between saying and doing

Interview by Richard Marshall.

Robert Brandom is the pittsburghegelianasaurus big beast

pragmatist lurking in the philosophical jungle. He’s always thinking
about the importance of language when thinking about humans,
about discursive understanding, about American and
Wittgensteinian pragmatism, about analytic pragmatism, about
Sellars, about compositionality, about semantic holism, about the
Kant-Sellars thesis, inferentialism, AI, German Idealism, Hegel as
pragmatist, intentionality, Wittgenstein,expressivism, about why
understanding is part of the core of the philosophic enterprise and
why he thinks its an exciting time to be working in philosophy. This
one’s leaving deep tracks…

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?

Robert Brandom: My first area of concentration as an

undergraduate at Yale was math. (I fell away, but did finish the joint
major.) A charismatic young philosophy professor, Bruce Kuklick
(who was writing his book on Josiah Royce), introduced me both to
the American pragmatists and to the sort of insights intellectual
history could shed on their thought. A model-theory course with Jon
Barwise, and Richmond Thomason’s introduction to possible worlds
semantics focused my interest on the possibilities for our getting a
mathematical grip on the phenomena of meaning and conceptual
content and (so) understanding. At the same time, reading the
pragmatists made me suspicious that the representational paradigm
of meaning and content that dominated formal semantics was
playing a Procrustean role.

I thought then—as in a significant sense I still do—that where it is

possible, a broadly algebraic form of understanding is the very best
kind. That is not the kind of understanding we have of each other,
including when we understand each other’s sayings and writings.
But it did not seem beyond imagining that what we are doing in
exercising such non-algebraic discursive or hermeneutic
understanding could itself be understood algebraically. The topic
was suggested by the pragmatists, and the method was that of the
analysts. I took it that in the early ‘70s we had a new and
qualitatively superior set of formal tools for undertaking that
mathematical semantic enterprise. (It was, of course, a similar naïve
enthusiasm for an earlier mathematical toolkit that had motivated
Russell, and those for whom he came to speak, at the beginning of
the century.) This was for me an inspiring challenge.

3:AM: You link classic analytic philosophy (of Russell and Frege
and early Wittgenstein) and American (and late Wittgensteinian)
Pragmatism (Peirce, Sellars, Rorty). So for those of us outside all
this, can you first say what you take to be salient about analytic
philosophy and the linguistic turn?

RB: I am interested in language because it is what makes us

sapient, and not merely sentient creatures. I am interested in us as
beings who exhibit a distinctive kind of understanding: discursive,
that is to say, conceptually articulated understanding. From the
beginning I took it to be essential to figure out how to synthesize two
perspectives philosophers had developed on this phenomenon. On
the one hand, there is the perspective of the logistical tradition of
Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Tarski, taking its point of departure
from the fact that the first sort of meanings or concepts on which we
got a formal grip were the meanings and concepts expressed in
abstract, disembodied, monological mathematical calculi. On the
other hand, there is the more or less anthropological perspective of
the broadly pragmatist tradition that comprises not only Peirce,
James, and Dewey, but also the later Wittgenstein and the
Heidegger of Being and Time. It is concerned with discursive
practices of using natural languages as a feature of the natural
history of creatures like us—with what makes it possible for us to
engage in such practices, and how we are transformed and
empowered by doing so.

These two perspectives line up more narrowly with what I think of as

the projects of formal and philosophical semantics. Formal
semantics starts with a primitive association of some kind of
semantically relevant whatsis with simple expressions, and is
principally concerned with algebraically generating on that basis an
association of semantically relevant whatsises with complex
expressions. Philosophical semantics is after an account of what is
we do in our social discursive practices to effect or establish the
association of expressions with semantically relevant whatsises,
and how such an association can then illuminate the norms that
govern the use of those expressions.

These two currents of thought—the logistical tradition of

compositional formal semantics that studies language as a
mathematical object, and the naturalistic anthropological tradition
that studies language as a social practice—correspond to the
perspectives within analytic philosophy and pragmatism that I am
concerned to synthesize, to bring together into a single synoptic
vision.
3:AM: And then there’s the pragmatism – both the American and
the Wittgensteinian species that you draw upon and develop. Aren’t
these an alternative rather than an extension to the analytic
approach? Wasn’t the later Wittgenstein of the ‘Philosophical
Investigations’ reacting against the analytics – and his earlier self?
How do you manage to run pragmatism in the analytic spirit, and
why?

