposition to a more thoroughgoing philosophical naturalism presumes familiar conceptions of scientific understanding, however, and also does not consider some new theoretical and empirical resources for a scientific account of our conceptual capacities. The other two developments guidÂing this book suggest that these presumptions are misguided.â
â In contrast to traditional efforts to establish the epistemic objectivity of articulated judgments, Davidson, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others rightly give priority to the objectivity of conceptual content and reasoning. They nevertheless misÂtakenly attempt to understand conceptual objectivity as accountability to objects understood as external to discursive practice. A more expanÂsive conception of discursive practice, as organismic interaction within our discursively articulated environment, shows how conceptual norÂmativity involves a temporally extended accountability to what is at issue and at stake in that ongoing interaction.â
It's hard to see a way around the priority of conceptual normativity. Any "new theoretical and empirical resources" will have to be justified in terms of such norms if they are to be scientific.
Any reductions of conceptual norms to something deeper and "more real" will depend on those same norms for their authority.
One criticism might be that the priority of conceptual norms is tautological and uninteresting. One retort is that maybe its only obvious useful for pointing out the absurdity in various extreme metaphysical theses that forget their dependence on an interpersonal framework of giving and asking for reasons.
Quoting igjugarjuk
I could be wrong , but it seems youâre not comfortable in making the leap from neo-Kantianism to a phenomenologically-informed enactivism. You want to hold onto the idea of a self-subsisting (even if only temporarily) content internal not just to conceptual norms but to empirical materiality. These irreducibly inhering contents constrain and influence experience normatively , both in terms of the (temporary) intransigence of materiality and of the manifest image, the space of reasons.
What Rouse and the enactivists are saying is that the world speaks back to , interrogates and modifies our space of reasons in every interaction with others and the world. This is what Wittgenstein means by the sense of words being person-specific and context-specific, that the meaning of a word is only in its actual use right NOW, in THIS context of interaction. There are no norms, no manifest image, no space of reasons that just sit there (even temporarily) protected from active, living, changing temporal context.
It's not that, though I can see why you'd suspect such a thing.
My real concern is simply avoiding the stereotypical vices and absurdities of that demon postmodernism. I was strongly influenced by Rorty and James and Nietzsche, and I was happy on the epistemological left-wing. I'm not the person who was afraid to go all the way but the person who did and had to admit that I had gone a little too far, that my beliefs were not as consistent as they could be with a move toward the center.
The basic, familiar distinction is between poetic expressions of preference or mere suggestions on the one hand and claims which are understood to bind others in the name of a universal reason on the other. What charms me about Brandom is that he's whittled it down the essence.
Whether or not a substrate makes sense is obviously secondary to the norms that govern its discussion. In other words, that substrate cannot ground those norms. I have no right to believe in it unless I can justify it. The space of reasons is the only 'Given' (to blend some keywords from Sellars.) Those norms are themselves the groundless grounds of Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dreydegger. Of course norms drift. And we can talk about Heidegger and Gadamer here, the inherited 'interpretedness' that forces us to deal with a past that leaps ahead. 'Universal' rationality is binding without being perfectly or truly universal. Its universality is 'to come,' a point at infinity. (One might think of Peirce here and the consensus to come.)
But who would ever dream there was ? Anymore than they'd dream a river was the same water every morning ? As soon as human norms are seen to govern (and not frozen timeless gods), we have a mutating source of authority, our own evolving best idea so far.
The 'not even temporarily' point is hard to make sense of. If you are only saying that it's all just fiction or mirage, I guess that's fine, but so is fiction and mirage. I don't think one can plausibly deny though that we are animals in the world together using sounds and marks to arrange our affairs.
What I mean by ânot even temporarilyâ is that only the actual interchange , in that moment, establishes the actual norm as what it is. The norm is a pragmatic action ,not a concept. This is no mirage, it is the only contact with the real. Every new moment is a new action and interaction and contests a previous instantiation of a norm. Dont let a norm be a thing that exists first and then changes, like a moving object. Let the act BE the norm.
