The Social Institution of Discursive Norms

Historical, Naturalistic, and Pragmatic Perspectives

Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall, Hans Bernhard Schmid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Lenguaje en filosofía

The essays in this collection explore the idea that discursive norms—the norms governing our thought and talk—are profoundly social. Not only do these norms govern and structure our social interactions, but they are sustained by a variety of social and institutional structures.

The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. The first offers historical perspectives on discursive norms, including a chapter by Robert Brandom on the way Hegel transformed Kant's normativist approach to representation by adding both a social and a historicist dimension to it. Section II features four chapters that examine the sociality of normativity from within a broadly naturalistic framework. The third and final section focuses on the social dimension of linguistic phenomena such as online speech acts, oppressive speech, and assertions.

The Social Institution of Discursive Norms will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy.

1 Introduction

Themes in the Study of Human Cognition as a Social Phenomenon

Preston Stovall and Leo Townsend

1 Introduction

Anglophone philosophy in the last three decades has seen a growing interest in the way participation in human society—as characterized by our doing things that count as taking up and conferring norm-governed roles within institutions like language, the law, social custom, and education—is part of what explains our existence as rational (to whatever extent we are) animals. If we use the label discursive norms to refer to the standards of evaluation that attend the exercise of rational thought and agency, this development in philosophy can be understood as a growing interest in the social institution of discursive norms. The essays in this volume present a sample—by no means representative—of the sorts of issues that arise when we ask and look to answer questions about the ways our social lives constrain and support our lives as rational animals.

The qualification animals is important. Human beings are by nature curious, and we take joy in learning things about the world around us. The good life for the human being involves having a sense of both reflective and immediate familiarity with one’s corner of the world—from the neighborhoods we call “home,” to the trades and day-to-day occupations that keep us alive, to our place among the stars. The intentionality of cognition, the structure it has as the kind of thing that it is, induces two sorts of understanding of our place in the world: one has a mind-world direction of fit, and the other has a world-mind direction of fit. The former kind of cognition is aimed at (or has as its success conditions) accurate representations of the way things are; the latter is aimed at (or is successful when) changing the world so as to bring it into accord with the mind (this is not to deny that an episode of cognition may involve both sorts of intentionality). Crucially, both mind-world and world-mind intentionality occur in singular and plural forms: we can individually and collectively wonder, debate, know, etc., both what to think and what to do. And by the end of the first year of life, human infants rapidly develop the ability to share affective, cognitive, and practical mental states that by the end of the third year of life have equipped us with capacities for shared intentional activity that are unlike anything so far seen in the rest of the animal kingdom (more on this in a moment).

As the consummate tool-using animal, human beings have had practical facility with manipulating things to achieve our ends well back into our evolutionary ancestry. But it is only with a systematic tradition of knowledge accumulation and transmission that we have been able to build up the reservoir of understanding necessary for advancing the picture of our place in the cosmos that goes beyond the affective- practical stance we inherit as the hominids we are. Institutions of study and knowledge dissemination can be likened to the arches of an aqueduct built to transfer the contents of that reservoir across generations. These institutions do the loadbearing work needed to ensure the rivers of scientific understanding deliver their waters from one time and place to the next. Institutions do not arise ex nihilo, however, and the successful exercise of institutional agency requires knowledge of the principles that delimit what counts as successful—just as knowledge of the principles of architecture and masonry is required for successfully constructing an aqueduct.

It follows that an understanding of ourselves as rational animals must be an understanding that develops at least in part through a study of the institutional structures that make us into the rational animals we are. And with an understanding of the institutional background to human life, we might hope to be better equipped to exercise individual and shared agency within these structures so as to achieve the ends we set for ourselves. Toward this common goal of developing both our mind-world and world-mind familiarity with and understanding of ourselves and our place in the world, the essays collected here present historical, naturalist, and social-pragmatic perspectives on the way our existence as rational animals is conditioned by our existence as social animals. In the rest of this introduction, we provide an overview of some of the themes that figure centrally in these three perspectives, or points of orientation around which they revolve—principally in the history of philosophy, in recent developments in the evolutionary and biological sciences, and in the significance this research has on questions of social concern—before closing with outlines of the essays themselves.

2 Central Themes

2.1 Themes from the History of Philosophy

That we are norm-enforcing and norm-creating animals, and that human cognition can only be understood inside the nexus of evaluation we collectively recognize and sanction as binding on ourselves, is a discovery that can be understood as having resulted from an extended conversation in the history of philosophy. Four philosophers whose voices recur across the last two centuries of that conversation are Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, C.S. Peirce, and Wilfrid Sellars. That Kant held a normative conception of human cognition is evident in both his theoretical philosophy, e.g., in this statement from the section “On the transcendental power of judgment in general” from the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1998, A132/B171; emphasis in the original):

If the understanding in general is explained as the faculty of rules, then the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of determining whether something stands under a given rule (casus datae legis) or not.

and in his practical philosophy, e.g., from this passage in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1996, 66, AK 4:412, emphasis in the original):

Every thing in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the faculty to act in accordance with the representation of laws, i.e., in accordance with principles, or a will.

While concepts are things that can be applied in all sorts of ways, they should be applied only in some, and the very possibility of being in error about the world necessitates thinking of cognition in normative terms. It follows that the rational application of a concept is one that involves some understanding of how that concept should be used—the successful exercise of mind-world intentionality in judgment involves a successful exercise of world-mind intentionality in self-government, or obedience to the commands of reason. For an act of judgment or volition counts as rational only insofar as it proceeds from or presupposes some recognition of the rule enjoining it.

