A Spirit of Trust Reading Group

Concepts and metaconcepts: substituting a pragmatic descent for a metaphysical ascent (10/03)

The reading I am engaging in is a reading that takes sides with Brandom. So I am not engaging in a reading that consists in noticing every notion that Brandom gets wrong against the background of Hegel’s own commitment. Of course, the goal is to assess Brandom’s reading against the background of Hegel’s own commitment, that is assess where Brandom is straying from the letter of the text, where he gets things right, where he adds sth, where he illuminates some connection between topics that have gone unnoticed so far in the literature, and so on. However, the aim is not to blame Brandom for being mistaken about Hegel’s philosophy, as if we were defending Hegel’s orthodoxy.

In this sense, I would characterize Brandom’s reading of Hegel as an ampliative reading: that is a reading that attempts to add commitments to Hegel’s text and to reap the benefits of it. Add commitments meaning also modernizing the text, using anachronistic categories to figure out what Hegel is really talking about.

Two Kantian premises that deserve to be introduced:

• The distinction between concepts and metaconcepts or categories (cause, unity, possibility, necessity, etc)
• Kant’s deontological criterion for sapience (in opposition with sentience) – rules and norms.

To do justice to Brandom’s text, I think we have to take fully into account what he calls his strategy to read the text, namely the semantic descent. In a nutshell, what sets Brandom’s reading apart, is precisely this semantic descent which clashes with the more traditional way of reading Hegel, namely a metaphysical ascent.

I – A deflationist reading. Inverting Hegel’s gesture from pragmatic metaconcepts to concepts

• Overcoming Kant’s theory of faculty – dualism between the receptivity of sensibility and spontaneity of understanding.
  • Shortcoming: psychological conception of the conceptual, underdetermination of categories.
• Hegel’s Phenomenology is an ascent from concepts to metaconcepts, thereby working out how we can get from sentience to sapience. This reading is a metaphysical reading of Hegel. This reading culminates in the Idea, as the autonomous, spontaneous, self-determining pure thinking that is Logic itself. This reading rests on a movement of semantic ascent that starts in consciousness and goes up to self-consciousness, then again overcomes self-consciousness to get to reason, then spirit, then religion, and finally absolute knowing.

What is the semantic descent?

1. Make explicit the use and content of ordinary empirical descriptive and practical concepts
2. Improve the expressive power of the metaconcepts

Against a finite set of metaconcepts rationally reconstructed along the succession of shapes of consciousness, there is no end to the task of producing expressive tools.

• There is no finite set of metaconcepts with which we could adjudicate any empirical, ground-level concepts. We can always better determine what we are doing when we engage in rational activities.
• The argument is that there is no one logic anymore. We can always come up with new forms of logic to make sense of our rational activities (cf modal logic in the 1950s – paraconsistent logic – quantum physics requires new logic to make sense of things happening.

From completeness and comprehensiveness to expressiveness: how we can make our ground-level concepts more explicit.

II – The intrinsic connection between use and meaning

Why does Brandom adopt such a strategy? Because he has a sort of criterion of what rationality is because he has a criterion of what specifically sapient practices are.

• Rational practices are practices that rest upon the two features of semantic descent:
• What are rational practices?
  • Rational practices are practices by which we can not only do something (imperatives – « shut the door ») but just as well make explicit what we do (« I shut the door because I don’t want anybody else to listen »)
  • Rational practices are practices by which we can always better determine what we mean by codifying how we use words.

What are specifically rational practices? they are practices that are characterized by an intrinsic connection between use and meaning so that we can understand meaning in terms of use.

Now what Brandom delivers is a specifically pragmatic account of contentfulness: meaning is understood in terms of use. How do we get from sentience to sapience? What confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices subjects engage in.

Hegel: conceptual content. Conceptual content as an operator in a non-psychological conception of conceptual content. The conceptual content is not sth that we have in our minds. Is conceptually contentful anything that stands in relation to what he calls determinate negation or mediation to other such things.

• Meaning is to be understood in terms of use
• For a word to mean what it does, it has to be used correctly
• Use is a normative concept

Cf wood – iron: Now it does not mean that there were no objective facts before there were people to articulate them.

EXPRESSIVE DIMENSION: our rational practices make the world more expressive. Our rational practices make the world more determinate by increasing the number of relations of negation and mediation between things. And in turn, the world bears a feedback effect on our practices via how we engage with it in the first place.

• Against any kind of dualism between the world and our words, between the world and minds, There exist two different forms that one identical conceptual content can take. Hylomorphic structure of form and content. This is the expressive account of the relations between subjective thoughts and objective states of affairs. What are those two forms:
  • Objective states of affairs: the distinction between impossible and necessary (triangle and circular X red and colored)
  • Subjective acts of thinking and judging: the distinction between what is impermissible and what is permissible (it is not impossible to endorse incompatible claims)

III – From social normativity to recollective history

Use is a normative concept: talking about how we use linguistic expressions, is talking about how we can correctly use those expressions. Being rational beings is all about bearing ourselves according to norms.

• Applying a concept is making oneself responsible for its correctness of it. By making oneself responsible for its correctness, I petition for a certain acknowledgment of my application as contentful.
• Our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes.

1. Use is a normative concept in the sense that talking about use is always talking about correct use.
2. The notion of objectivity of use is not primitive, the notion of an objective notion of use is to emerge from our rational practices.
3. Social account of normativity in terms of recognition
4. Historical account of recollective rationality

Rational practices are normative, social, and historical.

• They are articulated by assessments of their correctness.
• They are social in the sense of petitioning a social entitlement for the correctness of my claims.
• They are historical in the sense of being articulated as retrospective and prospective.

Thinking representation through the experience of error (24/03)

What is it for sth to show up as an appearance of something? How can our semantic theory not already doom us to epistemological skepticism, that is, to the gulf excavated between representings that are in conceptual shape and representeds that are not. 

How can we understand the representational content in pragmatic terms? In other words, how can we understand the representational content in terms of the activity a subject must engage in so as thereby to count as treating something as a normative standards for assessments of the correctness of judgements? 

• Main goal: conceiving of the distinction between appearance and reality in terms of what consciousness does—and not in terms of some sort of intrinsic properties or format that all our thoughts would possess. Now this goal is actually threefold:
  • Pragmatic rendering of what representings are: for sth to be a representing is to count as a judging having contents exhibiting the unity characteristic of the propositional. 
  • Pragmatic rendering of what representeds are: for sth to be a represented is to provide a normative standard of correctness to our representing of it. 
  • Pragmatic rendering of the representational relation: for such a thing as a representational relation to stand in between represented and representing is to be able to engage in the experience of error (acknowledgment – rectification). 

1. Pragmatic rendering of the distinction between appearance and reality 
2. Experience as the critical process of integration of incompatible commitments
   • Experience of error as the operator that secures epistemological adequacy on semantic accounts of intentional contentfulness and aboutness. 
3. What does bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism mean?
   • A semantic theory that does not already doom us to epistemological skepticism: While for Kant, only mind-related appearances are intelligible, for Hegel, the world in itself is intelligible or in conceptual shape. Deontic normative vocabulary is a pragmatic metavocabulary for alethic modal vocabulary. 
   • Error: practically treating one’s commitments as standing in these normative relations to  one another is implicitly understanding them as commitments concerning what is objectively impossible and necessary, that is appearances of a reality articulated by such alethic modal relations. 
   • What is the experience of error? It is the experience of treating one’s commitments as appearances (representings) of some (represented) reality.