I'm open to the limitation of any form/content framing, but I think you are pushing it too far. Unless all you are saying is that every move in the game has its little effect on the rules of the game.
If I say that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, then I'm committed to the claim that I saw an animal on the sidewalk last night. That's a fairly stable rule. If I say that the car was painted solid red, I can't go on to say that it was painted solid blue. (I can't in the sense that I ought not do so, unless in an exceptional situation where I'm talking philosophy perhaps or making a joke, etc.)
Quoting igjugarjuk
:clap: :cool:
Quoting Joshs
:fire:
Quoting igjugarjuk
Good stuff. :up:
But what of the âsenseâ of this rule? There is never just what is the case, a propositional truth structure. There is a way in which it is the case , a way in which it is relevant to me right now at this very moment, a commitment to a certain comportment toward the utterance. Where is the âhowâ of this âwhatâ? Are they being kept artificially separate from each other? Why did I say I saw the cat, what made it important to me to communicate this and what response am I looking for? These questions are not separate from the fact of the matter, they define the sense of this fact. I can repeat the statement that I saw a cat on the sidewalk last night, and each repetition may offer a whole new sense, a new emphasis , a new intention, a new kind of commitment, all bound up within the âsameâ claim.
But this only works in contexts, the empirical or the logical, where it is decidable just what being warranted or justified consists in, For me, philosophy is a matter of ideas and insights, not warranted or justifiable claims and propositions.
Quoting Agent Smith
One man's fallacy is another man's phallus.
:lol: This is a type of thinko I call evolution fallacy - reducing anything and everything to sex (Darwinian success story).
How are such contexts to be decided if not rationally ? This is as simple as offering reasons for claim that a context is or is not subject to rational norms. Admittedly people sometimes just stop talking and wage war.
I agree that something like a finishing touch or final spin is added at each moment, but it strikes me as unrealistic to ignore the weight of the past here. To have skill at speaking even basic English is the work of many days.
:up:
Perhaps norms of intelligibility, which can be identified perhaps with semantic constraints, are too readily mistaken to Sunday School platitudes. All that's intended by the phrase are the mostly unwritten rules that we disobey at the risk not only of being misunderstood by others but also of not knowing ourselves what we are talking about in the first place.
We've discussed this some already, of course. To me philosophy is not simply constituted by (potentially) justifiable claims. It makes such claims about such claims. It discusses justification in the first place. This is human self-knowledge. We make explicit the nature of our behavior-coordinating 'chirps and squeaks.' This surely involves creativity. Where do shiny new hypotheses come from ? The strong philosopher is like a non-fiction poet, not only seeing human reality in a new way but making a case for this being better than a merely exciting madness and instead a deeper and truer rationality. I agree with you that the point is to put more life in to life, to live more vividly. It's not given that self-knowledge is the best path toward this goal, but I think it's a path.
Quoting Pie
Like Heidegger, Derrida , Merleau-Ponty , Wittgenstein and others, I am a holist when it comes to how new context changes the past. Everything one has ever experienced , learned and committed to memory interacts with every other bit of oneâs past, and the totality of oneâs past is changed in drawing on any aspect of it. This change is extremely subtle so we ignore it and talk instead about the weight of the past, as if past were a present thing that holds us down. For Heidegger and Derrida , the past canât hold us down if the past only ever exists as already affected by the present that it crosses with. When we say someone is stuck in the past they are not literally frozen in an archive, they are continuing to move forward every moment into fresh experience, but so ploddingly that it appears they are only regurgitating a âwhat wasâ.
:up:
Quoting Joshs
No need, in my view, to read a complaint into what's presented as a neutral fact.
Quoting Joshs
I don't see why the past wouldn't still be constraining. Indeed, I see both thinkers as acutely aware of such constraints.
[quote= Derrida]
The trace is not only the disappearance of origin â within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace. We must then situate, as a simple moment of the discourse, the phenomenological reduction and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience. To the extent that the concept of experience in general â and of transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular â remains governed by the theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the reduction of the trace. The Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart) is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the movements of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental phenomenology belongs to metaphysics.
