[00:00:00] JAY WALLACE:
Good afternoon. I’m Jay Wallace, professor of philosophy and chair of the Howison Lectures Committee at UC Berkeley. I’m very pleased, on behalf of both the Howison Committee and the Graduate Council, to welcome you to this year’s Howison Lecture in Philosophy.
Before I begin my introduction of today– today’s Howison lecturer, I’d like to say a few words about the occasion that brings him here today. The Howison Lectures were established by friends of George Holmes Howison in honor of his many contributions to the University of California. Howison was born in 1834.
Following college in Marietta, Ohio shortly after the Civil War he moved to St. Louis and became a member of that city’s philosophical society, where he had an opportunity to meet with influential thinkers of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. In 1884, after a six-year professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Howison accepted an offer to join the University of California as founding member of the Department of Philosophy. This included an appointment as Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, which was the university’s first endowed chair.
With a strong, strong, outgoing personality, Howison made philosophy a factor not only in the university but in the surrounding community as well. He took great interest in his students and was influentially involved in their lives. He taught at the university until 1909, and died six years later at the age of 81.
Howison left all his property to the university, creating several endowments that have supported many important academic endeavors on our campus. In 1919, friends and former students of Professor Howison established the Howison Lectures in Philosophy at the University of California in his honor. Those of you who have been at Berkeley for some time will know what a remarkable legacy and memorial this lecture series has become.
The list of past Howison lecturers that’s printed in your program includes many of the most important and influential thinkers of the past century, and the large audience that these lectures routinely attract, even on a beautiful Northern California day, is a testimony to the continuing vitality at our university of the subject that Howison helped to introduce here.
[00:02:35] HOST:
We are greatly indebted to Professor Howison, to those who established this lectureship in his honor, and to the many other friends whose generosity has done so much to make Berkeley a leading center for research and teaching in philosophy. And I will take this opportunity to add, as I do every year, that our capacity for gratitude has not yet been exhausted, in case some of you might wish to emulate Professor Howison and his friends and former students in supporting the study of philosophy on our campus. Our Howison lecturer for this year is Professor Bob Brandom, who has established a towering reputation as one of the most significant and wide-ranging philosophers of the present day.
Professor Brandom was an undergraduate at Yale University, where he studied philosophy, receiving the BA degree in 1977 with exceptional distinction in the major, an honor that is bestowed only occasionally, according to Yale College, to Yale students whose work is, quote, “Extraordinary even when compared to the work of other students who receive distinction.” He continued his philosophical studies at Princeton University, where he held a Whiting Fellowship from 1974 to 1976, and a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship in 1975 to ’76. He received a PhD from Princeton in 1977, with a dissertation supervised by Richard Rorty on practice and object.
Professor Brandom joined the distinguished philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1976, and expressing a kind of institutional loyalty that is rare in this era of the academic free agent, he has remained a member of the Pittsburgh department ever since. His many contributions to the excellent department that has been his academic home, including includes service as its chair from 1993 to 1997. He was Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at Pittsburgh from 1998 to 2007, and he now holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy.
Professor Brandom is a searching and systematic thinker who has made prolific and extremely influential contributions to contemporary discussions on a wide range of important issues. The animating spirit of his work is to understand language and thought inferentially, in terms of what Wilfrid Sellars called The Game of Giving and Asking for Reasons. To be sapient on this approach is essentially to be a participant in a certain kind of social practice, one whose participants keep score on each other’s commitments and entitlements.
This vision, which draws on sources as diverse as Frege, Hegel, and the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, finds impressive expression in Professor Brandom’s first and most influential book, Making It Explicit, which was published by Harvest– Harvard University Press in 1994, and which, despite its massive dimensions, was immediately recognized as one of the works of philosophy that you had to read if you were a serious student of the subject. The influence of this book was also truly international, as I can personally attest from my time as a professor and frequent visitor in Germany, where Professor Brandom is widely regarded as the most significant American philosopher of his generation, if not the most significant philosopher überhaupt as they would say over there. Making it explicit is a truly magisterial accomplishment, the product of many years of deep and systematic reflection.
The author of a work such as this could have been forgiven for resting on his laurels. In the years since the appearance of his first major work, however Professor Brandom has continued to philosophize at a remarkable pace, producing several new volumes in recent years, including Articulating Reasons from 2000, Between Saying and Doing from 2008, and Reason and Philosophy from 2009. The systematic contributions contained in these and other works by Professor Brandom are nourished by his intensive engagement with figures from the history of philosophy, and the fruits of this engagement can be sampled in two further volumes that he’s recently published, Tales of the Mighty Dead from 2002 and Perspectives on Pragmatism from 2011.
He’s been at work for many years on a major study of themes from the philosophy of Hegel, which the philosophical world is looking forward to with eager anticipation. Professor Brandom’s accomplishments have been extensively and rightly acknowledged in the larger world of the academy. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, and he’s held fellowships at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at All Souls College in Oxford.
[00:07:28] JAY WALLACE:
He gave the prestigious John Locke Lectures in the University of Oxford in 2006, and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University in 2007. He maintains a punishing travel schedule, and his work has been featured at multi-day conferences and workshops in many different countries around the world, including, this is just a small sample of them, Latvia, Spain, Taiwan, Argentina, Germany, and the Czech Republic. He was awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award, in the Humanities Award from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 2004.
In addition to today’s lecture, Professor Brandom will be speaking tomorrow in the Philosophy Department on Modal Expressivism and Modal Realism together again. That will be at 4:10 PM tomorrow in the Howison Library in Moses Hall. His topic today is Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity.
So please join me now in welcoming Professor Brandom to Berkeley as this year’s Howison lecturer.
(audience applauding)
[00:08:44] PROFESSOR BRANDOM:
Well, thank you, Jay. It’s a pleasure to be back at Berkeley where I have so many friends and it’s an honor to be doing so under the aegis of the Howison lecture. Hegel said, “To him who looks on the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.”
More than half a century later, Nietzsche said, “When you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” These paired Spiegelirone passages express in gnomic aphorisms sentiments that mark the endpoint of a critical arc of 19th-century philosophical thought. Hegel’s sunny homily epitomizes the optimism of his version of the Enlightenment rationalism that flourished in the previous century.
Nietzsche’s darker remark foreshadows the pessimism of a distinctive kind of nihilism rooted in reductive naturalism, which the events of the following century would make both familiar and fitting. Each of these successive 19th century currents of thought, one looking back to what had already been understood and one pointing ahead to what had yet to be dealt with, comes with a rationalizing narrative of progress, the first of disenchantment by reason, the second of disillusionment with reason. It was always essential to the self-understanding of Enlightenment that it see itself as the advent of something both genuinely new and essentially progressive.
It defined itself by the contrast between the light of reason that it sought, developed, and celebrated and the darkness from which enlightenment arose and by which it was still surrounded and would always be threatened. The shadows of superstition, prejudice, and dogmatism, cast by arbitrary despotic power sedimented in the merely traditional institutions with which those habits of thought connived and in which they thrived. The fundamental conceptual innovation of the time was not the focus on reason by itself.