RB: It is easy to see pragmatism as not only critical of but

antithetical to analytic philosophy’s concern with meanings.
Wittgensteinian pragmatism about discursivity urges us to shift our
attention from the analyst’s focus on meaning to concern with use—
from semantics in the traditional sense to pragmatics in a broad
sense. Rorty, like Dewey, wants to replace analytic philosophy’s
master-concept of representation by concern with coping and
practical agreement. Heidegger relocates the description and
explanation characteristic of Vorhandenheit as a late-coming
parochial sub-region of the more primordial Zuhandenheit. And so
on. Wittgenstein himself seems to have drawn semantically nihilistic
conclusions from his foregrounding of the social practices that
constitute the use of linguistic expressions. Methodological
pragmatists assert that the point of associating meanings with
expressions (as theoretical postulates) would be to codify
proprieties governing their use. Wittgenstein takes it that the uses in
question are so varied and motley, and above all so plastic and
variable, as to defy such regimentation. This is a point that his
admirer Charles Travis in our own day has underscored with
examples exhibiting the unavoidable “occasion sensitivity” of even
the most ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary—from which he
has also drawn skeptical conclusions about the prospects for
compositional truth-conditional semantics as classically conceived.

But I think concern with meanings and concern with the use of
expressions, semantics and pragmatics, ought to be seen as
complementing, rather than competing with one another.
Methodological pragmatism and semantic pragmatism about
philosophical semantics—that is, the claim that all there is to
associate meanings (semantically relevant whatsises) with
expressions is their use—do not together entail the semantic nihilist
conclusions Wittgenstein and Travis want to draw. One of the ways
in which classical analytic philosophy read its brief too narrowly is
that it did not systematically consider the ways in which the
meanings expressed by some vocabularies can make explicit what
is implicit in the use of other vocabularies. This is true for instance
of vocabularies whose principal expressive role is to serve as
pragmatic metalanguages for other vocabularies. Expressions for
normative statuses, such as “commitment” and “entitlement” let us
say what it is one is doing in endorsing a claim or an inference.
Before one had logical vocabulary, one could, I take it, in practice
take or treat an inferential transition as appropriate or inappropriate,
or two claims as incompatible.
Introducing conditional and negation locutions lets one make those
normative attitudes explicit as the contents of claims that are
themselves assertible—which is to say in a form in which reasons
can be asked and given for them. I agree with Sellars (who follows
Kant in this respect) in taking it that an essential element of the
contents of the concepts expressed by the use of ordinary empirical
descriptive vocabulary—indeed, what distinguishes genuinely
descriptive vocabulary from mere discriminating labels—is their
involvement in subjunctively robust reasoning. (Sellars wrote a long
essay called “Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable
Without Them.”) Alethic modal vocabulary lets us say explicitly what
we implicitly commit ourselves to by using such descriptive
vocabulary.

Analytic pragmatism, as I pursue it in Between Saying and Doing,

aims to study systematically relations between meaning and use. In
particular, it offers an account of a number of pragmatically
mediated semantic relations between vocabularies, arguing that
these are crucial for understanding both the use of and the
meanings expressed by a number of vocabularies that have been of
particular interest to philosophers, including logical, modal,
normative, semantic, and intentional vocabularies. I regard the idea
that one can ignore what is special about the use and meanings of
these vocabularies and directly investigate logical, modal,
normative, semantic, and intentional facts as a fundamental
mistake. It is a mistake of a piece with the one Wittgenstein
diagnoses in the Tractatus as resulting from thinking that logical
vocabulary has the same expressive picturing relation to facts that
nonlogical descriptive vocabulary does.

3:AM: We get a different philosophical landscape from you once we

take all this in: you start with Kant and run through to Sellars…!
Your approach might be labeled ‘semantic holism’. Have I got this
right by saying that (roughly) instead of starting with the pre-
sentential units of meaning (words plus logical bits and pieces) and
building up meanings, you start with the sentences and inferences
to be drawn. Can you sketch how your approach works?

RB: Right. I take it that the basic move in a language game is

saying something in the sense of making a claim. That is
undertaking a distinctive kind of commitment: an assertional or
doxastic commitment. What makes it the claim that it is is the
circumstances under which it is appropriate to make the claim, and
the consequences of making it. This is a matter of what else would
commit or entitle you to make the claim, and what else making it
would commit or entitle you to. Understanding a claim, practically
grasping its significance, is being able to keep score on how making
it changes what the speaker and audience are committed or entitled
to. On this picture, claimable (so believable) contents are articulated
by inferential relations between their circumstances and
consequences of application.