For Kant, the most general rules delimiting the successful operation of human cognition are to be read off of the logical structure of judgment. This presents an argument about the way the world is or must appear to us to be, but it is an argument arrived at by reflection on cognition: the ability to think, e.g., about objects and their causal properties is conditioned by the ability to make subject-predicate judgments under the strong alethic modality “necessarily.” In order to understand what it means for the world to be a place of objects and properties in causal relationships, then, we must understand first what it means to think in terms of subjects, predicates, and modalities. We owe both this normative understanding of human cognition, and this reflective method for divining the rules that govern rational thought and action, largely to Kant.

Hegel recognized that whereas Kant conceived of concepts as rules for judging, they could also be conceived as rules for inferring. This is illustrated perhaps most vividly in Hegel’s understanding of concepts for individuals, particulars, and universals not in terms of the way they compose into different judgments (as was commonly supposed), but instead in terms of their roles as middle terms mediating inferences for, respectively, inductive, deductive, and analogical syllogisms (see Stovall 2020). And whereas Kant thought of the logical structure of cognition as a static transcendental delimitation for human knowledge fixed once and for all, Hegel thought of human cognition as having a dynamic historical dimension along which it and our understanding of its categorial structure developed. Because Hegel conceives social institutions as the media through which human understanding develops, and because the development of human understanding is at the same time a development of who we are as historical persons, Hegel recognizes that our understanding of human understanding has to come by way of an understanding of human society.

The influence of Kant and Hegel on American philosophy in the second half of the 19th century was widespread, and it left an impression on American philosophy well into the 20th (cf. Schneider 1963 and Kuklick 2001). During this time, the normative conception of human cognition was reframed in terms of developments in biology. This trend is exemplified in the work of Charles Peirce and Wilfrid Sellars. Peirce coined the view “pragmatism” on the basis of Kant’s use of pragmatisch (Peirce 1931–58, 5.412), and he shared with Kant the view that human cognition is to be understood in normative terms, while he shared with Hegel an interest in situating human cognition in a social and developmental context (see Kiryushchenko, this volume). But, in step with his time, Peirce adopted the framework of Darwinian biology as a basis for reconceiving that normativity and its social background (see Stovall 2016 for more on the historical development from Kant and Hegel, through Darwin, to Peirce and Sellars). From (Peirce 1931–58, 6.20):

When we think, we are conscious that a connection between feelings is determined by a general rule, [that is] we are aware of being governed by a habit.

And like Kant, Peirce thought that the ability of the mind to cotton on to the world depends upon its ability to track the modal contour of objects and their properties in space and time, but he understood this ability as one that is localized in the central nervous system.¹

For his part, Sellars took himself to be carrying out a Kantian project as well—the subtitle of his Science and Metaphysics is “Variations on Kantian Themes,” and Richard Rorty recalls that Sellars characterized his (Sellars’) work as an effort to “usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage” (Sellars 1956, 3). Rather than supposing our modal knowledge of the world was a problem that we had to provide some explanation for (as it was for Hume), Sellars argued that we should instead see the ability to reason in modal contexts as a condition on the possibility of knowledge of objects in space and time (as Kant argued). Our philosophical focus then shifts from questioning how we come to know that the world has the modal shape it does, to an examination of the way our modally robust reasoning constrains the way we understand anything about the world at all. From “Inference and Meaning” (Sellars 1953, 15–16, emphasis in the original):

…even though material subjunctive conditionals may be dispensable, permitting the object language to be extensional, it may nevertheless be the case that the function performed in natural languages by material subjunctive conditionals is indispensable, so that if it is not performed in the object language by subjunctive conditionals, it must be performed by giving direct expression to material rules of inference in the meta-language. In other words, where the object language does not permit us to say “If a were φ, it would be ψ” we can achieve the same purpose by saying “‘ψa’ may be inferred from ‘φa.’”

And from “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities” (Sellars 1958, §79, emphasis in the original):

Once the tautology “The world is described by descriptive concepts” is freed from the idea that the business of all non-logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an ungrudging recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to second-class citizenship in discourse, are not inferior, just different.

This is a view that Sellars arrived at fairly early in his philosophical development. Of his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the mid-1930s, he writes (1975, 285):

I had already broken with traditional empiricism by my realistic approach to the logical, causal, and deontological modalities. What was needed was a functional theory of concepts which would make their role in reasoning, rather than a supposed origin in experience, their primary feature. The influence of Kant was to play a decisive role.

Sellars’ work develops other themes from Kant, Hegel, and Peirce. For Sellars, a reflective stance on the categories of cognition—categories like modality, inference, and non-logical concept—opens up into a study of the logic of scientific inquiry, as Hegel and Peirce both argued in their theories of syllogistic inference (the syllogistic figure Hegel labelled “analogy” was dubbed by Peirce “hypothesis,” and in his later work this form of inference was assimilated to abduction). And like Kant, Sellars thought that moral cognition should be understood through the categories of practical rationality. But like Hegel, he supposed that moral laws are ones a society imposes on itself in the guise of its collective identity, for he understood moral cognition as an exercise in shared intentionality: to think one ought to do A in C is to have a thought of the same kind as we shall do A in C. Like Peirce, however, he thought that human cognition had to be conceived (at least in part, and at least for some purposes) in terms of neural activity. Sellars held, for instance, that the ability to know the world in the ways we do turns on the ability of our neural states (ultimately processes) to reliably co-vary with—or picture in Sellars’ terminology—the objects and properties (ultimately processes) that populate the world as we understand it. This is a kind of isomorphic subjunctively stable relationship between two kinds of spatio-temporal-causal structure that underlies and makes possible the mind-world intentionality of human cognition. As we will see below, a similar kind of isomorphic picturing relationship appears to underlie the world-mind intentionality of human cognition as well, though this is something we have on...