The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians

The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity

SERIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

Editorial Board

Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon

Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body

David Carr, Emory University

James Dodd, New School University

Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University

José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University†

Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University

William R. McKenna, Miami University

Algis Mickunas, Ohio University

J. N. Mohanty, Temple University

Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis

Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima

Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz

Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy

Elizabeth Ströker, Universität Köln†

Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College

Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

International Advisory Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Université de Paris†

Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent

Albert Borgmann, University of Montana

Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute

Richard Grathoff, Universität Bielefeld

Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg†

David Rasmussen, Boston College

John Sallis, Boston College

John Scanlon, Duquesne University

Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Carlo Sini, Università di Milano

Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve

D. Lawrence Wieder†

Dallas Willard, University of Southern California

The Intentional Spectrum

and Intersubjectivity

Phenomenology and the

Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians

MICHAEL D. BARBER

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS      ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

© 2011 by Ohio University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barber, Michael D., 1949—

The intentional spectrum and intersubjectivity : phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians /

by Michael D. Barber.

   p. cm. — (Series in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-1961-8 (hard : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-8214-4368-2 (electronic)

1. Perception (Philosophy) 2. McDowell, John Henry. 3. Brandom, Robert. 4. Phenomenology. I. Title.

B1647.M144B37 2011

121’.34—dc22

2011000788

For Charlie, Dave, Eleonore, Ollie, and Susie

CONTENTS

Preface

1   The Debate about Perception: Inferentialism, Representationalism, and Intelligible Empirical Content

1. Representationalism versus Inferentialism

2. The Intelligibility of Empirical Content

2   The Debate about Perception: Rational Constraint, Phenomenology, and Interiorization

1. The Question of Rational Constraint

2. Experience in McDowell and a Phenomenological Elaboration

3. Rational Constraint: Critique

4. Interiorization

3   The Fullness of Perception

1. McDowell’s Disjunctivist Account of Perception

2. McDowell on Nonconceptual Content

4   Tradition and Discourse, I-We and I-Thou: McDowell and Brandom on Intersubjectivity

1. Intersubjectivity and the Debate on Perception

2. I-We Intersubjectivity, Its Ethical Dimensions, and the I-Thou Relationship

3. Self-Reflective Methodology and I-Thou Relationships

4. Ethical Intersubjectivity: Older than Epistemic Intersubjectivity

5   McDowell’s Wittgensteinian Quietism

1. Interiorization and Metaphilosophy

2. McDowell’s Nonconstructivism

3. McDowell and Natural Science

6   Self-Reflectivity, Radical Reflection, and Consciousness: Brandom’s Philosophy of Philosophy

1. Self-Reflectivity: Ultimacy and Essentiality

2. Theorizing the Pretheoretical

3. A Philosophy of Language or of Consciousness?

7   The Levels of Ethics

1. McDowell: Ethics and Practical Rationality

2. An Alternative View of Ethical Experience and Practical Rationality

3. A Discursive Ethics of Principles

8   Phenomenology, the Intentional Spectrum, and Intersubjectivity

1. Phenomenology and the Intentional Spectrum: The Perceptual Pole

2. Phenomenology and the Intentional Spectrum: The Eidetic-Theoretic Reflective Pole

3. Points of Tension: Intersubjectivity and Ethics

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Over the last twenty years the University of Pittsburgh has been the site of some of the most exciting philosophical work in the world. Drawing inspiration from the work of Wilfrid Sellars, his successors in the Pittsburgh Philosophy Department, John McDowell and Robert Brandom, have sought to realize his legacy and debated its significance. Both McDowell and Brandom are in agreement in different ways with Sellars, who opposes what he takes to be a myth that some perceptual given independent of a conceptual network forms the foundation of empirical knowledge.¹ As Sellars puts it, "One could not have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well.² For example, the place that such a conceptually grasped fact has within a more encompassing conceptual network (e.g., knowing that something is green involves also knowing it is not red and is colored). This rejection of the myth of the given reminds one of G. W. F. Hegel’s crucial discussion in the Sense-Certainty" segment of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which he opposes the empiricist view that one can get at a particular without a universal, a concept, of some kind, even if only a universally applicable indexical concept such as here or now.³ It is for this reason that Richard Rorty has dubbed this second generation of Pittsburgh philosophers (including John Haugeland, who has subsequently moved to the University of Chicago), the Pittsburgh School of Neo-Hegelians,⁴ a denomination that Brandom proudly applies to himself and McDowell.⁵