Philosophy, whose avatar is Socrates, had perennially championed reason. Nor is it the mere association of reason with freedom. “Know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” the Christian tradition and the person of John had already taught.
What is wholly new in the Enlightenment philosophy, its characteristic insight, is its identification of that transformative emancipatory power with reason in its critical function. The only authority it admits as legitimate and legitimating is the authority of the better reason, that peculiar normative force compelling only to the rational that had so fascinated and puzzled the Greeks. And the Enlightenment acknowledges no higher judge competent to assess the merits of competing reasons than the natural light which the capacities of each individual reasoning subject equip it.
That’s why Kant says, “Sapere aude, dare to understand. This is the motto of Enlightenment.” In his essay identifying Enlightenment as man’s relief from his self-imposed tutelage.
The advent of an age in which individuals accept no authority transcending their own capacity critically to assess reasons is, for Kant, speaking here for the whole Enlightenment, nothing less than humanity’s coming to maturity. This emancipation is to be effected by the wholesale replacement of the traditional model of authority, which understands it exclusively in terms of the obedience owed by a subordinate to a superior, by a model that understands authority exclusively in terms of the force of impersonal reasons, accessible by all. Reasons, for Kant, can accordingly be identified as freedom in the form of autonomy.
The authority of the superior in power is abolished. Authority resides only in one’s own acknowledgment of reasons. All of, all the great philosophers in the period from Descartes to Kant were theorists of Enlightenment.
Hegel, though, is the first to take the advent of modernity, for him, simply the single most important thing that’s ever happened in human history, as his explicit topic. And further, he’s the first to appreciate it not just as an intellectual phenomenon, namely Enlightenment. He was the first to conceptualize the economic, political, and social transformations as all of a piece with the intellectual ones.
For Hegel, reason shows itself as having the form of a vast meta-narrative, rationally reconstructing the emergence of modernity in all of its multifarious aspects. That narrative is progressive and triumphalist. It’s the emergence of reason as sovereign, both in individuals’ subjective self-consciousnesses and in the social institutions that they shape and that shape them.
It’s also, and essentially, as Hegel says, the history of the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Here, two strands of the Enlightenment come together; faith in the sovereignty of reason, and the narrative of the emerging self-conscious realization of that sovereignty, which is the emancipatory power of reason. Freedom takes concrete form only in the practical, including the institutional appreciation of the rational nature of genuine authority, the idea that reasons alone are normatively authoritative.
This is reason’s disenchantment of the subordination model of authority in favor of the model of autonomy as consisting and acting for reasons. This intoxicating identification of freedom and the authority of critical reason is the beating heart of German Idealism. In it, ideas that in retrospect could be seen to have been all along implicit in Enlightenment rationalism come to fully explicit theoretical self-consciousness.
And it’s in just such a context, Hegel thinks, that counter-currents of thought become visible, as also having been all along implicit in that same tradition. In this case, a crucial trajectory of 19th century thought expresses the revenge of Enlightenment naturalism on Enlightenment rationalism. The form that revenge takes is genealogy.
Genealogies directly challenge the very idea of the normative force of the better reason which lies at the core of the Enlightenment rationalists’ successor to the traditional subordination model of authority. The principal practitioners of the genre I’m calling genealogy were the great unmaskers of the 19th century, above all, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and closer to our own time, we might add Foucault. What they unmasked were the pretensions of reason.
Kant had rigorously enforced the distinction between reasons and causes, criticizing Locke for producing what he called, “A mere physiology of understanding rather than a proper epistemology,” by running together issues of justification and causation. “We must separate,” he insisted, “the quid juris, the question of right, from the quid facti, the question of fact. The first is a matter of the evidence for our beliefs, the second of their matter-of-factual causal origins.”
When the great genealogists dug down in the areas of discourse they addressed, they found causes underlying the reasons. Their enterprise can be rendered in relatively moderate terms. What they diagnosed were systematic distortions in the structure of communication, as Habermas puts it.
For Marx, the distorting causes were economic classes. For Nietzsche, they were expressions of the will to power. For Freud, they were such things as lingering echoes of the child’s role in the family romance.
On the moderate understanding of genealogy, those causal factors shape the reasoning of those subject to them, operating behind their backs, so that their own thoughts and actions cannot be transparent to them. This way of thinking about things at least leaves open the possibility of emancipatory critical discourses, which would make explicit those distorting causal factors, so breaking the hold they have on reasoners and moving them towards the ideal of rational self-transparency. But I’m going to be concerned here with a more radical challenge genealogy can be seen to make to the Enlightenment’s idea of reason.
For one can take it that what the genealogists dug down to is not just causes distorting our reasons, but causes masquerading as reasons. When what we fondly believe to be reasons are unmasked, all that remains is blind causal processes. These processes have taken on the guise of reasons, but in fact yield nothing more than rationalizations.
Genealogy, in its most radical form, seeks to dispel the illusion of reason. Now, as I shall use the term, genealogical explanations concern the relati– genealogical explanations concern the relations between the act or state of believing, on the one hand, and the content that’s believed, on the other. A genealogy explains the advent of a belief, in the sense of a believing, an attitude, in terms of contingencies of its etiology, appealing exclusively to facts that are not evidence, that do not provide reasons or justifications for the truth of what’s believed.
In this sense, when it occurs to the young person that he’s a Baptist because his parents and everyone they know are Baptists, and that had he been born in a different community, he would, with equal conviction, have held Muslim or Buddhist beliefs, that’s a genealogical realization. And as is evident already in this mundane example, the availability of a genealogical explanation for a constellation of beliefs can have the effect of undercutting its credentials as something to which one is rationally entitled. The genealogy asserts counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals linking the possession of certain beliefs, attitudes of believing, to contingent events whose occurrence does not provide evidence for the truth of what’s believed.
If the believer had not had a bourgeois upbringing, were not driven by ressentiment, or had not had that childhood trauma, she would not have had the beliefs about the justice of labor markets, Christian ethics, or conspiracy theories that she does. None of those events upon which the genealogist asserts the holding of the beliefs in question are counterfactually dependent, however, provide evidence for what’s believed. For the particular vocabularies they address, all of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud offer natural histories of the advent of beliefs, believings, couched in those vocabularies, ones to which the rational credentials of the beliefs, what’s believed, are simply irrelevant.
Natural causal processes of belief formation are put in place of rational ones. To him who looks on the world reductively, the world looks reductively back. This movement of thought, too, comes with its native meta-narrative of progress and understanding.
The earlier replacement of theological necessity with rational necessity as the fundamental explanatory category is disenchantment of the world by reason. The replacement of rational necessity with natural necessity is disillusionment with reason. From the genealogical point of view, the Enlightenment apotheosis of reason just substituted one ultimately supernatural delusion for another.
The Enlightenment was right to be impressed by the rise of the new science, to see it as requiring a thoroughgoing transformation of our understanding of our relations to our world. But from the genealogical point of view, it was insufficiently radical. It naturalized and so disenchanted the world, but it didn’t disenchant us.