The theoretical idea of conceptual content expressed by

subsentential expressions are to be understood in terms of the
circumstances and consequences of application they inherit from
the contents expressed by the assertional use of declarative
sentences involving them—though along another dimension, in an
up-and-running discursive practice we typically determine the
contents of novel claims from the contents of the concepts applied
in expressing them. On this view, assertional commitments and
inferential commitments come as an indissoluble package; neither is
intelligible in abstraction from the other.

It follows immediately from this way of thinking about things that one
cannot have one concept without having many. The idea of
grasping just one, isolated concept is incoherent: the sound of one
hand clapping. Grasp of a concept, Sellars says, is mastery of the
use of a word. More specifically, grasping a concept is a matter of
practically mastering its use in making assertions (a version of
Kant’s rendering of concepts as “functions of judgment”), which
essentially involves placing it in a “space of reasons” (as Sellars
called it), inferentially articulated by relations of being-a-reason-for
(in either the committing or the entitling sense). So the assertional
descriptive use of concepts is part of a package that includes also
the inferential explanatory use of those concepts, which is a matter
of what can be reasons for their application and what their
application can serve as reasons for.

3:AM: Doesn’t this result in denying compositionality ? Isn’t a push-

back against your position the issue that it destroys a neat way of
explaining why we can use a finite vocabulary to mean a huge
number of original things – and also we’d never know if we were
making the same sense to anyone else? I guess this is the Fodor
challenge – is it one that keeps you up at night sometimes?

RB: Semantic holism at the sentential level is compatible with as

much compositionality as there actually is at the subsentential level.
Dummett already introduced semantic ‘molecularism’ as an
alternative to atomism: attribute sentential meanings based on the
use of a small finite set of whole sentences, decompose them by
considering the contribution made to those sentential meanings by
subsentential expressions occurring in them, and then recompose
those subsential meanings to generate sentential meanings for an
indefinite number of novel sentences formable from those
subsentential components.

In my version, we dissect sentences by grouping them into

equivalence classes accordingly as intersubstitution preserves the
goodness of inferences. Associating discursive content with singular
terms and predicates (to begin with) is practically mastering the
special class of substitution inferences they determine. This gives
us a place to start in determining the inferential role of novel
compounds, because we know things such as that if x walks then x
moves, and that if Benjamin Franklin was a printer then the inventor
of lightning rods was a printer.

In my view, that’s all compositionality gives us—or needs to. It does

not determine all the inferences novel sentences are involved in, by
anyone’s lights. As Fodor himself has emphasized in other
contexts, one can know a lot about birds and a lot about Antarctica,
and not know that Antarctic birds are flightless. It’s just a fact that
many things that follow from the conjunction of two properties don’t
follow from intersecting what is true of either one by itself: from red
+ Winesap apple ripeness follows, while from red + blackberry
unripeness does (because, as they say, blackberries are red when
they’re green). Anybody has to tell a noncompositional story about
how we practically master inferences like these.

I think the issue about whether I mean the same as someone else is
a different one—though they are often run together. The inferential
norms that we bind ourselves by in using public language are
shared. When I claim that the coin is copper, I am, whether I know it
or not, committing myself to its melting at 1085º C.. I have played
that counter in the game, and that is part of what I have committed
myself to by doing that. Those same norms bind us all. Of course I
might have a different conception of those norms, as evinced by my
actual dispositions to claim and infer. But we might equally disagree
about what the extensions of our terms are, without that affecting
the semantics of our utterances (or, I would say, our thoughts). In
any case, things are not in principle more difficult for inferentialists
than for representationalists here.

3:AM: So what you call the Kant-Sellars thesis’ is roughly the idea
that if you can use ordinary, non-necessary, non-normative
language then you’ve got all you need to use necessary, normative
language too (is that right?) – what’s the significance of this move?

RB: One of Kant’s big ideas is that besides concepts whose

principal job it is to describe and explain empirical goings-on, there
are concepts whose distinctive expressive role is to make explicit
features of the framework that makes empirical description and
explanation possible. The paradigm for Kant is the sort of lawful
inferential connection among concepts expressed by counterfactual-
supporting subjunctive conditionals (his “hypothetical judgments”).
For Sellars these categorial concepts include not only alethic modal
vocabulary, but also deontic modal normative vocabulary. Such
concepts are, as I want to say, explicative of structural semantic and
pragmatic features of discursive practice as such. Discursive
practice is essentially, and not just accidentally, an implicitly
normative practice, in which practitioners undertake and attribute
commitments and responsibilities and claim and exercise authority,
their entitlement to which is always potentially at issue. And what
makes such a normative practice discursive,
we inferentialists claim, is that it is essentially, and not just
accidentally, a practice of giving and asking for reasons—that is, a
practice of asserting and inferring. Propositional contents are
claimables and believables: what can be offered as reasons and
reasons demanded for.