Despite their being subsumed under a common classification, McDowell and Brandom have developed their own distinctive philosophical viewpoints. In addition, they have engaged each other in an intriguing and intricate three-round debate on perception. The first round appeared in a 1997 issue of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (cited hereafter as PPR), dedicated to a discussion of Brandom’s central work, Making It Explicit (cited hereafter as MIE). In this issue, one finds a précis of Brandom’s work, including a response by McDowell titled Brandom on Representation and Inference and Brandom’s replies to McDowell. The exchanges of the second stage of the argument, published among a series of papers in PPR in 1998, included an exchange between Brandom and McDowell, but an expanded version of Brandom’s criticism of McDowell and another response by McDowell appeared in a volume titled Perception, edited by Enrique Villanueva.⁶ This 1998 issue of PPR commenced with McDowell’s précis of Mind and World (cited hereafter as M&W), continued with Brandom’s critical essay "Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,⁷ and terminated with McDowell’s Reply to Brandom.⁸ The final stage of the debate on perception started with McDowell’s Knowledge and the Internal,⁹ and this essay was accompanied by Brandom’s critical piece, Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons.¹⁰ These two articles can be taken as pertaining to a later phase of the debate because this discussion was drawn to a finish by McDowell’s 2002 essay, Knowledge and the Internal Revisited.¹¹ In that essay, McDowell makes the case that Brandom’s entire approach, which is marked by a certain skepticism toward common sense, ends up cutting commonsense perceivers off from the world, that is, interiorizing"¹² their beliefs about the world, as will be explained below.

I will trace this debate in chapters 1 and 2 under three technical rubrics that will be fully explained later and that have been alluded to in the brief account of the rounds and articles above: representationalism versus inferentialism, the intelligibility of empirical content, and rational constraint. The first issue has to do with whether one’s epistemic relationship with the world begins with the effort to represent the world or with the inferential network without which representations cannot be linguistically expressed. While representationalism risks being linguistically naïve, inferentialism is in danger of enclosing itself within a set of linguistically interconnected inferences that may never make direct contact with the world, in other words, a kind of linguistic idealism. The second topic concerns how conceptual capacities are involved in our engagement with the world, that is, whether they function in isolation from sensation processes, especially if those processes are causally explained, or whether we have access to some sorts of pure, concept-free givens that are in some impossible way supposed to justify conceptually formed judgments. Because these forms of isolating conceptual capacities from experience end up jeopardizing the intelligibility of empirical content, which for McDowell must be conceptual in nature to be intelligible, he argues that commonsense concepts are deployed in experience from the start, in receptivity, from within a first-person perspective. The third question deals with whether it is necessary to have experience, conceptually informed as McDowell thinks, validate and constrain higher-level judgments or whether rational constraint by the world can be achieved through an intersubjective process in which we hold each other accountable to the world, as Brandom contends. In my opinion, McDowell accounts better than Brandom for the intelligibility of our rational connection with the empirical world, which I take to be the central issue in their debate on perception and the one in which the other two questions (i.e., representationalism or inferentialism and rational constraint) are rooted. McDowell’s view that conceptual capacities are engaged in experience from the start enables him to explain the intelligibility of empirical content in a way that Brandom, Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, Wilfrid Sellars, and several others cannot. Phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition, with its appreciation for holistic cognitive functioning and its reflective, constitutive methodology that uncovers strata of intentional activity that need not appear separately, is capable of accommodating McDowell’s fruitful and important insight.

It will become clear in considering this debate about perception that both Brandom and McDowell, being the systematic philosophers they are, do not approach the issue of perception and our relationship with the empirical world apart from the broader dimensions of their standpoints. These dimensions, in particular their conceptions of the role of intersubjectivity in knowledge and their philosophies of philosophy, appear repeatedly in all three rounds of the perception debate. Their differences over the place of intersubjectivity in knowing, which have been discussed by them in other venues besides the three-round perception debate, will be considered in chapter 4, where I will favor Brandom’s approach over McDowell’s for reasons that I will explain below.

In addition, one residual issue raised in the third and final stage of the perception debate concerns whether Brandom interiorizes perception, that is, cuts off commonsense perceivers from the world. Such interiorization occurs when a critical, skeptical philosopher adeptly imagines scenarios in which factors hidden from the view of commonsense perceivers (but imagined by the philosopher) lead to the conclusion that they can be deceived without knowing it. As a consequence, the philosophical critics become cautious about affirming if what they experience ever conforms to the way the world is such that they appear to be confined within their own experiences that do not extend to the world itself. This issue raises the deeper question of Brandom’s and McDowell’s philosophies of philosophy, with McDowell upholding common sense and Brandom articulating the basic structures involved in philosophical discourse characterized by a scorekeeper perspective that does not accept uncritically the commitments and entitlements attributed to others. These differing metaphilosophies will be analyzed and compared in chapters 5 and 6.

