Practices of Reason

Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientific Image

Ladislav Koreň

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

This book offers new insights into the nature of human rational capacities by engaging inferentialism with empirical research in the cognitive sciences.

Inferentialism advocates that humans' unique kind of intelligence is discursive and rooted in competencies to make, assess and justify claims. This approach provides a rich source of valuable insights into the nature of our rational capacities, but it is underdeveloped in important respects. For example, little attempt has been made to assess inferentialism considering relevant scientific research on human communication, cognition or reasoning. By engaging philosophical and scientific approaches in a productive dialogue, this book shows how we can better understand human rational capacities by comparing their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this vein, the author critically revisits and constructively develops central themes from the work of Robert Brandom and other "language rationalists": the nature of the assertoric practice and its connection to reasoned discourse, the linguistic constitution of the shared space of reasons, the social nature and function of reasoning, the intersubjective roots of social-normative practices and the nature of objective thought.

Practices of Reason will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic.

1 Introduction

1.1 What, Why and How?

We humans are not the only gregarious and intelligent animals. But our kind of (ultra-)sociality is extraordinarily complex. The scope and scale of our coordination, cooperation and division of labor is unprecedented. We culturally elaborate complex foraging, technological, religious, moral and political practices. And we scaffold and teach our offspring to master and navigate them. Our intelligence keeps pace. We articulate and share our thoughts and choices in language. And we assess, justify and modify them in light of evidence, reasons, values or norms. No other terrestrial species does that.

The phenomenon of human sapience, as I shall conceive of it in this book, combines both these aspects of sociality and intelligence. But what is the relation between them?

One prima facie possibility is that our extraordinary intelligence explains our complex sociality. We are individually capable of feats that other animals are not capable of. We excel at causal analysis of the world.¹ Based on this, we manufacture and manipulate sophisticated tools. We count and calculate. Last but not least, we systematically and productively talk, think and reason in sentences. Arguably, all this disposes us to flexibly come to terms with new challenges and opportunities arising in our rapidly changing environments, which we actively transform and engineer to begin with.

Note, however, that in their human-unique form, the aforementioned cognitive skills are culturally fine-tuned and learned. For example, other animals count in the sense that they can reliably discriminate quantities of up to three or four items.² We, too, are capable of this feat early in infancy. So this may be a biological design of Mother Nature. But only we elaborate and learn conventional systems of recursive counting. Mastery of such systems (practices) vastly expands our cognitive possibilities. Much the same holds for other mentioned skills shaped by Mother Culture. Unaided by them, our individual intelligence may be impressive, but it is arguably not nearly as impressive.³ In the early phase of our development, we do not outperform other higher primates across cognitive domains.⁴ Yet what markedly differentiates us from early on is our cultural environment and the socially scaffolded development of our cognitive and agential skills. We depend on and learn a lot of our adaptive know-how and know that from competent or knowledgeable others. A great deal of it prepares us to cope with the challenges and opportunities of life in environments transformed by our social-cultural activities. To keep pace with such transformations, occurring at a faster temporal scale than biological evolution, much of the relevant practical or theoretical knowledge must be transmitted through social learning and teaching. But our minds are not blank slates. Current research indicates that we are predisposed to process social stimuli (voices, faces, smiles, looks, etc.), which prepares us to interact, communicate with and learn from others.⁵ Based on this, we acquire and make use of various cultural-cognitive designs. And we eventually become capable of sophisticated feats across cognitive and problem-solving domains.

This suggests another possibility: our unique forms of intelligent behavior may reflect our specific social and communicative ways of life. To drive the point home, consider a distinctive mark of our kind of higher intelligence: we are capable of assessing and managing our views and doings in terms of their credentials and treating them as providing reasons for or against other things that we might believe or do. This trait does not seem to have parallels in the animal realm. Why is this? Extant scientific views hypothesize that it may originally have evolved in the public domain of communicative interaction, rather than in the private domain of solitary thinking.⁶ For instance, our ancestors could have started to focus on and assess their views or doings in light of reasons primarily within social-communicative exchanges in order to convince others to accept or do something, or to arrive with others at such conclusions. Ranging from hunter-gatherers to civilized societies, such practices and corresponding abilities are ubiquitous and play a vital role in the social-collective ways of the lives of human beings. The idea is that they could have evolved to serve some useful purpose for our socially and cognitively interdependent ancestors, such as coordinating or sustaining communicative exchange, pooling information, or participating in cooperative decision making. On this picture, primordial forms of assessment of thoughts and doings in light of reasons might have coevolved with linguistic communication to serve such functions, secondarily being co-opted also for private ratiocination.⁷