The inferences that they can serve as premises and conclusions of

are counterfactually robust inferences, which are made explicit by
the use of alethic modal vocabulary, paradigmatically subjunctive
conditionals. Besides being in this sense explicative of structural
features of any autonomous discursive practice (any language
game one could play though one could play no other), deontic and
alethic modal vocabulary can be elaborated from the use of ordinary
empirical descriptive vocabulary, in the sense that anyone who can
use such vocabulary already knows how to do everything they need
to know how to do in order to master the use of such vocabulary.
That is what, in my version of Sellars’s version, becomes of Kant’s
claim that such categories or pure concepts of the understanding
are graspable a priori. In Between Saying and Doing I offer a
detailed account of this expressive role, which is distinctive not only
of alethic and deontic modal vocabulary, but also, I claim, of logical
vocabulary, ontological vocabulary (such as ‘object’, ‘property’,
‘fact’, and ‘proposition’), and semantic and intentional vocabulary.

3:AM: Do you see your approach as being crucial for the

development of the artificial intelligence programme? Is your view
that the traditional analytic philosophical approach of Russell and
Quine lacked the resources that your extended analytic/pragmatist
approach brought?
RB: I do think that those pursuing AI projects should be thinking
both about inferentialist approaches to semantics, and about
deontic scorekeeping approaches to pragmatics. (Indeed, the latter
idea—that what one must do in order thereby to understand what
someone is saying is keep track of how their utterances change
what they and other people are committed and entitled to—is in fact
the basis for the AI in one of the versions of “The Sims”.) In addition,
my particular form of analytic pragmatism—thinking systematically
about the relations between meaning and use, and in particular
about pragmatically mediated semantic relations between
vocabularies—brings into view a different way of thinking about the
task of AI. The classical project of AI, what my friend John
Haugeland called GOFAI—Good Old-Fashioned Artificial
Intelligence—was subject to criticisms, by him, developing thoughts
of his teacher Bert Dreyfus, on the basis that it implausibly required
making explicit, in the form of rules (programs), everything that was
implicit in our skillful, embodied social practices. What I call the
“pragmatic elaboration” AI project, by constrast, is to specify a set of
practices meeting two conditions.

First, each practice in the set can be engaged in by systems that do

not engage in any discursive practices, and second, it is possible to
algorithmically elaborate that set of practices into (the capacity to
engage in) some autonomous discursive practices. Algorithmic
elaboration is putting together primitive abilities using only a small
set of primitive elaborative abilities (such as moving to the next
instruction on a list and moving to a different instruction conditionally
upon the results of some yes/no test) in the way the capacity to do
long division can be algorithmically elaborated from the abilities to
multiply and to subtract. In Between Saying and Doing I argue that
there are reasons for skepticism about the feasibility of the
pragmatic elaboration version of AI. But they are quite different from
the reasons for skepticism about the prospects for GOFAI.
3:AM: Looming over this is also your strange engagement with
German Idealism. Here we can see why you step away from the
strong empiricist tendencies of an Ayer or Carnap and move back to
a tradition where reason distinguishes us as rational animals. Kant
and Hegel are the killer apps here, along with Descartes, Spinoza
and Leibniz. Is the appeal the fact that these thinkers pushed the
idea that rationality is a normative idea, that we live in a ‘space of
reasons’?

RB: I’m not sure I’m willing to give you that engagement
with German Idealism today is “strange”. Perhaps we could agree
on “unusual”. And as far as Kant goes, not even that unusual
anymore, I think. A golden age in the Anglophone appreciation of
Kant was already incipient by 1970, opened up by Rawls on the
practical side, and Strawson and Bennett on the theoretical side.
We are now a couple of academic generations into the renaissance
they initiated. And Hegel is just too interesting a reader of Kant to
be left out once one decides to take Kant seriously.
One of Kant’s master ideas is that what distinguishes genuine
knowers and intentional agents from merely natural creatures is that
judgments and actions are things their subjects are in a distinctive
way responsible for. They express commitments. They are
exercises of a special kind of authority. Responsibility, commitment,
authority are all normative concepts. What distinguishes genuinely
discursive beings from those that exhibit only the practical
intentionality on display at a high level in the goal-seeking behavior
characteristic of mammalian predators, is not the presence of some
distinctive Cartesian mental substance. It is being subject to a
special kind of normative appraisal. The difference for Kant is not
ontological, but deontological. What one is principally responsible
for in judging and acting is having reasons for them. Those reasons
are what entitles one to those commitments. Judgments and actions
are rational commitments in the sense that they are liable to
assessment as to one’s entitlement to those commitments in terms
of the reasons one has to judge or act that way. As discursive
beings, we live, and move, and have our being in a normative space
of reasons.