For our purposes, what is significant is that the central issues present in and emerging from the debate on perception—our perceptual relationship to the world, intersubjectivity, and the philosophy of philosophy—have all been discussed thoroughly within the phenomenological tradition. Drawing on the works of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, and Emmanuel Levinas, I will attempt to bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on this exchange (some of which I have reconstructed) between McDowell and Brandom. I hope to show phenomenologists how their approach to philosophy is highly relevant to this discussion that has gone on in analytic philosophy especially insofar as McDowell has brought to light the importance of experience for understanding how it is possible to have intelligible empirical content at all. In chapters 5 and 6, I also intend to demonstrate (to phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, and those of other persuasions) that phenomenology—particularly Husserl’s understanding that there is an intentional spectrum extending from our perceptual encounter with world and everyday lifeworld experience to self-reflective, transcendental phenomenology—can locate McDowell’s and Brandom’s philosophies of philosophy in relationship to each other and mediate their debate. Furthermore, Husserl’s phenomenology can accommodate, support, and appropriate within itself the insights of both McDowell and Brandom. For example, I will show how phenomenology’s retrogressive reflective method can illuminate how strata of perceptual intentional activity can work in tandem with the actualization of conceptual capacities for McDowell. Finally, I will illustrate how McDowell’s account of conceptual capacities being actualized within receptivity explains a phenomenologically recoverable stratum with the higher-level, linguistic inferential activities constitutive of discourse for Brandom.

In addition, at several points I will introduce criticisms and clarifications of McDowell’s and Brandom’s views that a phenomenological perspective might contribute. For example, though agreeing in many respects with McDowell’s realism about our encounter with the world, I will show in chapter 3 how phenomenology, especially as it is developed by A. D. Smith,¹³ might be used to converge critically with his disjunctivist view of perception, explaining perceptual dimensions of experience (e.g., three dimensionality, kinesis, Anstoss [the resistance (things offer us)]) that can offset the argument from illusion that is focused only on deceptive sensations. While McDowell shows the mistakes that the skeptic makes in arguing from experiences of illusion to the conclusion that nondeceptive experience cannot be distinguished from deceptive experience, Smith develops a more ample account of the perceptual dimensions of perception (beyond mere sensation) that enable us to relate to an object independent of us. Further, Husserl’s approach to verification, constitutive methodology, and his concept of horizon can fill out aspects of perception that McDowell, because he limits himself to the mere cooperation between receptivity and spontaneous conceptualizing, does not develop.

In chapter 4, I will defend Brandom’s views on intersubjectivity against McDowell’s argument that his own I-We approach to intersubjectivity, which consists of a tradition equipping individuals to know on their own, is superior to the I-Thou relationship that he thinks is characteristic of Brandom’s views. In McDowell’s view, Brandom’s account of intersubjectivity amounts to a set of critical individuals keeping one another under surveillance,¹⁴ and it is unhelpful for understanding how sociality underlies our aiming at the world, or objective purport. In refuting McDowell’s criticisms here, I will explain the importance of I-Thou relationships in administering the norms (even the traditional ones) through which knowledge is achieved. Moreover, I will show how Brandom’s approach to epistemic intersubjectivity resembles the primordial ethical intersubjectivity developed by Emmanuel Levinas; how it can exemplify a surprising openness and vulnerability of individuals to each other; and how it, in fact, plays an important role in the question of objective purport.

In chapters 5 and 6, on their respective metaphilosophies, I will suggest that McDowell’s argument on behalf of common sense, which rightly opposes skeptical approaches to it, nevertheless represents a model of Brandom’s scorekeeping model insofar as McDowell keeps score on those who are skeptical of common sense (and who therefore keep score skeptically on it) and thereby indirectly vindicates common sense. McDowell’s scorekeeping, in fact, resembles a kind of recognitional, rather than skeptical, scorekeeping, affirming a knowledge that is already there and does not itself rely on scorekeeping mechanisms, as Brandom exemplifies in his defense of those who know even though they might not be able to provide justifications for their beliefs (e.g., reliable shard identifiers or chicken sexers). I will illustrate that McDowell’s affirmation of common sense depends on a philosophical perspective that is not itself common sense but above it and already en route, therefore, to something like an unacknowledged transcendental-phenomenological perspective on which his critique of scientism depends. Further, I will demonstrate how Brandom’s work rests on phenomenological insight and the striving for an ultimate perspective typical of transcendental phenomenology, which must always be understood at the same time as transcendental intersubjectivity. In addition Brandom’s philosophy requires, if it is to be fully self-reflective, an explanation of the lifeworld, which is the origin of discourse, which Husserl provided for the natural sciences and philosophy itself, and which McDowell recognizes in his apology for common sense.

