Reading Brandom

On A Spirit of Trust

Gilles Bouché, Gilles Bouché

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000753073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Robert Brandom's rationalist philosophy of language, expounded in his highly influential Making It Explicit, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, establishing him as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom presents the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Hegel. He submits that the Phenomenology of Spirit holds not only many lessons for today's philosophy of language, but also a moral lesson much needed in today's increasingly polarized societies, in the form of a postmodern ethics of trust.

In this outstanding collection, leading philosophers examine and assess A Spirit of Trust. Thetwelve specially commissioned chapters explore topics including:

• negation and truth
• empirical and speculative concepts
• experience
• conflict and recognition
• varieties of idealism
• premodern ethical life and modern alienation
• a postmodern ethics of trust.

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Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust is essential reading for all students and scholars of Brandom's work and those in philosophy of language. It will also be important reading for those studying nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

PART I

Semantics

1

Brandom on Hegel on negation

Robert B. Pippin

I

The many parts of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust interlock in such an organic way that it seems manifestly unfair to single out a topic in isolation and spend a few pages trying to understand and assess it. But unless there is someone who can get it all into economical focus in one article better than I can even imagine, this is the task for all of us. I have announced: “Brandom on Hegel on Negation.” Let me start with Hegel.

In the Jena Phenomenology, Hegel already speaks of “the tremendous power of the negative” and simply identifies it with “the energy of thinking, of the pure I” (PG/P, §32). But also, in the first edition of the Science of Logic, he calls negation “the truly real and being-in-itself [das wahrhafte Reale und Ansichseyn],” and writes that negativity is the “abstract foundation of all philosophical ideas and speculative thinking in general,” and that it is only in our time, the “new time,” that we have even begun to understand it (GW 11, p. 77).¹ When, in the last volume of the Logic, he comments on this “new” understanding of his, he is as clear about its supreme importance as he is difficult to understand:

Now the negativity just considered constitutes the turning point of the movement of the concept. It is the simple point of the negative self-reference, the innermost source of all activity [Tätigkeit], of living and spiritual self-movement [Selbstbewegung]; it is the dialectical soul which everything true possesses and through which alone it is true; for on this subjectivity [Subjektivität] alone rests the sublation [Aufhebung] of the opposition between concept and reality, and the unity which is truth.

(GW 12, p. 246)

Brandom interprets this speculative notion of negativity as “a process that is mediated by the relations of material incompatibility and consequence” (ST, p. 42). He calls Hegel’s concept of determinate negation Hegel’s most fundamental conceptual tool, and it is such negation that he defines in terms of “material incompatibility and consequence,” and he insists that the general normativity of material inferences is irreducible to the normativity of formal principles alone. There is no doubt that this tracks something crucial to Hegel. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that negativity is to be understood “not as change, nor yet as nullity, but as difference or determination” (GW 8, p. 80, my translation).

Brandom’s central idea is that determinate negation is a modal issue, a matter of alethic modalities, concerned with material modalities in reality (accounted for by a “modal realism”) of necessity, possibility, and impossibility. By “modal” Brandom means to point to the fact that theoretical cognition of the world, even empirical description, relies on words that are not mere descriptions, but, for example, articulations of laws that support robust counterfactual inferences, necessitation, preclusion, and that our descriptions, quoting Sellars, are only descriptions (and not “labels”) “in the space of implications” (ST, p. 761).² Or:

The determinateness of a thought or state of affairs (predicate or property) is a matter of its modally robust exclusion of other thoughts or states of affairs, those it is materially incompatible with.

(ST, p. 95)³

The basic unit of intelligibility is the judgment, understood by Brandom as, essentially, a commitment. (He says that judgments are “the smallest unit for which one can take cognitive responsibility” (ST, p. 68). He also says that his use of “commitment” tracks Hegel on “setzen” (ST, p. 63, n. 1).⁴ Brandom’s full theory of intentionality is that it is functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normatively regulated, and socially pragmatist; far too much to consider here.⁵) But there is no doubt that one important element in understanding the possible content of any such commitment is an understanding of the possibility of conceptual content. And the most important element in the possibility of such content is that any entitled wielder of such a concept is just thereby (by having understood its content, by having come to possess and be able to use the concept) extruding material incompatibilities and finding and endorsing further material commitments.

According to this conception, to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility (“determinate negation”) and material consequence (“mediation”) with other such contentful items (ST, p. 42).⁶ These incompatibilities are not modeled on predicate or sentence negation. Something’s being a square excludes its being an aspiration or an episode in the civil war, but these are “indeterminate negations” and locate the subject in that infinitely other logical space of everything that is not a square. (This is what traditional logic called an “infinite” judgment.) But knowing that a square is not a circle (that it is not a non-square, it excludes that possibility), or that something cannot be red and green all over, or that Pittsburgh’s being west of Harrisburg and Harrisburg’s being west of Philadelphia means that Pittsburgh is west of Philadelphia is determinately informative, and the inferences are not formal-logical. (Red and square are different, but compatible properties; square and circle are different but incompatible; two different kinds of differences.) These material incompatibilities and material consequences are normative requirements on understanding the content being the content it is. They have to do with the coherent thinking of these contents, but they involve no reference to the psychology of thinking. In a Fregean mode, one could say, as Brandom does, that thoughts stand in these relations, not psychological thinking-events, as long as we recall that a thought is what is, when true, a fact. (As Hegel would have it, this is to consider a thought in a logical mode, in terms of the logic of “pure thinking.” This is precisely not to consider it a mental episode, a temptation Hegel thought Kant gave in to, against his better philosophical nature.) Having noted that, when all goes well, what we know is what is the case, Brandom also notes that Hegel wants to understand what we should say about cases where all does not go well, or where we do not yet know how things are going. That is, in the Phenomenology, where the question is “how it is for the subject” when things are unsettled or error occurs, Hegel wants to discuss the relation between how things seem to be, or appearances, and how they are, really, and Hegel shows how he can have a position on this that does not rely on Kant’s “confirmation” by extra-conceptual intuitions.