As I see things, this is what lies behind another of Kant’s

innovations: taking the judgment to be the minimal unit of
experience and sapient awareness. For judgments are the minimal
units of responsibility. Concepts are “functions of judgment” in that it
is what concepts we apply in judging (or endorsing a practical
maxim) that determine what we thereby make ourselves responsible
for. That is their rulishness. This overarching commitment to the
essentially normative character of discursive intentionality is also
the basis on which we should understand what Kant calls the
“subjective” and “objective” aspects of the form of judgments. The “I
think” which can accompany all judgments is the formal mark of who
is responsible for the judgment. The “object = X” which marks the
implicit claim to objective validity of judgments is the formal mark of
what one thereby makes oneself responsible to, the standard for
assessments of the correctness of the judgment.
It follows that for Kant the biggest philosophical task is
understanding the normativity that is the essence not only of our
practical engagements with the world, but also of our cognitive
ones. The most urgent philosophical task is to understand the
normative bindingness (Kant’s “Gültigkeit”) of concepts, and what it
is for us to bind ourselves by rules in making judgments and acting
intentionally. These are all ideas that I think are of the utmost
importance today, and why we cannot afford to ignore the legacy of
German Idealism.

3:AM: You take Hegel’s notion of Anerkennung as a key to getting

straight the relationship between rational agents don’t you? This
seems to involve ideas of recognition, community and responsibility
at its core. Can you say something about why this space of reasons’
is a social space, and whether this is another reason for being
attracted to this approach to rationality – it opposes an
individualistic, atomized approach that might be supposed in
classical representational semantic theories?

RB: The idea that discursive intentionality should be understood

as an essentially normative phenomenon was recovered for our
own time by the later Wittgenstein. Only one strand of this thought is
the normativity of conceptual content that Kripke emphasized and
that has been crystallized in the literature on the “rule-following
considerations.” Wittgenstein’s stories often aim to underline this
normative dimension to thought in general. So for instance he asks
us to imagine someone who is asked by a mother to “teach the
children a game.” Upon her return an hour later she discovers that
the children have been taught to gamble for money with dice.
Horrified, she responds: “I didn’t mean that kind of game.”
Wittgenstein thinks that what she says is true, even in the case
where she didn’t at all consider this possibility. But, his interlocutor
asks, how can this be so? What is it about the desire expressed in
her request that settled it that shooting craps did not fall under the
scope of her request? How did that intentional state or its linguistic
expression, reach out to all the possible ways of responding to
settle that this response was not appropriate, did not count as
correctly responding?

Wittgenstein clearly thought that understanding such phenomena

requires taking seriously the situation of intentional states and their
linguistic expressions in social practices that are themselves
governed by implicit norms. I understand Hegel as already having
made a move of this same general kind. He naturalized Kantian
normativity, bringing it down from the heaven of noumenal activity
presupposed by our empirical activity into the realm of social
practice. On this line, for Hegel “all transcendental constitution is
social institution,” as John Haugeland characterized this reading.
“Geist” is Hegel’s term for the whole realm of implicitly normative
social practices, all the doings subject to assessment according to
those norms, and all the institutions they make possible.

At its core, for him as for Wittgenstein, is language. “Language

(Sprache) is the Dasein of Geist,” he says in the Phenomenology—
which is a phenomenology of spirit (Geist) just as taking that socially
instituted normativity in all of its manifestations as its topic. Hegel’s
social practice approach to the normativity that is not only
characteristic, but constitutive of discursive intentionality, differs
from Wittgenstein’s way of working out that idea in two fundamental
ways, both of which make it especially attractive to me. First, Hegel,
unlike Wittgenstein, is a rationalist. He follows Kant in seeing the
norms articulating what is a reason for what as at the core of the
normativity of discursive intentionality. Transposed into his social
key, this means that while Wittgenstein insisted that our language
games have no “downtown”, Hegel thinks—as I would put it—that
practices of giving and asking for reasons are the “downtown” of our
discursive social practices. Second, Hegel is a systematic
philosophical theorizer in a way Wittgenstein explicitly and
emphatically is not. (Thinking, to my mind mistakenly, that
eschewing such theorizing follows from the claim—the only one that
appears verbatim in both the Tractatus and the Investigations—that
“philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.”) Hegel offers a
sophisticated account of the metaphysical structure of social
normativity.