...
On the one band, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is difference. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation, motor or sensory. This difference is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order â a phonic or graphic text for example â or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing â in the colloquial sense â as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived ânotationâ would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise.
...
Without the difference between the sensory appearing [apparaissant] and its lived appearing [apparaĂźtre] (âmental imprintâ), the temporalising synthesis, which permits differences to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That the âimprintâ is irreducible means also that speech is originarily passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane metaphors would only betray. This passivity is also the relationship to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorised us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm
https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf
What turn out to be prejudices in retrospect, were the very 'mechanisms' that made their transformation into prejudices possible in the first place. We can only judge now by the (unstable) standards we 'are.' We agree, I think, that each such judgment changes who we are.
:up:
if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
dont mistake changing
headlines for changes
if you want freedom
dont mistake circles
for revolutions
think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why
if you want a revolution
learn to grow in spirals
always being able to return
to your childhood
and kick out the bottom
...
https://allpoetry.com/from-Tombstone-as-a-Lonely-Charm-(Part-3)
The past is only constraining to the extent that new experience is always already familiar, recognizable, intelligible to us at some level. Pure novelty is non-existence But it is familiar not because a piece of the past has simply been carried over as a sedimented , recycled bit, glomming itself onto new events. There can be no pure duplication or repetition of a past as identical to itself.
The far-out version is something like this:
[quote=Kojeve]
The Real itself is what organises itself and makes itself concrete so as to become a determinate âspecies,â capable of being revealed by a general notion"; the Real itself reveals itself through articulate knowledge and thereby becomes a known object that has the knowing subject as its necessary complement, so that "empirical existenceâ is divided into beings that speak and beings that are spoken of. For real Being existing as Nature is what produces Man who reveals that Nature (and himself) by speaking of it. Real Being thus transforms itself into âtruthâ or into reality revealed by speech, and becomes a âhigherâ and âhigherâ truth as its discursive revelation becomes ever more adequate and complete.
It is by following this âdialectical movementâ of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself â i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech â of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their âdialectical movement,â the Speech that reveals them.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm
If we criticize the foundations of our conceptual system, we nevertheless employ this very system to do so.
https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf
Sure. But who ever claimed otherwise ?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/kojeve-s.htm
Just some remarks. Largely unstructured. Allegedly Brandom seeks
Which is a lot of qualifiers for a main goal of a piece.
( 1 ) Transcendental. There's statement in the essay which uses it:
(though this is the author rather than Brandom)
A transcendental claim then seems to be claim about what must (logically? a-priori?) be true in order for the state of ourselves, our environs etc to be intelligible and capable of having the properties that they do. It's a structural claim, rather than a functional one.
( 2 ) conditions of possibility. That seems to be the way of fleshing out the relationship of (something... us?) the structural underpinnings of 'determinately contentful conceptual norms' to the determinately contentful conceptual norms themselves. Don't know how the conditions of possibility condition (as a verb) the determinately contentful conceptual norms either - is it (allegedly) an empirical fact that they do or an a-priori one?
( 3 ) determinately contentful. That has an exegesis in paper.
Determinately contentful conceptual norms are those conceptual norms which concern empirical rather than logical concepts. Like if I eat a spoiled egg I'll feel crap. What seems to make the norm determinately rather than conceptually contentful is the relationship of events/states of affairs to each other ('material inference') rather than 'logical ones'. I imagine that relations of material inference can only be learned with reference to, or in derivation from, stuff which has been seen and done.
I believe there's an ambiguity in the way I've presented the relationships of material inference referenced in the paper, because it's unclear over whether they are natural successions of events/dynamical flows of environments ('mind independent') or whether they are bodily/mental constructions instantiated in people that represent natural successions of events ("mind dependent"). I also believe that the ambiguity comes from holding the distinction between mind dependent and mind independent on the crucible of mental states - construed as patterns of the psyche. On that there's a quote in the article about where Brandom begins his case for his goal.
And in that regard reading those relationships of conceptual inference, whether material or nonmaterial, as psychological events will probably be a misreading.