But, as in the two original Hegel quotations, this all concerns not just thinking. Facts or states of affairs stand to each other in these relations as well. The “logical” relations simply reflect the way the world is conceptually structured. So, on the object side, we have alethic modal relations, and, on the subjective side, we have deontic normative relations: what we ought to extrude, and what we ought to undertake. They are both “two sides of one coin.” More precisely formulated:

Hegel sees the deontic normative sense of “incompatible” and “consequence” that articulates the attitudes of knowing subjects and the alethic modal sense of those terms that articulates objective facts as deeply related. They are different forms that one identical conceptual content can take.

(ST, p. 3)⁷

Now this sort of conceptual or modal realism is only one of a triplicity of general characterizations that Brandom thinks we have to understand together if we are to understand Hegel. I won’t have time to go into them and will concentrate on this modal realism, but the rest of the picture should be noted. There is first objective idealism, defined as “a reciprocal sense-dependence of the concepts articulating the objective things and relations and the concepts articulating the subjective thoughts and practices of understanding consciousness itself” (ST, p. 209). The modally real impossibilities and implications would still exist even if there were no subjects around, but the sense or meaning of these determinations depends on our way of identifying them, as the determinate meaning of a fact could be said to depend on the meaning of the content of an assertion, particulars on the behavior of singular terms, and so forth. (It might be worth noting here that Hegel would not say that this is a relation of dependence, but identity, which Brandom sometimes suggests, as in “two sides of the same coin,” and he would ultimately not want to describe one side of the identity as “subjective,” if that is meant in any psychological sense. A great deal will ultimately depend on this, but it is not germane to the issue we are tracking.⁸) And finally there is conceptual idealism, where Brandom’s pragmatic reading of Hegel begins to be more detectable. This aspect arises with the question:

Should this whole constellation of objective conceptual relations and subjective conceptual practices and processes be understood in terms of the relational categories of objectivity or the practical-processual categories of subjectivity?

(ST, p. 369)

The answer is the latter. These practical-purposive processes, the “instituting” processes of purposive action and intentional agency, are what have the priority, raised as a question in what was just quoted. (This aspect of Brandom’s position is worth a conference all by itself, since it involves his reading of Hegel’s summative position in the Science of Logic, in which the Absolute Idea is the unity of the practical and theoretical idea. Since we lack a chapter on the Logic, I will rely later on Brandom’s article about logical and empirical concepts, but in a way too limited to broach any issue about the Absolute.)

The way in which Brandom discusses the side of deontic normative relations touches on quite a puzzling issue and gives us a way, I want to say a partial way, of understanding it; that is, Hegel’s frequent invocations of resolve and drive, of excitation, pulsation, and movement in the Phenomenology and the Logic. An attractive feature of Brandom’s approach is that this aspect is built into the theory of conceptual content itself (again, as throughout, if we do not think of these activities as psychological events, but as expressing the normative proprieties inherent in commitments as such). He claims that Hegel is building on an idea of Kant’s:

the responsibility in question should be understood as a kind of task responsibility: it is the responsibility to do something. What one is responsible for doing in committing oneself to p is integrating that new commitment into the constellation of prior commitments, so as to sustain its exhibition of the kind of unity distinctive of apperception.

(ST, pp. 67f.)⁹

The concept of negation (incompatibility) in terms of which we should understand determinateness (whether of subjective thought or of objective fact) essentially involves a principle of motion, of change, of active, practical doing—as odd as this seems from the point of view of the logical tradition indigenous to Verstand (ST, pp. 688ff.).

Let me sum up the preceding. Brandom’s approach has the advantage of giving us one coherent way of understanding the position, clearly Hegel’s, that negation should not be understood as a mere logical operator. The world is “full of negation”; that is, in Brandom’s interpretation (and in his own view), objects and events stand in modally robust relations of exclusion and implication, all such that understanding the world imposes deontic normative requirements on anyone asserting anything about it. This definitely tracks something of importance to Hegel. As Hegel’s remarks on Kant’s Antinomies show, he greatly admired Kant’s treatment of negation in a substantive or material rather than an exclusively formal respect. In the way Kant thinks of it, p and ~p are formally contradictory, but if p is “The stone smells good” and ~p is “The stone does not smell good,” they are not contradictories, however it seems formally, but contraries. Stones have no smell; that predicate is excluded, impossible. (This is a point put to great use by Michael Wolff in his important book on contradiction.¹⁰)

Now for some qualifications. The limitation of the approach (or its merely introductory status) is that the position is most often oriented from “ground-level” cases of, largely...