Chapter 7, The Levels of Ethics, provides a kind of final test case dealing with an area distinct from the epistemic domain in which the debate between McDowell and Brandom has been predominantly conducted, namely, ethics. Here I will show that McDowell’s vindication of common sense leads him to develop a virtue ethics functioning at the lifeworld level in which communities imbue their members with capacities, an Aristotelian second nature, through which they perceive situational moral requirements in a manner parallel to their epistemic capacity to encounter the world rationally. However, on this commonsense level of ethical experience, McDowell, despite his recognition of other-regarding virtues, does not take sufficient account of the ethical force that is involved in experiencing another person and that has been more adequately described by Levinas and by commentators giving a virtue-ethical interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s thought. In ethics as in epistemology, intersubjectivity plays a greater role than McDowell acknowledges. In addition, this summons to accountability by the other in ethical experience can motivate one to provide to this other a theoretical justification of one’s ethical beliefs. McDowell overlooks this possible motivation and his philosophical quietism inclines him against such a theoretical undertaking, which both Husserl and Brandom endorse as a possibility and to different degrees sketch out. Brandom, for example, endorses as a possible direction in which an ethics compatible with his epistemology might be developed, namely, a discourse-ethical approach similar to that of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Once again, because McDowell and Brandom are such systematic philosophers, one sees how the different approaches they take toward perception, metaphilosophy, and intersubjectivity have implications for the kind of ethics they envision.

The concluding chapter, fulfilling a promissory note implicit throughout the book, presents Husserl’s intentional spectrum, encompassing the poles of philosophy that McDowell and Brandom occupy, from the lifeworld perceptual encounter with the world to self-reflective transcendental phenomenology’s philosophy of philosophy. By committing myself to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology (which can be taken to extend from one pole to the other), though, I incur a certain responsibility at least to show how that viewpoint is reconcilable with the other positions that I have taken on in the course of elaborating and criticizing the viewpoints of McDowell and Brandom. For instance, I attempt to show how Levinasian ethics might be integrated with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and how Husserlian transcendental intersubjectivity is compatible with Apel’s transcendental pragmatics (which I utilize in explaining Brandom’s theory of discourse and which underlies Habermas’s discourse ethics that Brandom claims to be compatible with his epistemology). Finally, I suggest how Husserl’s own view of ethics might be compatible with the two-level Levinasian-discourse theory of ethics, whose bare bones are indicated in chapter 7.

One might ask why such a book is important now. Indeed there have been systematic studies of Brandom’s work by Jeremy Wanderer, for example, and of McDowell’s work, particularly by Maximilian de Gaynesford, Tim Thornton, and Richard Gaskin, who have in different places compared and contrasted Brandom’s work with McDowell’s.¹⁵ But I know of no work that has addressed the Brandom-McDowell debate on perception as a starting point from which to trace their rich philosophical encounter as it blossoms across several philosophical areas (e.g., metaphilosophy, the role of intersubjectivity in knowledge, and ethics). Likewise, many respected thinkers in the phenomenological tradition have engaged the work of McDowell, such as Steven Crowell, Walter Hopp, Frode Kjosavik, Jakob Lindgaard, A. D. Smith, and Dallas Willard. A smaller number, such as Crowell or Thorsten Gubatz, who has discussed Brandom’s work from a Heideggerian perspective that is sympathetic to phenomenology, have incorporated Brandom’s questions into their phenomenology.¹⁶ But no one in the phenomenological tradition has considered both McDowell’s and Brandom’s work in relationship to each other and to the phenomenological tradition, as this book does. In addition, several philosophers in the tradition of Jürgen Habermas, including Habermas himself, have devoted much greater attention to Brandom’s thought than phenomenologists have; consequently, this book, by including Brandom as a key interlocutor in this threesome, attempts to redress that lacuna also.¹⁷ In sum, this is the first work to clarify the different systematic approaches of Brandom and McDowell by bringing them into relationship to each other and to consider their philosophical relationship from a systematic phenomenological viewpoint, drawing, particularly, on the spectrum of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and Levinasian ethics. At a time when analytic philosophers and continental philosophies withdraw into separate camps—perhaps because the burgeoning of secondary literature makes it difficult even to keep up with one’s limited field of expertise—this book attempts to cross the boundaries.