Instead of mind(internal) and world(external), Brandom seems to use another coordinate system for the space of reasons, the subjective and the objective. Which he has a special sense for.
Subjective is what things are 'for us' and objective is what things are 'in themselves' - with the clarifying comment that things as they are in themselves are 'the form of empirical reality'. Presumably this is the constellation of material inferences+events which plays a representational role in how we do stuff. I think this is evinced by:
Another interesting highlight is the Brandom quote that the content of subjective and objective concepts form 'two poles of the intentional nexus' . Will assume this means oppositional poles, like north and south, rather than points of attraction/guidance. I suppose it could also be a 'yes and', since both poles are guiding norms!
My brain has now stopped working. I am now crowdsourcing exegesis on how objective norms are binding.
"Because he didn't want to get wet, he put up his umbrella." We can think of the very meaning of 'wet' and 'umbrella' as existing 'within' our allowing such inferences. We would not say (could not understand) "He wanted to keep his feet dry, so he took off his boots in the snow." To me this is like Saussure's system of differences without positive entities, except that the nexus is explicitly inferential.
As far as I can tell so far, we should look for concepts in the structure of both our verbal and non-verbal 'doings.' We 'perform' concepts, or rather concepts are like a second-nature structure in our doings, some of which can be made explicit and modified.
This quote from A Spirit of Trust might add something.
[quote=Brandom]
Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme.
...
The disparity of the senses (appearances, phenomena, ways things are for consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the unity of referents (reality, noumena, ways things are in themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of the same coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other.
[/quote]
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Heroism%20and%20Magnanimity%20PMFSCA%2018-9-21%20j.docx
In logical contexts what is warranted is what is valid, In empirical contexts what is most directly warranted is what is observable. Then there is the less determinable criteria of what makes sense in terms of our causal understandings of how things work. What would be the criteria for warrantability in metaphysics or aesthetics?
Quoting Pie
Right, but as above, what can we say, and how do we justify what we say, about the justifiability of claims that lie outside the logical or empirical contexts?
So, you mention self-knowledge; how do I know that I am knowing myself, that is how do I tell that the ideas I have formed about myself are justifiable? Do I appeal to agreement from others? Do I assume that I know myself better than others do? How could I find out whether I know myself better than others do?
It's a well worn reversal, but I think it is salient: "the unlived life is not worth examining"; how do I go about justifying thinking that is true or not, or even merely salient, or not? Does it not convince (or not) on the basis that it somehow "feels right" (or not)?
In philosophy, say I weave my understandings and insights into a coherent, magisterial system of ideas; a magnificent intellectual feat involving both creative originality and a lot of hard work; could any of that justify thinking that my system is therefore true? Is justification in philosophy merely rhetorical? What could be the alternative? Consensus, perhaps? That wouldn't seem likely!
A normative reason is a reason to do something.
We have faculties of reason. A faculty of reason gives its possessor the impression that there are reasons to do things. That's why it is called a faculty of reason.
If the faculty is a good one, then it will be reliably tracking the actual reasons that there are.
Being rational is a about how responsive one is to the rational impressions one's faculty of reason generates in oneself.
So a 'perfectly' rational person is someone who always does what they get the impression they have reason to do, and they do it because they get the impression they have reason to do it.
And an ideally perfectly rational person would be someone whose faculty of reason reliably tracks the reasons that there actually are, such that they always do what they in fact have reason to do.
:up:
We do have to be careful, though, because observation is theory-laden.
Quoting Janus
At some level of complexity, I think our historicity becomes central. Whatever we propose forces a reevaluation of the past (generalized retrodiction). We need to explain our proposed revised history as a story of progress and a making explicit of a reality that was already there. We put the hypothesized object or conceptual shift 'back in time' and relive our pasts with a new X-ray vision. I imagine a detective getting hunch and playing it out, looking for confirmation or contradiction. This is also like carefully fitting a candidate belief into a network of previous investments at minimum cost perhaps.
[quote = Brandom]
Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme.