The central role in that story is played by the concept of recognition.

In a slogan, he takes it that social substance, Geist, is synthesized
by reciprocal recognition. This is what he makes of the
Enlightenment idea that norms governing human conduct are
neither features of the natural world (as what was “fitting” was for
the Greeks) nor the result of divine commands, but part of the
human social world. There were no normative statuses (no
proprieties, no commitments or responsibilities, no authority) apart
from normative attitudes; it is people practically holding each other
responsible, attributing authority, that institutes such statuses. (This
is the core thought he extracts from social contract theories of
political obligation.) Adopting normative attitudes towards some
others, taking them to be the subject of normative statuses, to be
able to commit themselves, to exercise authority, to undertake
responsibilities, he calls “recognizing” them. I actually have the
authority to commit myself, to make myself responsible (the
normative status at the center of Kant’s understanding of discursive
beings) just in case I am taken to have that authority by those I
grant the authority to hold me responsible. Only such reciprocal
recognitive attitudes institute genuine normative statuses.

This is an extremely rich idea about the basic metaphysics of

normativity. It takes a lot of working-out. But one can get some taste
of its flavor by thinking about the difference between the properties
you have, on the one hand, when you aspire to be a good
philosopher and think that you are one, and, on the other hand
when you are taken to be (recognized as) a good philosopher, not
just by anybody, but by those you take to be good philosophers—
the ones you take to be (recognize as) authoritative about such
things. The first is a subjective attitude. The second has solidified
into a genuine normative status by becoming a social status—one
instituted by reciprocal recognition.
3:AM: Inferences are central to your account. Can you explain what
you take to be the role of inferences? Why are they so important to
your account of reasoning? (After all, its not always clear what a
reason has to do with any inference.)

RB: You make a very important point. Semantic rationalists in

general think of discursive content in terms of role in reasoning. And
there is indeed a very great deal more to reasoning than inferring:
drawing a conclusion from some premises. Making distinctions,
formulating definitions, and producing constructions of some
objects, concepts and claims from others are just some of the other
activities that are not only rational but in an important sense reason-
constituting. The specifically inferentialist version of semantic
rationalism amounts to a bold methodological commitment to
understanding all these other sorts of activities and the relations that
articulate them in terms inference and inferential relations, which
are in that sense taken to be fundamental.
I take it that assertions, and the doxastic commitments they
express, are what distinguishes specifically discursive practices
from the rest. Further, I think assertions and doxastic commitments
are essentially, and not just accidentally, fodder for inferences. They
can both serve as reasons and have reasons demanded for them.
Giving and asking for reasons is by no means all we do with
language, but it is (contra Wittgenstein), the “downtown” of the rest
of the suburban sprawl, whose presence demarcates anything as a
Sprachspiel, a language game in the verbal, rather than the merely
vocal, sense. That is why the inferential relation of being-a-reason-
for, holding in the first instance between claimables (=believables),
is semantically fundamental.

3:AM: Is your Hegelianism true to the historical figure or is that less

interesting to you than how his ideas have been open to developing
your version of analytic pragmaticism? I guess another way of
asking this is to ask: was Hegel really a proto-analytic-pragmatist?
Wouldn’t Russell have raged at the thought? And if you’re a
Hegelian, does that make you an Idealist?

My principal interest is in what I can learn from Hegel (indeed, from

any thinker) about philosophical issues I am interested in, such as
the nature of conceptual contentfulness and how social practical
attitudes can institute discursive normative practices. To learn what
he has to teach, one needs to get him right: to understand properly
the content of his claims. For an inferentialist, that is a matter of
understanding what those claims commit him to and what would
commit him to them, what they entitle him to and what would entitle
him to them, what is incompatible with them, and so on. The holism
that comes with such semantic inferentialism teaches that the
inferences involved are massively multipremise material inferences.

So what conclusions one can draw from any particular set of claims
depends on what other claims are available as auxiliary hypotheses
for drawing those inferences. Selecting those collateral premises
from other claims one attributes to the author or text one is trying to
understand yields a perspective on the content I call a “de dicto”
reading. Selecting them from claims one endorses (takes to be true)
oneself yields a perspective on the content I call a “de re” reading.
The key point is that for the inferentialist, these are equally valid
perspectives on the content of the claims actually made (which are
something like functions from sets of auxiliary hypotheses to
consequences, incompatibilities, and so on). I take it that one
engages philosophically with a thinker by offering de re readings.
But one can only do that if fully grounded in de dicto ones.