The Enlightenment conception of individual knowers and agents who brought about and were in turn transformed by the convulsions of modernity retain a spark of divinity in the form of the faculty of reason. The genealogical movement of thought teaches by contrast that the subjects and their relations to the objects they know about and act on, no less than those objects themselves, must be thoroughly naturalized. But then, what about the normative force of the better reason?
Is it, too, just an illusion arising from the play of natural forces, or can it somehow be understood in terms of them? Can we really understand the natural science that’s the source of our genealogies, of our believings, itself entirely in naturalistic terms? Must we?
In its most radical form, the genealogical thought is that if we can understand the etiology of our believings and our preferings, intendings, and so on, in terms of causes that do not provide reasons for them, then talk of reasons is shown to be out of place, not only superfluous, but actively misleading. This meta-narrative of genealogy, as unmasking illusions of reason, depends on the disjunction, causes, or reasons being exclusive. It’s forcing a choice on us.
Genealogy, in other words, turns Kant’s distinction between causes and reasons back on itself. It becomes a snake that poisons itself by biting its own tail.
(paper rustling)
Now, Marx and Freud offer local genealogies. That is, they offer genealogical analyses only of a specific range of discursive practices, the use of only some vocabularies, the vocabulary of political economy or the vocabulary one uses to explicate and make intelligible one’s psychological motivations. Though Nietzsche’s most detailed stories are also of this local kind, he points the way to the possibility of a more global genealogical lesson, that a suitably thoroughgoing reductive naturalism might undercut the rational credentials not just of some parochial region of our belief, but of the whole realm.
The very idea of reason as efficacious in our lives would be called in question by globalizing the genealogical enterprise to extend it to all discourse. In this form, genealogy would be what Tennyson called, “The little rift within the lute, that by and by shall make the music mute, and ever widening, slowly silence all.” This global genealogical challenge would be c– would come to be expressed explicitly in various forms in the 20th century.
But the Neo-Kantian Windelband could already find it implicit in the aspirations of his 19th century historicist opponents. And it’s this broader idea that I want to consider. Globalized genealogical arguments take a common form.
They present causal etiologies of states and events of believings, thought of as episodes in the natural world, as rendering superfluous and irrelevant appeal to reasons that normatively entitle believers to the contents believed. The thought is that all the explanatory work can be done by causes, with no work left to be done by reasons. And as a second subsidiary task, one then explains the motives for which, and the structures by which, believers and theorists conceal, from themselves and from others, the underlying causal processes of belief acquisition under an obscuring veil of what then show up as mere rationalizations.
All the great genealogists of the 19th century particularly relished offering such meta-genealogies. That’s how they unmask our conception of ourselves as rational animals, as nothing more than an illusion that puffs up and comforts animals with the sort of natural needs and interests that we have. Our need for that swaddling illusion reveals us to be, in essence, not, as we’re pleased to think, autonomous, rational animals, but merely needy, insecure, rationalizing animals.
At this level of generality, the genealogical challenge to reason has the form of a naturalistic reductionism about the essentially normative force of the better reason. I think it’s illuminating to compare this global challenge with a more focused version that Gilbert Harman addresses to specifically moral normativity. He argues that the best explanation, indeed a complete explanation, of why people have the moral normative attitudes they do, why they treat some acts as morally right and others as morally wrong, need appeal only to other normative attitudes of their own and others.
It need not appeal to norms or values in the form of facts about what is actually morally right or wrong. He contrasts this situation with that concerning our attitude towards electrons. The best explanation of which, he takes it, must include reference to facts about electrons and our interactions with them.
He concludes that we do not, in the end, have reason to believe in the existence of moral norms, reasons, or values, as we do for the existence of electrons. A global version of this argument addressed to the norms of reason, rather than of morality, would contend that a complete explanation for people taking or treating some claims as reasons for others need appeal only to their attitudes of taking or treating some claims as reason for others, not to any facts about what really is a reason for what. Propositional attitudes, paradigmatically beliefs, would be treated just as features of the natural history of creatures like us, and hence as explicable entirely in terms of other such features, in this case, further attitudes.
Now, I think that there’s a structural defect that afflicts global reductive genealogical stories of this kind. They depend on what I’ll call semantic naivete. Semantic naivete consists in taking for granted the conceptual contents of the attitudes whose rational relations to one another one wants to dissolve genealogically.
If the attitudes in question are not thought of as propositionally contentful, then the issue of rational normative relations between them, of some of them as providing good reasons entitling or committing one to others, doesn’t even arise, as it does not for whirlpools, thunderstorms, supernovae, and other natural occurrences into whose causal antecedents we might inquire. The question I see as posing a counter-challenge to genealogical challenges to the very idea of reason is whether and how one is to understand the contentfulness of beliefs apart from their situation in a normative space of reasons. The overall point is that epistemological claims, including skeptical genealogical ones, have semantic presuppositions.
I’m gonna argue that the soft underbelly of genealogical skepticism about reason is its implicit commitment to naive semantics. When we look at things more closely, we’ll see that the underlying issue concerns the relation between contingencies governing attitudes, what applications of concepts are taken or treated as correct according to the prevailing reasons, and norms to which those attitudes are subject. Observations about the attitudes provide the basis for the genealogical challenge to the intelligibility of the norms.
The particular form of semantic naivete I will identify as crucial to this debate turns out to be an assumption about the relations between semantic attitudes and semantic norms that’s common both to Enlightenment rationalism and to genealogical challenges to it. The thinker who diagnoses these shared presupposi– this shared presupposition, contests it, and offers a constructive alternative is Hegel, whom I will argue both anticipates and responds creatively to the genealogical currents of thought he inspired and, in many ways, made possible. Now, I’ve described genealogical challenges to our understanding of ourselves as rational both as rooted in Kant’s distinction between reasons and causes, and as expressing the revenge of that distinction on itself.
This is, of course, a very crude formulation. To refine it, we need to fill in some of the Kantian background. Kant brought about a revolution in our understanding of the mind by recognizing the essentially normative character of the discursive.
In a decisive break with the Cartesian tradition, he distinguishes judgments and intentional actions from the responses of non-discursive creatures, not ontologically, by their supposed involvement with an ultimately spooky kind of mental substance, but deontologically, as things their subjects Kinda distinctive way responsible for. What we believe and what we do express commitments of ours. They’re exercises of a kind of authority distinctive of discursive creatures.
Responsibility, commitment, authority, these are all normative statuses. Concepts, which articulate discursive acts of judging and intentionally doing, Kant says, are rules. They’re rules that determine what we’ve made ourselves responsible for, what we’ve committed ourselves to, what we’ve invested our authority in.
Appreciating the rulishness, the normative character of the mind, this is Kant’s normative turn. Practically, what we’re responsible for and committed to doing in investing our authority in how things are or ought to be, Kant thinks, is having reasons for those commitments. What are concepts or rules for doing is reasoning.
It’s the concepts articulating the contents of our judgments and intentions that determine what count as reasons for and against thinking or acting that way, what would entitle us to do so or justify us in taking on commitments with those conceptual contents. For Kant, as discursive creatures, we live and move and have our being in a normative space of reasons. After Descartes, the challenge was to find a place for mental stuff in a natural world of physical stuff.