[/quote]
I was thinking earlier about violence, silence, reasons. Violence and silence are intended to represented two states of communication breakdown. While people are still talking, I expect that they will sometimes talk exactly about what they do and do not have to justify. Until patience is exhausted or consensus is reached, they're will be disputed territory.
Quoting Janus
It might be like figuring out if you are driving on the correct side of the road. Norms are enforced more or less gently. A young man might think he's a great violinist and continue to fail to impress those who recognize such talent professionally. A humble young woman might think she's only mediocre at math and continually amaze her teachers with her genius. Probably both will move toward correction. No man is an island. We've evolved to work together, respond to censure and praise.
Let me jump in. Brandom is updating Hegel who himself was extending/fixing Kant.
Humans (largely) no longer experience the norms governing them to be either imposed by God or fixed like the laws of nature. We are self-consciously our own masters. We have grown up as a species, and we have to figure out all by ourselves what's a good bedtime and whether it's OK to eat 5 eggs every day.
Brandom is concerned with rational norms. He presents a scorekeeping notion of rationality. We all keep each other honest by tracking each other's claims. One of the big rules is that we don't contradict ourselves. Since our original beliefs make us responsible also for their implications (and so many other beliefs that have not even occurred to us yet), we are constantly finding our system of beliefs in need of repair. We have to drop this one or that one.
A big thing to note here is that I can believe something that contradicts your beliefs as long as it doesn't contradict my own. Individuals matter. We are not some big blob. I can call you out for a belief that I myself endorse...because for you it involves contradiction, while it doesn't for me.
Another big issue here is mutual recognition. Words don't mean whatever 'I' want them to mean. Their use by the tribe as a whole is authoritative. But I might be able to make a case for a new use so that my use even becomes standard. The tribal norms have no definite location or representative. We feel our way in to them and obey and enforce (and ever so slightly modify) them simultaneously.
I agree with you about responsiveness or sensitivity. I'm not sure 'impressions' isn't misleading.
For instance, it seems to me - that is, I get the impression that - I have reason to reject a view that contains a contradiction. What is that an impression of?
I can give a very clear answer: it is to have the impression I am directed to reject a view that contains a contradiction.
I would just use the word 'norm.' One ought to avoid contradicting oneself. That's a norm governing reason itself. This norm is so basic that it's maybe even tied up with the very concept of a self. A self-contradicting person is like two or more people trying to share a single body.
Note that norms are often expressed with 'one,' as in 'one ought to tip at least 20%.' One is one around here. One is unified and coherent and not self-contradicting.
You have used the word ought. But there are normative oughts and bon normative oughts. (The rain ought to arrive soon, for example, is not a normative use of the word ought)
So what makes a normative ought a normative ought?
Directive is a synonym, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(philosophy)
Note that I can explain my actions by saying that I'm just following the rules. I explain paying taxes gladly perhaps in terms of my perceived responsibility to the less fortunate or simply to pay my fair share for public goods like roads.
But who is the director? Not me, yes?
But whose directives could be the truth conditions of such beliefs? Not my own, surely?
The tribe as a whole is the director, if you must embrace a noun to match the verb. Be wary, however, of being dragged by the surface of language into grand metaphysical-theological hypotheses. Reason is deeply and gloriously entangled with human autonomy. There's a special perversity in trying to wring some non-human Divinity from the fragile triumph of the Enlightenment. We are that 'divinity' (or its replacement, just as we were its model in the first place), and rational norms are precisely those which are not exterior to us. I am free to the degree that I myself endorse the constraints that bind me, because I understand the reasons for them. We impose laws on ourselves, both for practical reasons and to manifest the best in us. Humanism is already the 'religion' of Reason, for 'Reason' is just our Geist or spirit or authority. To take reason as an authority is just to take ourselves as authorities in a particular way, namely 'without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another. ' What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The law for me is the law for you.
[quote=Kant]
Enlightenment is the human beingâs emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use oneâs own understanding [= reason] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any otherâGW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)
It is requisite to reasonâs lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another. (5:21)
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#ReaSelKno
And what if my tribe dies save me. Are you saying that now that no tribe exists I no longer have any reason to do anything or believe anything?