Though one might question the accuracy of a particular exposition or argumentation in this three-way dialogue between Brandom, McDowell, and phenomenology, something is gained by endeavoring to examine philosophical encounters systematically, across a variety of issues, something that cannot be seen when one’s interest is too limited to specific, particular arguments. For finely grained arguments, such as those found in the debate between McDowell and Brandom on perception, emerge from a broader, often implicit background and reflect broader philosophical values, strategies, and commitments that become visible only in a systematic encounter between the two of them and between them and phenomenology. Further, phenomenology can learn about itself in this encounter, about the usefulness of its constitutive methodology, the breadth of the intentional spectrum it encompasses, and the value of the ethical approach to intersubjectivity that has been developed under its auspices. In brief, such systematic encounters between different philosophies reveal philosophy itself to be an intersubjective endeavor, for it is only in seriously encountering counterpositions that require that we understand, appreciate, and carefully disagree with that we begin to understand ourselves.

I would like to acknowledge St. Louis University for bestowing on me from 2004 to 2010 the Hotfelder Distinguished Professorship and for providing me with a sabbatical semester in the spring of 2008—without this generous support, this book would never have been possible. Thanks are due to the anonymous reviewer of Ohio University Press for his many fine questions. I am also indebted to Erin Jones and Joshua Anderson for their extensive, careful editorial assistance. I also am indebted to a host of family, friends, and colleagues: David Barber, Timothy and Terrance Barber and their families, Marian Cowan, the late Susie Duckworth, William Hamrick, Tom Kelly, Patti O’Connor, Robert Poirier, Tom Rochford, Ollie Roundtree, Aliyah Roundtree, Bill Rehg, Don Schlichter, Charlie Shelton, Eleonore and Donald Stump, Ted Vitali, and Paul Vu. Without their support and encouragement, I would never have had the fortitude or hope necessary to bring this work to fruition.

CHAPTER 1

THE DEBATE ABOUT PERCEPTION

Inferentialism, Representationalism, and Intelligible Empirical Content

As promised in the preface, I will discuss in these first two chapters the debate between John McDowell and Robert Brandom about perception under three foci: representationalism versus inferentialism, the intelligibility of empirical content, and rational constraint. These issues will frame the structure of these two chapters, and in each case I will exposit what is involved in the issue and where McDowell and Brandom stand, and I will present my critical viewpoint. A fourth issue that arises in the third stage of the debate, interiorization, will be presented in the next chapter and discussed at length in chapter 5, since resolving that issue depends on understanding their philosophies of philosophy.

1. REPRESENTATIONALISM VERSUS INFERENTIALISM

1.1. Inferentialism before Representationalism?

After Brandom’s brief précis of MIE in the first stage of the debate in PPR 57, McDowell’s Brandom on Representation and Inference takes up Brandom’s inferentialist opposition to representationalism. According to McDowell, Brandom opposes representationalism, which involves a kind of naïve directedness of language toward the world insofar as representationalists overlook (or merely confine to an afterthought) how the linguistic contents through which they direct themselves to the world are inferentially related to each other. For example, one might observe a red brick and state, This brick is red, without taking into account the linguistic-conceptual network one presupposes, insofar as red is a color different from green and bricks are rock-like substances different from Jell-O.¹ The worst example of such representationalism, discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein at the outset of the Philosophical Investigations, is St. Augustine’s idea that to understand the language-reality relationship we begin with names semantically related to objects in reality. Augustine seems so preoccupied with representing the world that he fails to understand how language works, since its basic element is the sentence, which brings linguistic terms into relationship with each other and enables us to make moves in a more encompassing language game. Brandom concurs with Wittgenstein that it is incorrect to take for one’s starting point a semantics of words and then to build up to sentences and finally language games. Indeed, the structure of MIE begins by discussing inferentially related assertions long before Brandom analyzes in chapters 6 and 7 the functioning of subsentential parts in his discussions of substitution and anaphora. Furthermore, one of Brandom’s central insights is that at that point where language meets the world—where I designate an object by deploying a demonstrative pronoun such as this, often with a sortal, that is, a classification of some sort, such as pig—I anticipate that subsequent pronouns and tokens can pick up on that designation. This can be rudimentarily exhibited in the simple sentence "This pig grunts, and so it must be happy, in which the pronoun it links back to the demonstrative and sortal this pig and exemplifies thereby an anaphoric chain between this pig and it. Future references that I might make can tap into this anaphoric chain as when I state, That pig to which I referred yesterday when I said ‘this pig grunts.’" Brandom thinks that when I first use a demonstrative and sortal to designate an object I am anticipating how a whole series of future pronouns might be linked in an anaphoric chain and, in this sense, might be inferentially related to each other.² Brandom’s theory of anaphora illustrates how one cannot make a representational reference to the world apart from an inferential network of (anticipated) interrelated linguistic terms (e.g., demonstratives and personal pronouns) and how, therefore, inferentialism precedes representationalism.