After Kant, the challenge became finding a place for norms in a natural world. Descartes had been roundly criticized for his dualism of minds and bodies. The danger is that the result of Kant’s revolutionary insight into the normativity of intentionality would be to replace that dualism with the dualism of norm and fact.
Now, I take it that a distinction becomes a dualism when it’s drawn in terms that make the relation between the distinguished items ultimately unintelligible. I’ll argue that the collision between the possibility of global genealogies and unding our, and understanding ourselves as rational depends on a set of assumptions, which I’m going to gather together under the rubric of semantic naivete, that would turn Kant’s distinction into a dualism, but also that those assumptions are optional and indeed incorrect. I’ll argue further that Hegel, intense and insightful reader of Kant that he was, already understood all this and offered a constructive alternative that can provide a way forward for us in thinking about these issues today.
Kant’s normative turn expressed an insight in discursive pragmatics, our understanding of what we’re doing in judging and acting intentionally. He also moved beyond the Cartesian tradition he inherited in seeing that its characteristic epistemological concerns raised a more fundamental semantic question. His idea here was that if we properly understood what it is for our thoughts to be representations in the sense of so much as purporting to represent something, the epistemological skeptical question of what reason we have to think that they ever correctly represent something would be revealed on semantic grounds to be ill-posed.
Hegel saw, however, that as penetrating as these archeological semantic excavations were, Kant failed fully to appreciate and address a crucial semantic question raised by his original normative pragmatic idea. Kant correctly saw that judging and acting intentionally are exercises of authority that come with correlative responsibilities, commitments to having reasons for and acknowledging consequences of those undertakings. Kant already understood concepts as functions of judgment in the sense of rules that determine what would count as a reason for applying those concepts in judgment and what the further consequences of doing so are.
In a strict sense, all Kantian rational creatures can do is apply concepts in judging and acting. So, those discursive activities presuppose the availability of the concepts they deploy. But that presupposition raises in turn the question faced by Kant’s rationalist hero, Leibniz.
Where do those concepts come from? How do we get access to them? Once the discursive enterprise is up and running, new concepts can be formed downstream from applications of old ones, e.g., by Kant’s judgments of reflection.
But what’s the origin of the concepts that make empirical and practical discursive activity possible in the first place? Hegel reads Kant as having a two-stage story. Transcendental activity is the source of the conceptual norms that then govern empirical discursive activity.
The empirical self accordingly always already finds itself with a stock of determinate concepts. The transcendental processes by which discursive norms are instituted are sharply distinguished from the empirical processes in which those discursive norms are then applied. In the 20th century, Rudolf Carnap provides an index example of this Kantian two-stage semantic-epistemic explanatory strategy.
In his version, the two stages correspond to beginning by fixing meanings, and only then going on to fix beliefs. The first semantic stage is selecting a language. The second epistemic stage is selecting a theory, a set of sentences couched in that language that are taken to be true.
His student, Quine, objected to Carnap that while this two-stage procedure makes perfect sense for formal or artificial languages, it makes no sense for natural languages. All speakers do is use the language, Kant would say, to make judgments. That use must somehow determine both what their expressions mean and which sentences they take to be true.
In the vocabulary I use to talk about Kant, the use of language to express judgments must be understood as affecting both the institution of conceptual norms and their application. Two-stage stories about the division of labor between semantics and epistemology, that is, about the relation between conceptual contents and their application in judgment, are committed to semantic purity. This is the view that the contents concepts possess are not at all affected by the use of those concepts in making judgments, in believing a particular subset of the universe of believables.
That’s the point of having a first semantogenic stage at which contents are determined, conceptual norms are instituted before the second stage comprising the application of concepts in taking things to be thus and so, to be as represented by some already contentful representings and not others. Commitment to semantic purity is commitment to the possibility of pursuing semantics independently of commitment to how things actually are. The thought is that epistemic commitments are not to contaminate semantic ones.
Semantic commitments are necessary conditions only for the expression of epistemic ones. On this picture, two independent elements combine to make epistemic commitments, true claims, semantic commitments, picking a language, settling on the co– on contentful concepts, and how the world is. And the second element is simply irrelevant to the first.
Now, semantic purity is not an unintelligible idea. It makes sense in the context of stipulating associations of semantic interpretants with linguistic expressions for artificial languages by a theorist working in a semantically more powerful metalanguage. But semantic naiveté results when one believes that semantic purity is intelligible for an autonomous intentional stratum, for natural languages or for thought in general.
Quine objects to the semantic naiveté of commitment to the possibility of pure semantics, and in this regard, makes common cause with the later Wittgenstein. Both thinkers take it that all there is to confer content on our expressions is the way those expressions are used paradigmatically in making claims and forming beliefs. That is, in committing ourselves to how things are.
Two-stage theories about the division of semantic and epistemological labor for natural languages and the thoughts they express, Quine and Wittgenstein think, are bound to invoke semantic stories about the first stage that make the notion of conceptual content ultimately magical. They’re committed to semantic purity. So when applied to natural languages and thought, they’re semantically naive.
This is exactly Hegel’s complaint about Kant. He was uncharacteristically but culpably uncritical about the source and nature of determinate conceptual contents. In this regard, at least, Hegel stands to Kant as Quine does to Carnap.
And like Quine and Wittgenstein, Hegel offers an ultimately pragmatist account of how using a natural language can be intelligible as both instituting and applying conceptual norms. This line of thought bears directly on the issue I started off by considering. For global genealogical reductive explaining away of norms in favor of attitudes presumes that it’s intelligible for the contents of propositional attitudes to stay in place after normative reason relations among their judgeable contents are relinquished.
Otherwise, what’s being explained genealogically can no longer be understood as believings, as attitudes of taking things to be thus and so. If our attitudes were not genuinely conceptually contentful, then we would not be even purporting to represent things as being thus and so. Things would not even seem to us to be thus and so.
If disillusionment about the reality of norms of reasoning entails semantic nihilism, then it’s self-defeating. A genealogist’s claims would entail that her own claims are senseless. The overall point I want to make is that taking the contents of propositional attitudes in general to be independent of the government of those attitudes by norms concerning what genuinely is a reason for what presupposes a semantically naive two-stage account of the division of semantic and epistemic labor, for it requires that the contents of propositional attitudes have already somehow been fixed in advance and independently of the rough and tumble of assessing evidence, balancing reasons, and deciding what to believe.
The semantic challenge for the globalized Harmanian genealogist is accordingly to say how we’re to understand the contents of the attitudes in favor of which genuine norms have been eliminated. The corrisdon– corresponding challenge for a one-stage account is to explain how institution of genuine conceptual norms is compatible with the possibility of genealogical explanation of acts of applying such norms. Hegel understands this challenge and offers an intricate and sophisticated story about the relations between the institution and application of conceptual norms, including the relations between discursive normative statuses and discursive normative attitudes that’s aimed precisely at meeting that challenge.