My Hegel is a pragmatist because he thinks you can’t understand

conceptual contents apart from an understanding of conceptual
norms, and he understands those norms as instituted by social
recognitive practices. My Hegel’s idealism consists principally in a
reciprocal sense-dependence thesis (which does not entail a
corresponding reciprocal reference-dependence thesis) concerning
the categories that structure the objective world and those that
structure our subjective practices: you can’t understand concepts
like object, property, fact, and law except as part of a package that
includes understanding concepts like referring, describing,
asserting, and inferring—and vice versa. (Claiming this does not
commit one to the crazy claim that if no-one had ever referred,
described, asserted, or inferred, then there would have been no
objects, properties, facts, or laws. That would be a reference-
dependence thesis.) In that sense of “idealism” I am an idealist.

3:AM: As is Hegel, so too is Sellars a key influence on your work.

You say he’s greater than Quine and as important as Peirce. A
naturalistic Kantian, fighting from a Kantian perspective to square
the manifest image of our life-view with the scientific world view,
what are the Kantian ideas of his that have been most influential in
your own thinking

RB: Sellars is the lens that brought Kant into focus for me. He starts
with Kant’s insight that discursive intentionality essentially involves
liability to assessment according to norms, and that the norms in
question are those concerning justification by reasons. In a famous
passage from Sellars’s masterwork Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind he says: “[In] characterizing an episode or a state as that of
knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode
or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of
justifying and being able to justify what one says” (EPM §36)

His account of the contents of ordinary empirical descriptive

concepts gives Kant’s normative rationalism a specifically
inferentialist twist: “It is only because the expressions in terms of
which we describe objects…locate these objects in a space of
implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label.”
[CDCM §108] And Sellars takes over from Kant the idea of concepts
whose principal expressive job is not empirical description or
explanation, but making explicit essential features of the framework
of discursive practices that makes describing and explaining
possible. For Sellars these concepts include alethic modal
vocabulary, deontic normative vocabulary, and ontological-
categorial vocabulary such as ‘property’ and ‘fact’. Following
Carnap, he understands such concepts as playing broadly
metalinguistic expressive roles. For instance, he understands the
job of modal concepts to be expressing the lawful relations among
properties and states of affairs that support the counterfactual-
supporting inferences in virtue of which descriptive concepts are
contentful—which is why, he claims, “description and explanation go
hand in hand.”

I think these are all great ideas. It seems to me that one promising
way forward for us today is to develop and exploit them further,
starting from what Sellars made of these core Kantian thoughts. I
explain how I propose to do that in my most recent book From
Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars.
3:AM: You count his project as a form of expressivism. Can you say
what you mean by that and if he is right does it commit us to
thinking that we’re not describing anything when we use terms like
‘red’ or ‘circular’?

RB: Many of the most potentially philosophically puzzling sorts of

locutions—modal and normative vocabulary, intentional and
semantic vocabulary, logical vocabulary, and ontologically
categorizing vocabulary such as ‘property’, ‘object’, ‘proposition’ and
‘fact’—play a distinctive expressive role that is not played by
ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary. They make explicit in the
object language features of what one must do in order to use
ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary. They are, Sellars claims
“covertly metalinguistic,” but as I think the point should be
understood, the metalanguages in question are not semantic
metalanguages, but pragmatic ones. In the first instance, they let us
talk about the use of expressions, rather than their meanings—what
we are doing rather than what we are saying. This species of
expressivism is rationalist and inferentialist, rather than emotivist:
what is expressed is features of inferential practice and attitudes of
doxastic commitment or endorsement.

By contrast to Sellars (and most expressivists), I hold that playing

this sort of expressive role is not incompatible with also playing a
broadly descriptive, fact-stating role. The claims made and (when all
goes well) facts stated by using vocabulary that plays this sort of
pragmatic metalinguistic role are distinctive in that they cannot be
understood apart from an understanding of what one is doing in
making claims and inferences—though they would in general still be
facts even if no-one ever asserted or inferred (the dependence is in
the realm of sense, not reference).