McDowell objects, first of all, that this may not be the case. In contrast to Brandom’s suggestion that one must opt for either representationalism or inferentialism as prior, McDowell argues that one can accept the idea that empirical concepts are intelligible only when considered in the context of each. In fact, McDowell points out that Brandom acknowledges the possibility of avoiding representationalism without prioritizing inferentialism in a footnote in MIE.³ Furthermore, McDowell suggests an alternative representationalist view that would be more aware of its inferentialist presuppositions than Augustine was. For example, one could explain the linkage of the word snow with snow through a Tarskian T-sentence that, in this particular case, would relate a sentence to the world by affirming that snow is white is true only if snow is white. An assertion of this kind as a move in a language game of making empirical claims about the world and as an instance of linguistic self-consciousness need not involve any untoward representationalism.⁴ A more modest approach, McDowell believes, would simply hold that whatever one is speaking of is not intelligible independently of the notion of assertion.⁵

In his reply, Brandom acknowledges the possibility of clarifying in tandem representational and inferential dimensions of language, but he asserts that he sought to defend the stronger hypothesis of the priority of inferentialism on a kind of Popperian wager to see if it could withstand falsification. Furthermore, he concurs with McDowell’s example of snow to discuss word-world semantic relations, and he points out that he has not neglected representationalism insofar as chapter 8 of MIE gives an account of the representational dimension of language. For Brandom, the question boils down to whether he has successfully explained representational language within the inferential context, and he thinks that if he has done so, then he has surpassed Wittgenstein, who, though he succeeded in showing that not all sentences have the expressive role of saying how things are and that not all terms pick out objects, did little to clarify what these roles themselves consisted in.⁶ Making explicit the inferential structures that referentialism deploys but does not reflect on has much to do with Brandom’s understanding of theory, rationality, and philosophy itself as a matter of making explicit what is implicit but not acknowledged. In turn, Brandom seems to detect the workings of McDowell’s philosophy of philosophy behind the criticism of inferentialism, and hence Brandom objects that his project ought not to be ruled out beforehand by theoretical quietism—a swipe at McDowell, whose theoretical position has been characterized as quietistic, as we will see in chapter 5.⁷

Nevertheless, it seems to me that Brandom cedes McDowell’s point when he admits that other versions of inferentialism might avoid a bad representationalism; that one could start with both inferentialism and representationalism and illuminate the relations between them, as he himself acknowledged in the footnote in MIE; and that he adopted only a Popperian strategy of trying to justify the stronger, more easily falsifiable hypothesis. Moreover, he allows that word-world semantic relations exist and endorses McDowell’s way of specifying the connection between snow and snow through the sentence Snow is white, which would be true if the latter (snow) were white.

Given that McDowell recognizes the importance of the inferential dimensions of representation, Brandom in the second phase of the debate, in his essay Perception and Rational Constraint, affirms that he would like to hear more from McDowell about how reference to what we think about precipitates out of the rational relations among things we might think (e.g., our beliefs) about what we are thinking about, that is, about how we represent the world through inferential structures.⁸ McDowell counters by disputing that M&W, on which Brandom’s essay comments, is but a promissory note to Brandom’s execution or, in other words, that the representationalism of M&W is but a prelude to Brandom’s inferentialism, and by spelling out his different theoretical purposes. He aims at offsetting naturalism and upholding what he calls minimal empiricism, understood as representational directedness to toward the empirical world. This discussion of perception and, in particular, the question of whether inferentialism ought to precede representationalism immediately elicits from McDowell, as it did from Brandom, an acknowledgement of his overarching view of rationality and theory, his very philosophy of philosophy—the topic of chapter 5. But for here, it is enough that McDowell resists Brandom’s requirement that he first clarify rational responsiveness (of inferential elements in relationship to each other) before clarifying rational responsiveness to the facts and that he precipitate the latter out of the former. He is concerned directly about responsiveness to the facts.⁹