And in the rest of this talk, I want to present the outlines of his story as I understand it. One way into Hegel’s constructive alternative to the semantic naivete of two-stage theories of the division of semantic and epistemic labor, through his conception of the determinateness of conceptual norms. What semantic purity claims conceptual contents are pure of is contamination by the epistemic, that is by knowledge claims, by judgments as to how things actually are.
The semantics of concepts, Hegel’s universals, is supposed not to depend at all upon epistemic commitments, that is on judgments, on the application of those universals to particulars in judgment. Hegel’s slogan for the conceptual sea change he sees as necessary for appreciating the interdependence of semantic and epistemic commitments is that we must move from understanding the conceptual in terms of the static categories of Verstand to understanding it in terms of the dynamic categories of Vernunft, adapting Kant’s terminology to his own use. Kantian concepts are determinate in the Verstand sense in that the rational relations of consequence and incompatibility between concepts which identify and individuate them are taken to be fully settled in advance of any application of those universals to particulars in judgment.
Kant envisaged an asymmetric structure of capacities in which a faculty of spontaneity is the source of universals which are applied to particulars supplied by a faculty of receptivity. In developing his successor, Vernunft conception, Hegel takes over from Kant his insight into the normative character of concept use and radicalizes it by construing the relations between universals and particulars itself in normative terms of authority and responsibility. Hegel says independence and dependence.
Hegel takes his cue from the fact that transposed into the normative key, the relations of authority and responsibility between universals and particulars are reciprocal and symmetric. Kant’s system masks that underlying symmetry by an artificial asymmetric division of semantic and epistemic labor. Spontaneous exercises of the semantic authority of the understanding, Verstand, over universals are for Kant independent of and prior to exercises of the epistemic authority of particulars which determine the correctness of application of universals to those particulars in judgment.
This overarching asymmetric structure is a manifestation of Kant’s understanding of freedom and reason in terms of autonomy, what Hegel calls pure independence. According to Hegel’s symmetric normative construal of the relations of authority and responsibility between universals and particulars, the application of one concept or universal obliges one to apply others to that particular, according to rational relations of consequence that, that articulate the content of the concept or universal. And it precludes one from being entitled to apply others to that particular, according to relations of rational incompatibility that also partially articulate the content of that concept or universal.
This is the authority of universals over particulars, the responsibility of particulars to universals. There’s a corresponding relation of authority of particulars over universals, for it can happen that one applies a concept, a universal to a particular, and the particular does not cooperate in also exhibiting the universals that are its consequences, or in also exhibiting universals that are incompatible with the original one. This, Hegel construes, is the particular exercising authority over the universal, telling it, as it were, that it cannot have the consequence and incompatibility relations that it originally came with.
That is, that a different universal is required. For Hegel, none of these reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility between universals and particulars should be understood as purely semantic, nor as purely epistemic. The clean division of semantic and epistemic labor is an artifact of semantically naive two-stage accounts.
Our judgments shape our concepts no less than our concepts shape our judgments. Hegel understands determinateness, his Bestimmtheit, in terms of what he calls individuality, Einzelheit. Individuality, in turn, is a matter of the characterization of a particular by a universal, which is something that has the form of a fact or a judgment.
As Kant emphasized, concepts shape and articulate judgments. Hegel adds the idea that judgment is a process by which concepts are determined. The essence of Hegel’s Vernunft conception is an account of the structure of the dynamic process in which the whole constellation of concepts and judgments develops by the exercise of the reciprocal authority of universals over particulars and particulars over universals.
Judging the application of universals to particulars is the development of individuals, at once the semantic shaping and determining of universals and the epistemic discovery of which universals apply to which particulars. Kant’s pure independence model of semantic authority, as untrammeled by corresponding responsibility, leaves it unclear what room there remains for epistemic constraint. Why cannot the boundaries, the implications and incompatibilities of the universal that’s been applied simply be redrawn to accommodate any looming recalcitrance?
[00:47:54] JAY WALLACE:
More deeply, what even counts as changing the content of a concept or universal for Kant? What holds fixed in advance the commitments one undertakes by applying it if its content is wholly up to the spontaneous activity of the subject? The Kantian division of semantic and epistemic labor seems unable to exclude the possibility that, as Wittgenstein puts it, whatever seems right to me is right.
In which case, the issue of right doesn’t get a grip. There’s just nothing in the Kantian picture to confer determinant contents on concepts, nor to hold them in place as determinant. What’s needed, Hegel thinks, is to replace Kant’s individualist model driven by his understanding of freedom as autonomy with a social one.
What Kant tried to accomplish within the boundaries of a single knowing subject by the division of semantic and epistemic labor should be done rather by a genuinely social division of labor. Concepts for Hegel are not to be found between the ears of individual knowers, but in the public language that they speak. “language,” he said, “is the Dasein of Geist.”
This transposition of the issue into a social linguistic key makes it clear how in judging whose paradigm now becomes asserting, I can bind myself by norms provided by the concepts I apply to particulars. It is, for instance, wholly up to me whether I assert that the coin is made of copper rather than say manganese, but it’s then not up to me what else I’ve committed myself to by claiming that and what would entitle me to that commitment. The metallurgical experts in my community that my community charges with the care and feeding of the concept of copper will hold me responsible for having committed myself to the coins melting at 1084 degrees C and having precluded myself from claiming that it’s an electrical insulator.
Whether I know about these implications is neither here nor there. They’re features of the move I’ve made in the language game, and it’s my participation in that game that permits me also to think quietly to myself that the coin is copper. A thought that inherits its shared content from claimables, whose sense the community fixes.
On this model, the authority of the individual speaker is balanced by a reciprocal responsibility and the content I freely committed myself to and made myself responsible for is held in place as determinant by my fellow speakers whom I’ve authorized to hold me responsible for it. What I’m responsible for is what I’ve said, not what I might later claim to have meant.
[00:50:32] PROFESSOR BRANDOM:
What Heidegger called the dignity and spiritual greatness of German idealism is founded on Kant’s reconstrual of self-conscious selfhood as consisting in freedom in the sense of authority, specifically the authority to commit oneself determinately, the capacity to bind oneself by conceptual norms, to make oneself responsible to norms that are rational in the sense that they articulate what’s a reason for, for a judgment or an action that has that content. Hegel sees that self-consciousness in this normative sense is an essentially social achievement. The authority to make one self-responsible makes sense only in a context in which one can be held responsible, and that requires two loci of authority and responsibility.
Normative statuses such as authority and responsibility and the selves that are the subjects of such statuses, Hegel teaches, are instituted by reciprocal recognition. That is by individuals practically taking or treating one another as authoritative and so responsible, as having the authority to make themselves responsible. Those I recognize in this normative sense of authorizing them to hold me responsible form a recognitive community.
In telling language, Hegel says that self-conscious individual selves, normative subjects, are instituted only when particular biological organisms come to stand in recognitive relations to one another, a matter of their practical normative attitudes, and so come to be characterized by the universal that is the recognitive community. That’s his model for how universals, particulars and individuals are related. Now besides developing Kant’s normative insights along the social dimension, Hegel develops it along a historical dimension.