Robert Brandom and fellow theorists have elaborated a congenial idea from a philosophical perspective: our unique kind of intelligence is discursive, being rooted in competences to take part in intersubjective practices of giving, taking and asking for reasons that consist of making, assessing, probing, defending and revising claims.⁸ This, indeed, is considered the original form of our peculiar sensitivity and responsiveness to “the force of the better reason.” Private (including purely internal) forms of taking account of reasons for (against) something actually presuppose and internalize those practices and abilities. Such rational practices and competences do not emerge ex nihilo. They build on more basic perceptual, cognitive and agential dispositions of sorts. This, I submit, is consistent with distinguishing different grades of sensitivity to evidence, where the lower grades (underlying flexible goal-directed behavior) may well be available to nonhuman animals or prelinguistic humans. Presumably, capacities of treating performances as moves in a space of reasons coevolved with linguistic-communicative capacities based on some kind of prior cognition and sensitivity to evidence. But once in place, they afford a brand-new mode of conceptual thinking and reasoning not available antecedently or independently. So, this can be interpreted as a transformative conception of human intelligence.

In my opinion, this approach (aka inferentialism) is a rich source of valuable insights into the nature of our rational capacities. But it is underdeveloped in important respects. Thus, its advocates have rarely been concerned with asking why or how human beings develop or acquire such abilities on phylogenetic or ontogenetic scales based on what kind of social, communicative and cognitive skills. Brandom, for instance, is explicit in that he aims to say what doing the “trick consists in” (i.e., what it takes to make norm-governed moves in a space of reasons), not how the trick is performed by or implemented in our minds.⁹ Nor, for that matter, is he concerned with theorizing, in a genealogical manner, why or how our forebears could have developed such a feat. Relatedly, little attempt has been made to assess the credentials of this approach in light of scientific research on human communication, cognition or reasoning.

This is both a lacuna and a missed opportunity. First, this view of human rational capacities is bound to be incomplete if it ignores these questions. Second, it had better be consistent with empirical findings about relevant capacities. Third, scientific conceptions of the nature of our rational capacities may be incomplete or problematic. And philosophical analysis may provide resources to complement or correct them.

This book aims at partially filling this lacuna. Approaching those neglected questions in a naturalistic spirit, I develop this view of human rational capacities in new and hopefully fruitful directions. The questions unifying all the chapters included in the book are why and how socially and cognitively interdependent human beings could have elaborated the “trick,” what kind of skills are required for it and how they develop across ontogeny? To address these questions, I bring to bear the philosophical method of pragmatic genealogy to reconstruct the raison d’être and constitution of the core discursive-rational practices and capacities. And I pay close attention to the cutting-edge scientific research on the origin, function and ontogeny of human social-cognitive and reasoning capacities. By engaging philosophical and scientific approaches in a cross-fertilizing dialogue and comparing their respective strengths and weaknesses, I aim to show how we can gain a better understanding of human rational capacities. In this vein, I critically revisit and constructively develop central themes resurfacing in the work of Brandom and other prominent “language rationalists”¹⁰: the nature of assertoric practice and its connection to reasoned discourse, the linguistic elaboration of the space of reasons, the social nature of reasoning, the intersubjective roots of social-normative practices and the nature of objective thought.

To my knowledge, there is no book that covers the same ground from this perspective. But I should say that I have no ambition (nor faith enough) to re-conceptualize in this vein some philosophical system as a whole. The philosophical view of human rational capacities as I broadly characterized it can be explored and developed in this promising naturalistic direction in a problem-based manner, often independently of other theoretical commitments also associated with it. In particular, intriguing proposals regarding the social origin and normative structure of human discursive practices and abilities are often interesting independently of a specific version of the inferential-role semantics advocated by Brandom and others. Don’t get me wrong. I do think there is something to be said for the inferentialist approach to semantics as a viable alternative or complement to mainstream approaches based ...