1.2. A Linguist Idealism?

McDowell’s second objection to Brandom’s placing inferentialism before representationalism begins with the recollection that Wilfrid Sellars held that proprieties of material inference (e.g., inferences about the world that are not expressed or analyzed in formal-logical notation) are essential to meaning in the sense that such proprieties make conceptual contents expressible. Gradually, however, Sellars slides into the position that the contents expressible in language consist of those material-inferential proprieties. For McDowell, however, these contents expressible in language are linked back to the world, which actualizes our conceptual capacities in the act of perception. But if conceptual contents are a matter of nothing more than the proprieties of the language used to express them, then the link to the world, so important for McDowell, would be severed, and one would seem to have fallen into a kind of linguistic idealism. By the end of Sellars’s development, as McDowell puts it, the whole perceived layout of the space of reasons, which would include our contact with reality, is not merely expressible in conceptual contents but taken up into the content of concepts.¹⁰ Once we have taken up the space of reasons into conceptual contents, if we change our minds about the way the world is, it would be equivalent to changing our concepts. For McDowell, Sellars’s slide, which he thinks Brandom repeats, is equivalent to a passage from a weak inferentialism in which one is aware of inferential connections to a strong one and everything is absorbed into inferences.¹¹ One detects here McDowell’s opposition to forms of idealism that derive the world from out of one’s conceptual contents, as opposed to his view, which recognizes and requires the arduous work¹² involved in adjusting one’s world view in response to experience.¹³

This second objection, that Brandom has absorbed the world into the content of concepts, elicits Brandom’s response that he believes, as an inferentialist should, in the intimate connection between our concepts and the way the world is, such that when we change our minds about the way the world is we are remaking our concepts. However, our inferences also depend on how we take things to be, and Brandom accuses McDowell of misinterpreting his strong inferentialism as a hyperinferentialism, a claim that McDowell denies.¹⁴ Strong inferentialism, according to Brandom, includes the idea that one deploying concepts must take account of the noninferential and nonlinguistic circumstances and consequences of application "characteristic of directly empirical and practical concepts (such as red and clumsy)"¹⁵ that are to be deployed in the presence of red, clumsy things.¹⁶

To determine whether Brandom has absorbed the world into the contents of concepts requires a deeper understanding of his view of how language relates to the world. He describes his theory of language, which conceives language as an inferentially connected system through which the world is spoken of, as an inferential semantics. Language, though, also needs to be understood with reference to the wider context of rule-bound, normative practices. It is we who institute and endorse the obligations of normative practices, such as language, though these practices bind us in ways that are not up to our subjective whims, and the rules of such practices are neither derived intellectualistically from first principles nor reducible to blind causal regularities. In explaining the normative system that is language, he adopts a particularly reflective stance insofar as he resists, as we have seen, beginning to discuss representation in advance of thinking about the correct use of linguistic expressions.¹⁷ Just as rigorous phenomenology strives to be aware of the conscious activity to which objects are given, so Brandom requires that one attend to the expressions through which representation is achieved, in particular, judgments with propositional contentfulness. The world stimulates propositionally contentful responses (e.g., this is blue), which are not derived from inferences and are therefore noninferential, but that, once uttered, pertain to inferential networks within which terms like this or blue are understood. We humans, unlike parrots and animals that can be taught to differentially respond to stimuli by uttering linguistic expressions (e.g., the parrot can be trained to say blue in the presence of blue things), can follow up on inferential links, knowing, for instance, that if something is blue it is colored and not red. Brandom would have concurred with Sellars that there could not be observational knowledge that is expressed in sentences without inference.¹⁸

However, Brandom’s discussion of language in chapter 2 of MIE, which was just summarized and which emerges from his account in chapter 1 of normative pragmatics that explains how practices are normatively governed (suggested in the previous paragraph), is narrowed in chapter 3. There he brings together the linguistic and normative features of the previous chapters, but within a particular model of language: the deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice. In this norm-governed practice, one adopts a peculiar critical stance, namely, that of a scorekeeper, attributing, undertaking, and assessing inferentially articulated beliefs and justifications. In Brandom’s vocabulary, beliefs and justifications are known as statuses and are described as commitments and entitlements, and one might adopt various attitudes toward such statuses, such as attributing them to others or acknowledging or undertaking them oneself. So normatively directed is Brandom’s discussion of discursive practice that he admits that he is not describing actual practice but only an artificial, idealized version of it, of how we ought to proceed in discourse. Within the practice of discourse, the emphasis is on critically assessing others’ commitments and justification; hence, the deontic (or normatively constrained) attitude of attributing beliefs to someone else assumes primacy and the model of discourse "trades in the status of being committed for talk about proprieties of practical attitudes of taking [another] to be committed.¹⁹ Even the deontic attitude of undertaking a commitment by oneself is definable in terms of a critical and external scorekeeper’s attribution of it, insofar as undertaking a commitment is doing something that licenses or entitles others to attribute it,"²⁰ and the attitude of acknowledging a commitment is a matter of attributing it to oneself. This critical scorekeeper perspective reinforces and perhaps underlies Brandom’s repeated emphasis on the need for self-reflectiveness about the language one uses to the point of favoring a linguistic approach to intentionality over a pragmatic approach. The pragmatic approach explains intentionality beginning with a rational agent’s mental states to which that agent eventually gives linguistic expression. By contrast, according to Brandom’s linguistic approach, one cannot speak of belief apart from linguistic social practices in which belief alone becomes intelligible, and to explain assertion in terms of a prior notion of (internally held but unexpressed) belief would entail uncritically taking for granted the propositional contents of the belief one holds before expressing it.²¹