What binds them together is Hegel’s idea that determinateness on the side of the content of conceptual norms, the topic of semantics, is intelligible in principle only in the context of a thoroughgoing reciprocity of authority and responsibility on the side of the practical force or significance of those norms, the topic of pragmatics in a broad sense. His metaconcept Vernunft is a view about the process of determining conceptual contents and about the kind of determinateness that results.
[00:53:04] JAY WALLACE:
This process, he thinks, has a normative structure distinctive of traditions. Understanding genealogical analyses as undercutting the claims of reason, as undercutting the rational bindingness of conceptual norms depends on assessing the rationality of discursive practice solely on the basis of the extent to which applications of concepts, whose contents are construed as already fully determinate are responsive exclusively to evidential concerns. Responsiveness of concept applications to any factors that are contingent relative to the conceptual norms already in force, which is the phenomenon, the genealogical diagnoses highlight is accordingly identified as an eruption of irrationality.
But the idea that assessments of rationality are appropriately addressed only to the application of already fully determinate concepts is the product of a blinkered semantic naivete. It ignores the fact that the very same discursive practice that is from one point of view the application of conceptual norms is from another point of view, the institution of those norms, and the determination of their contents. Only when discursive practices viewed whole does its rationality emerge.
If the semantigenic process by which conceptual contents are determined and developed is ignored, the distinctive way in which reason informs and infuses discursive practice must remain invisible. For Hegel, the principal task of reason in his preferred sense of Vernunft rather than Verstand is, as he says, ‘To give contingency the form of necessity.’ Following Kant, by necessary, he means having the form of a rule.
That is, for him, reason’s job is to put the sort of material contingencies the genealogist points to into a normative shape. From Hegel’s point of view, far from undercutting reason, the possibility of genealogical explanations just underlines the need for this particular function of reason and the crucial job that it does. So, how can we understand the process whereby concepts acquire and develop their determinate content as putting contingencies of their application into a normative shape?
[00:55:27] PROFESSOR BRANDOM:
Hegel’s idea is that a distinctive kind of retrospective rational reconstruction of prior applications of a concept is necessary and sufficient to exhibit those applications as conferring a determinate content on the concept. One brings order to the motley welter that is the discursive practice one inherits by discriminating within it a privileged trajectory that’s expressively progressive in the sense of making gradually explicit norms that then show up retrospectively as having been all along implicit. “Doing that,” he says, “is turning a past into a history.”
The best model I know of the kind of rational activity that determines conceptual contents by making or finding the right kind of history for them is the jurisprudential one, institutionalized and codified in case law. Its purest paradigmatic form takes place in what in the Anglo-American legal world is called common law. For in that realm, by contrast to statute law, judges are not guided in their decisions as to whether to apply or withhold the application of a concept, say, the concept of strict liability, by explicit statutes, propounded and given the force of law by legislatures, statutes that say explicitly what is and is not licit according to the norm they institute.
In case law, in lieu of norms explicit as such principles, judges at common law must decide cases with novel facts on the basis only of norms that they discern as implicit in the tradition of already decided cases. The governing authority to which common law judges are responsible is provided by precedent. The judge’s job is not only to decide the present case, but also to provide a rationale for the decision by providing a distinctive kind of narrative justifying it as correct.
Such a narrative selects some prior decisions as precedential in the sense of being not only relevant and correct, but as having revealed some hitherto hidden aspect or contour of the norm that’s developing in the tradition defined by those precedents. The legal concepts and principles explicating them that are given expression as rationales for deciding novel cases are often characterized as judge-made law, and this description is apt because there’s nothing more to give content to this kind of law and its concepts than the decisions that judges have rendered and the retrospective rational reconstructions of traditions defined by precedence that the judges offer to justify those decisions. Rational, rationalizing processes of this sort are both responsible to the contents of the conceptual norms they apply and they exercise authority over the development of those conceptual contents.
They are processes of determining conceptual contents, both in the sense of finding out what those contents are, manifested in the essentially retrospective rationales judges supply for their decisions, and in the sense of making those contents what they are, manifested in the essentially prospective shifting and sharpening of the norms that each new application and interpretation provides. These hermeneutic practices give contingency the normative form of necessity, and by incorporating those contingencies, infuse determinate content into the developing norms. It’s of the essence of the kind of rationality distinctive of this sort of concept-determining process to be articulated by these complementary perspectives; retrospective, determining as finding, and prospective, determining as making, responsibility to the tradition one inherits and authority over the tradition one bequeaths.
Looking backward along the privileged trajectory of precedence selected by the narrative rationalizing any particular decision, one sees only unbroken expressive progress, the gradual emergence into the explicit light of day of a governing norm that appears as having been all along implicit in earlier decisions. But looking forward at how legal concepts and principles evolve by being applied in concrete cases, the discontinuities between those narratives show up as sequential judges revise their predecessors’ judgments as to which earlier applications should be treated as precedential and how. T.S. Eliot describes this aspect of Hegelian Vernunft as it worked in a different corner of the culture.
He says, “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves which is modified by the introduction of the new, the really new, work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives.
For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered, and so the relations, proportions, and values of each work of art toward the whole are adjusted, and this is conformity between the old and the new.” Considering genealogical counterfactuals about what the norms would’ve been had various non-evidential factors differed, reveals a judicial process shot through with contingencies. As for instance, when the order in which two cases happen to be adjudicated evidently affects the content of the law that results.
The normatively contingent character of any particular decision to apply or not to apply a particular concept is manifested in the fact that one always can explain any particular decision genealogically in terms of what the judge had for breakfast, in the derisive slogan of jurisprudential theory. That is, to explain it in terms that do not appeal to the content of the norm whose applicability is in question. To explain it instead, for instance, in terms of the intellectual fashions or public passions of the day, or by features of the judge’s training, temperament, or political convictions.
But to conclude that the possibility of such an explanation means that no norm is therefore instituted, that the norms discerned as implicit in the tradition inherited cannot rationally justify one decision rather than another in a novel case, is to insist stubbornly and one-sidedly on occupying only one of the perspectives that are in fact two sides of one coin, as Hegel insists and as jurisprudential practice demonstrates. It’s precisely to refuse to see Vernunft whole. It’s to embrace the scie– semantic naivete that ignores the essential role rationally incorporating those contingencies plays in conferring determinate content on determining the content of always-evolving conceptual norms.
Hegel points to the generality of the lesson he wants us to learn from his Vernunft model of the practice of reason in a remarkable passage epitomized in an aphorism expressing his twist on a slogan of the day. He says, “No man is a hero to his valet, but that’s not because the man is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.” The passage continues explaining that the reason is that the valet’s dealings are with the man, not as a hero, but as one who eats, drinks, and wears clothes in general with his individual wants and fancies.
Thus, for the judging consciousness, there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and so play the part of the moral valet toward the agent. What Hegel calls the universal aspect of the a– action is its normative dimension. The hero’s a hero insofar as he acts according to the norms that articulate his duty.