And can't an entire tribe of us, no matter its size, be mistaken about what it thinks it has reason to do?
It is Reason who issues the directives. That's why we call them directives of reason.
And Reason is not the name of a tribe, but a person.
They have not one mouth but many. Who decides what the words you used to ask that question mean ? Do you believe there is a single authority ? 'Language is received like the law.' You just assilimiated the norms for using English as a child. You never bothered to ask who made them up. It'd be silly to name just one person of course. Either of us might launch a meme if we get lucky.
Now we can discuss another example: democracy. Some tribes elect legislators to create the law, judges to interpret the law, and still others to enforce the law.
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Sovereign+nation
Oh you can still speak English and feel guilty on that island all by yourself. Once the top is set spinning, you can take away that hand that set it going. There were a guy who lived as a hermit for 30 years, stealing food from vacation cabins, basically living like a rat. He just walked off the 'set' one day, a young man...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/north-pond-hermit-maine-knight-stranger-woods-finkel
Yes, we can be wrong. Speaking of which, you seem to be lost in the woods yourself.
Brandom and you are the lost ones.
I have taken you by the hand and shown you what a reason is. It is a directive. And directives have a director. And that director is Reason. And Reason is a person, because directors are persons. And now you know what Reason is.
That's not lost. Show me where I have taken a wrong turning.
Why not choose a standard religion like most people ? It'd be less lonely. I see that you think you have a case or an argument, but you don't. It's textbook bewitchment by language. When they say it's raining, what is it exactly that rains ? Does the royal We trip you up too ?
Normative reasons are directives. You know that now. Wikipedia confirmed it for you.
Directives need a director.
And in the case of normative reasons, its not us, but Reason. That's why they're called 'reasons'. They're directives from Reason.
And so Reason is a director. And only a person can be one of those. So Reason is a person.
Where is the misstep? Or have I been altogether too clear?
You are either serious, which is concerning, or majestically committed to the bit.
[quote= Joys]
Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welchâs female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupidâs bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either.
...
Her every effort would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even ifâwhat then? Would it make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girlâs honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess.
...
And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasnât ashamed and he wasnât either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldnât resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girlâs love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap13
The space of reasons. How much space do they need? 10ft sq? What about their colour? I like beige ones.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm#chap13
Frey Bentos. Have you ever had a frey bentos pie? They have a very poor quality filling.
In the Timaeus Plato introduces a different notion of space, the Chora, with its own likely story. It is the work of the imagination, philosophical poesis. Something often disparaged by reason, but to the detriment of philosophy. It fails to recognize its own imaginative assumptions regarding what reason can do.
For a more detailed discussion of the Chora: Shaken to the Chora.
From that account:
If everything is theory-laden, then our judgements are fucked because we would find ourselves in an infinite regress of theory-ladenness. I accept that when it comes to observations and the judgements that issue therefrom, there is a terminus in experience as it is given, which means that even children understand very early (they only need to understand the requisite language) how to discern truth and falsity in statements concerning simple observations.
Quoting Pie
With "self-knowledge" I was thinking more along the lines of understanding one's motives, not of assessing one's skills in disciplines where a simple reality check could disabuse one of any deluded notions of one's abilities. The kind of thing I am thinking of in that context would be "why do I feel compelled to inflate my assessment of my abilities"?
Do you have good reasons to think this is not the case?
Justification seems easy enough when it comes to "modest empirical matters", which make up a good percentage of our practical concerns. The same goes for truth in this connection; it is only when it comes to metaphysics and aesthetics where there is any rationale for much disagreement. "Each to their own" should take care of that; if only good will predominated. But good will does not predominate, and that's down to human recalcitrance in my view.
So, basically what I'm saying is that metaphysical issues: idealism vs physicalism. immaterialism vs materialism, realism vs ant-realism and so on are not of much significance, or at least ought not to be, when it comes to the critical issues facing us. On the contrary social harmony in a complex pluralistic society requires tolerance of difference and diversity.