Despite Brandom’s methodological turn to a linguistic model of discursive scorekeeping, he does not believe that objective responsiveness to the world is jeopardized. From the beginning, he recognizes that one must take account of the not necessarily linguistic or inferential circumstances (e.g., of the world) that furnish the setting under which a linguistic expression or concept is correctly applied, uttered, or used. Perception—for example, in which the nonlinguistic world functions as a stimulus evoking a linguistic response—serves as a point of language entry. Because Brandom provides for such language entries, he insists that his strong inferentialism, which is sufficient for conceptual contentfulness, consists of broadly inferential articulation, that is, it encompasses those noninferential circumstances and consequences of application. Such a strong inferentialism differs from hyperinferentialism, which allows only narrow inferential articulation, that is, it permits only the kinds of inferential circumstances and consequences of application that might occur in mathematics or formal logic for instance.²²

To ensure that language is appropriately linked to the world, Brandom, within his discursive framework, integrates his scorekeeping model with his account of perception, contending against Sellars, who thinks that perceivers establish their own reliability as perceivers, that someone else—a scorekeeper—must certify the reliability of a perceiver. Furthermore, he consciously extends this model to the question of whether observational authority should be attributed to a reporter’s claim. Attributing observational authority, though, is a matter of a hybrid deontic status in which the reporter and the scorekeeper make different contributions to the process. On the one hand, the observer (or perceiver-reporter) makes a claim; on the other, the scorekeeper, before considering whether the observer is entitled to that claim, must herself endorse a series of facts that must be true for the entitlement to be attributed. Thus, one keeping score and trying to determine whether to confer observational authority on a whale watcher’s claims about whales (i.e., trying to establish whether the whale watcher is entitled to those claims) must check whether the appropriate circumstances of application obtain (whether whales are in the bay), whether appropriate enabling conditions are in place (the reporter is facing in the direction of the whales and free from hallucinogenic influences), and whether there may be defeating conditions (e.g., walruses in the vicinity). In other words, the social dimension of the practice of giving and asking for reasons confers on thought and talk its representational dimension in which scorekeepers hold others accountable for their claims about the world, and the determination of whose applications of concepts are authoritative depends on a messy retail business of assessing the comparative authority of competing evidential and inferential claims.²³

Just as Brandom’s turn to a linguistic model did not entail hyperinferentialism insofar as he provides for language entries in perception, this inclusion of discursive scorekeeping and intersubjective processes of holding each other accountable to our statements about things, does not imply that we lose the world²⁴ by falling into an idealism of linguistic practice.²⁵ Indeed we as scorekeepers do not make the facts be what they are, since our discursive practice is empirically constrained²⁶—which is precisely the concept Brandom will use in the second phase of his debate over perception with McDowell. The representational dimension of our concepts is such that they answer for their ultimate correctness of application not to what you, I, or all of us take to be the case, but to what actually is the case. The mention of all of us suggests that even an entire community could be wrong about the facts, though that must be shown from some scorekeeping perspective, such as that of an individual over against the community. In other words, objectivity is generated by the critical, intersubjective, linguistic model of deontic scorekeeping in which each scorekeeper holds others accountable to claims about the world and in which the critical scorekeeping perspective has built into it a distinction between what is objectively true and what is merely subjectively held to be true.²⁷

This exposition of Brandom’s views on how language relates to the world makes it clear that his reflective stance on the explanatory priority of language and his adoption of the critical attention to language, particularly to language as deployed within the critical deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice, need not entail the kind of linguistic idealism of which McDowell seems to accuse him when he charges him with taking up into the contents of concepts the entire space of reasons. After all, he provides for perceptual