The valet views what the hero does genealogically in resolutely naturalistic, non-normative reductive terms. And so as the passage continues, the valet explains the action as resulting from selfish motives. Just as every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty, so too can it be considered from the point of view of the particularity of the doer.
If the action is accompanied by fame, then it knows this inner aspect to be a desire for fame. The inner aspect is judged to be an urge to secure his own happiness, even though this were to consist merely in an inner moral conceit in the enjoyment of being conscious of his own superiority and in the foretaste of a hope of future happiness. No action can escape such judgment.
For duty for duty’s sake, this pure purpose is an unreality. It becomes a reality in the deed of an individuality, and the action is thereby charged with the aspect of particularity. That’s the end of the quote.
Here, Hegel writing in 1806, before the advent of the great unmaskers of the dawning 19th century, acknowledges that every application of a norm is in principle liable to a naturalistic genealogical explanation. It can be seen, indeed can be correctly seen as far as that vision reaches from the point of view of its particularity, its normative contingency. But that valet’s eye genealogical view is one sided.
It fails to see the whole of the doing, for the valet fails to see that a norm can also be active, that the particular contingent motives he sees, what the hero had for breakfast, can be given the form of normative necessity, can be incorporated in a narrative that exhibits them as inconformity to duty as correctly performed according to the governing norms. Hegel calls the genealogical valet’s attitude, Niederträchtigkeit, literally something like a striving for the low, an impulse to debase. His term for the practical attitude of giving contingency the normative form of necessity is Edelmütigkeit, magnanimity.
It’s a form of norm-instituting recognition. Its retrospective recognitive aspect, he calls forgiveness. Its prospective recognitive aspect, he calls confession.
What one forgives is the normative contingencies that infect prior applications of concepts. One forgives them not wholesale by a grand gesture, but by the hard retail work of constructing an expressively progressive historical narrative in which they play precedential roles as making explicit aspects of the developing conceptual content that are now revealed as hitherto having been all along implicit. The slogan of this generous hermeneutic recognitive attitude is Tennyson’s when he says, “Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs and the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”
This is what Hegel does in his own writings, first and foremost in the Phenomenology, but no less in the histories he constructs for philosophy, art, and religion in his lectures. Concrete magnanimous hermeneutic forgiveness is finding such a purpose, that is a norm, to which the concept application being forgiven can be seen to contribute, so widening the thoughts of man. Hegel calls this, ‘Making what happens into something done.’
What the magnanimous interpreteVr confesses is the contingent inadequacy of each particular such forgiving, rational reconstruction. One confesses that one is unable to find a narrative in which every contingency is given the normative status of a progressive precedential expression of the underlying developing conceptual norm. In confessing, one petitions one’s successors for forgiveness of that contingent failure of one’s own effort at forgiveness.
The edelmuthig rational rationalizing process in which conceptual norms are instituted by diachronic magnanimous reciprocal recognition is a structure of trust, trust that one’s trespasses will be forgiven as one forgives those who have trespassed before one. So, Hegel foresaw the genealogical challenge to rational normativity that would arise from a reductive naturalism and would result in a small-minded, niederträchtig valet’s hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of magnanimity and trust he recommends instead is not based on fine feeling or pious sentiment.
Instead, he argues that the only construal in which reason and meaning are threatened by the possibility of genealogy is a narrow, one-sided conception that’s mistaken because semantically naive. In its place, he puts a more capacious conception of Vernunft as comprising not only the norm-governed application of concepts, but the process and practice by which their content is determined. At its core is the magnanimous hermeneutics that shapes genealogical contingency into a normative rational form.
My aim here has been to sketch, in the broadest of outlines, the insights that underlie Hegel’s inspiring vision of the relations between the normative and the natural. Thank you.
(audience applauding)
[01:09:23] INTERVIEWER:
Okay. Bob has said he would be, Professor Brandom has said he would be willing to take some questions for a few minutes if there are, if there are some, as I’m sure there are.
[01:09:37] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Thank you very much. That was awe-inspiring and I’m sure I understand only a small piece of it. The piece I did understand was the reference to law, and I was wondering about that because it seemed to make the case for Hegel worse.
I realize you’re presenting Hegel’s vision rather than defending it, but there are very few lawyers today who would accept the romantic teleological story you told about law, that as judges, as judges work through the common law, they work it purer. That’s the old trope. Even Dworkin, I think, would have taken that as a kind of sentimental conceit.
And I think what most people thinking about law would say is, that sort of story is a necessary piece of the legitimation of law, the sociological legitimation of law. It also, it works as a kind of hard constraint to impose some external controls on what judges do. But not even the earliest of the legal realists, the what the judge had for breakfast guys, thought that judges just threw up their hands and, you know, awarded damages to themselves.
The concepts, the point was that the concepts were highly under-determinative, but that there was some determination by these concepts. But basically, the work of singling out who won and who lost in a particular case was explained genealogically, and that we had to tell this progressive story. This progressive story came from outside.
It came from the needs of power to justify a system that, by and large, served those interests. And I think that, I mean, that’s the worry that one would throw back on Hegel, that this progressivism comes externally. It’s a legitimation story.
It makes us feel good about ourselves, about the nature of the concepts we have, but it’s ultimately a myth about the contingencies we have.
[01:11:14] PROFESSOR BRANDOM:
Yeah. I mean, I absolutely agree that if that were the, if that were the story I was attributing to Hegel, it would be subject to all those criticisms. I think instead you can see it as articulating the normative fine structure of what Dworkin calls the judge’s chain novels.
And, and what distinguishes the Hegelian story, which I was really just able to wave my hands at here, but which in other places I have written about more extensively, is that it’s not that he thinks that there are secreted in the tradition some norm which is gradually getting, you know, all the pieces of that, except the pieces that are of that statue are being chipped away by, by each decision and the, the already present statue is being found. Rather, he thinks each judge has to tell a story like that. That’s the only form of rationalization.
The only form of reason you can give for making one judgment rather than another is to find that rationale implicit in the decisions that have been made before. But the very next judge’s story may be radically different about what is progressive. The trajectory that he discerns which again is as far as he picks out the precedents expressively progressive and cumulative and monotonic.
Each precedent that he picks out is revealing some aspect that he’s appealing to, but its relation to the rationale that the previous judge told may be radically different. And so, so Hegel sees sort of at each stage when we ask, “Well, what is the content of this concept,” we’ve gotta understand it as a snapshot of, of something that is being shaped in a process of, of this description. And I read him as thinking that that’s what we should be doing for our philosophical predecessors as well, that he told one story in the Phenomenology and in the history of philosophy about what each philosopher had discovered such that if you put all these things together, you got to the system, to his account.
And, and I read him as thinking that it’s our job to do quite a different one and say, “Oh, well, yes, and the piece that he got was this, and he misunderstood Leibniz,” and and so on. So, the, the romantic picture that, that you were properly rejecting I think is one that, that isn’t looking at this prospective discontinuities, the radical discontinuities. Between the retrospective Whiggish stories.
He thinks this, that telling stories like that is the form of reasons marched through history, but that in principle, that process of determining the content of concepts involves also these radical discontinuities
[01:14:23] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah. Thank you very much. That was excellent.
I have a few questions, one general systematic question and then more of a Hegel question. So here’s the general question. Like, if I understand you correctly, Hegel has resources to fight a globalized form of hermeneutics of suspicion, but you yourself said that almost no form of the hermeneutics of suspicion is global unless it goes global, and you didn’t mention Darwin, so I would like to hear something about that.
So I think some form of globalized form of reductive naturalism can be fought with Hegel, but that doesn’t give us a lot of ground against the skeptic because the skeptic might say, “Well, all contents can be reduced minus this one.” So, you know, if that’s all the ground that we stand on, that doesn’t seem to be a lot.
[01:15:03] INTERVIEWER:
So I wonder whether you could say something about that.
[01:15:06] JAY WALLACE:
Well, I mean, specific-
[01:15:07] INTERVIEWER:
Yeah.
[01:15:07] JAY WALLACE:
Specifically on that point, I think the residue has got to be the bit that doesn’t get genealogically reduced, has got to be an autonomous discursive practice, a language game one could play, though one played no other. So, that’s not just leaving, you know, one or two concepts out of the genealogical target area. That’s got to leave, you know, enough for us to understand ourselves as rational beings within.
Now, if then you can be genealogical about individual motivational structures, or about political economy, I mean, the question is going to be, Well, can you really be genealogical about what are regions of discourse or vocabularies that have often threaten to spread out to encompass the way we understand ourselves. But-
[01:16:06] INTERVIEWER:
And then the Hegel question, I mean, you draw a distinction now between the epistemic and the semantic, which does a lot of work in this paper, but I wonder if you don’t need, in addition to that distinction, the ontic if not the ontological. I know that you don’t like the concept of truth to play a very important role here, but Hegel, of course insists in the subject of logic, that truth itself is the object that he’s contemplating. So, I wonder if you have a deflationary reading of Hegel’s obvious insistence on truth, because if I read him correctly, he’s saying that better reasons better be sometimes best reasons and best reasons are reasons hooked up with the truth.
So I’m wondering if there’s a deflationary account of that in your reading.
[01:16:53] JAY WALLACE:
Well, actually, wouldn’t read him as saying what you’ve just said, but I am perfectly happy to say, truth is absolutely central for him, and furthermore is front and center in this story I’m telling. But it’s not the best place to look, to see how he’s thinking about it, is not this objective logic, but the preface to the Phenomenology, where he gives us what I take to be a definition of truth, though it hardly is gonna show up in your coherence theory/correspondence theories, where he says, “Truth is a vast Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober, “where no sooner does an individual member of “the drinking party fall insensible beneath the table, then another takes his place.” You say, “This is his theory of truth.”
Yes, this is the story about the process of the development of these concepts, which are elbowing each other at the table with their incompatibilities, with their consequences to each other, but each one, each determinate concept eventually shows itself not to be adequate to the phenomena, to incorporate some claim about what follows from what, or what’s incompatible with what that is precisely infirmed by the particulars. It falls beneath the table. We say, “No, that isn’t the norm.”
That concept that says that if it’s copper, then this follows from it, that’s not quite right. That one goes beneath the table, but there’s always another one to take its place, and that’s the locus of truth, is that process which is precisely where the semantic and the epistemic are merely aspects of it, but not separable components. Now, obviously, a lot of work would need to be done to connect that to the other things he also says about truth, but th– that’s the one I’m talking about.
Yeah.
[01:18:45] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Would you kindly tell me what is the definition of a fact, and what is the difference with truth? And how we can apply these two ideas of fact and truth in terms of making our judgment? We make judgments every day, thousands of them every day. Now, who has the best judgment?
[01:19:05] JAY WALLACE:
Yeah. Well, I don’t know that I have a lot to say about who has the best judgment. I mean, on this account of truth, the essential thing is that there’s no final judgment about it.
I mean, I think Hegel would agree with Frege that uh, a fact is a thought that is true, a thought not in the sense of a thinking, but of, but of a thinkable. But that notion of truth has to be understood in terms of this process of committing ourselves to something as true, to taking something as a fact. And we’ve got to realize that those are fragile attitudes, that none of them is unrevisable, and in the end, that maybe none of them are unrevised.
Now, it is one of Hegel’s challenges to make sense of the notion of an objective, uh, empirical world, that, that is the way it is, regardless of our attitudes towards it. And I think in the introduction of the Phenomenology, he gives us an account of the nature of representation that, that lets us do that. But thereon hangs a tale.
[01:20:08] INTERVIEWER:
Thank you for your talk.
[01:20:10] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I have a question about this globalizing genealogy project that you mentioned, because thinking about the universal in particular, I must say, my field is modern Chinese history, and when we think about the universal in particular, it’s always, a sort of process of how China went from say, being its own universal, to say, the Middle Kingdom, to but one nation among many. And so, I guess on a very practical level, I’m just wondering how does this globalizing genealogy work if, I mean, I don’t even know what it looks like, I guess, on the one hand. And second, it seems like, is this, a sort of globalizing genealogy as method that is sort of useful to as, you know, a sort of ongoing conversation that’s been happening in Western Europe and the US, but how do you see it going beyond, I guess, is the question I have?
[01:21:08] PRESENTER:
Okay. I mean, my guess is that we’re slightly talking past each other on globalization. That, you know, I’m starting with the notion of genealogy as a particular kind of reductive naturalism, as wanting to understand our discursive practices in Vallès’ terms of, causal processes that are not normative.
And that has local and global versions. What it’s local and global with respect to is discursive practice. The local versions are only looking at some vocabularies.
Freud, by and large, only cares about our understanding of our own motivational structure, but the kind of argument he gives is one that one could open up to talk about all of discourse. And I was concerned to give a counter-argument to that kind of radicalization of a genealogical argument. But I doubt that those considerations are gonna help much with the concerns that you had.
[01:22:18] INTERVIEWER:
I think there will be time for one more question, yes?
[01:22:21] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I really enjoyed your talk, both feeling that it was a pleasure to follow and equally to be challenged by your bringing up case law as a paradigm of this normative process. Made me think of my own experience as a musician, and it seems like there’s a lot of richness in using that as a way of understanding the tradition. Particularly, I think, in the Western tradition, where you have both a written artifact from the past and this tradition of interpretation and this living quality of it.
Very stimulating and enjoyable. Thank you.
[01:22:55] PROFESSOR BRANDOM:
Oh, good. Uh, I mean, I put in the Eliot quote at, at the end to indicate that this, this isn’t all about copper, you know? That there’s, or strict liability or whatever.
This is supposed to be a story about concepts as such, and in particular if there’s any, go to the normative fine structure distinctive of tradition, which is one of the things I’m saying Hegel has a lot to teach us about, then that’s gonna be true in artistic traditions absolutely as much as in jurisprudential or uh, scientific ones.
[01:23:31] JAY WALLACE:
And that’s all we have time for today. Um, remember Bob Brandon will be talking again in the philosophy department tomorrow on what was the topic? It was about modal logic and expressivism together again. But please join me in thanking him for a very stimulating discussion today.
(applause)