3:AM: One push back against the Sellarsian project – and I guess
your too – is that he was committed to the ‘linguistic turn’ in
philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century – and that the
idea that philosophy is properly committed to analysis of language is
now over. Philosophers are now wanting to philosophise things like
time again, and not just the concept of ‘time.’ Etc. Isn’t there
something to this criticism – science is saying the world is a certain
way and for philosophers to just discuss how we might talk about
the world and not think about the world is to avoid the key issue.
There is no way of fully squaring the manifest image with what we
know about the world, even if you call it ‘the myth of the given’.

RB: I do think that understanding language is part of the core of the

philosophic enterprise—but not because I think philosophy consists
in the analysis of the concepts expressed by using various linguistic
expressions. Rather, I think one of the core concerns of philosophy
is to understand us as creatures who understand. And I think what
makes us sapient, and not merely sentient, is that we can talk. So
we have a central philosophical interest in understanding what it is
to engage in discursive practices, and how and why doing that is so
transformative. The move from the practical intentionality of the
beasts to our discursive sort of intentionality, which is the move from
sentience to sapience, is what makes room for Hegelian Geist in the
realm of Natur. Language (Sprache) is the Dasein of Geist, Hegel
tells us.

I think, with Hegel and Sellars, that the discursive realm of Geist is
an essentially normative space, that normative statuses are
instituted by social practical recognitive attitudes and practices, and
that distinctively discursive (in Kant’s sense of conceptually
articulated) norms are instituted by assertional and (so) inferential
practices of giving and asking for reasons. Other approaches to
understanding this fundamental issue are of course possible. But
nothing about this broadly Hegelian way of understanding what is
distinctive of us commits one to restricting philosophy to a narrow
project of conceptual analysis.

3:AM: You’re sometimes called one of the Pittsburgh Hegelians.

The other is your colleague John McDowell. You don’t agree on
everything about Hegel though do you – so where is McDowell’s
Hegelianism most unlike your own?

RB: Not surprisingly, our different readings of Hegel (and for that
matter, Kant and Wittgenstein) mirror our larger metaphilosophical
differences. My Hegel is a Kantian, pursuing the Enlightenment
project of offering a constructive, systematic metaphysics of
discursive intentionality. As I said above, one of his big moves is
bringing Kant’s insight into the essentially normative character of
discursive intentionality down to earth, according to something like
the slogan “All transcendental constitution is social institution.” John
sees Hegel rather as critically continuing and radicalizing Kant’s
project of getting us beyond metaphysics, constructively in the
direction of an Aristotelian naturalism.

3:AM: These are strange days for philosophy. Some say its in the
doldrums, others that it is trivial and should leave the room for the
physicists. Why do you say there’s still space for the philosophers?
Why should we listen to what they’re saying?
RB: I think it is a very exciting time to be working in philosophy.
We’ve inherited an incredibly rich set of ideas. I’ve been talking
about a subset of them that come from Kant and Hegel, from
Wittgenstein and the American pragmatists, from Sellars, and from
the analytic tradition in the philosophy of language. Those are just
the ones that I’ve spent the most time developing, overlapping those
that matter to other contemporary philosophers whose work I find
inspiring, such as Huw Price and Sebastian Rödl. Some of the
most original and transformative philosophy today is being done in
the neo-Aristotelian tradition represented by my colleague Michael
Thompson and Irad Kimhi. John McDowell swims powerfully and
easily in both these currents of thought. It seems to me that anyone
with philosophical bones who reads what I’m reading—both among
the mighty dead and among the rising generation—should find their
pulse quickening.

For me, the question of whether or not the philosophical tradition is

in the doldrums (or a Slough of Despond) should be understood in
terms of the power and originality of the ideas available to be
worked with, rather than in terms of the ultimate interest of whatever
areas are “hot” in the profession in a purely sociological sense. I
don’t know much about that, and don’t care much about it, either.
(I’m told that when a survey asked undergraduates whether they
thought it was true that today’s college students are more ignorant
and apathetic than those of earlier generations, the commonest
answer was: “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” I certainly don’t want to
endorse that attitude in general, but on the issue of the current state
of the discipline, considered sociologically, I’m ‘fessing up.)

I think what distinguishes philosophers as such is that we study

humans as discursive beings—that is, as normative rational
creatures, in the sense that what we in the fullest sense do
(including believing) is subject to normative assessment as to the
goodness of the reasons we have for doing or believing that. (How
rational we are in the sense of how successful we are at actually
fulfilling our obligations to have such reasons is quite a different
matter.) Norms and inferential-justificatory behavior can be studied
empirically. But the question of what norms and good inferences
are, and of how to understand the kind of creatures we are in virtue
of living in such a normative space of reasons seem to me to be of
the first importance—not only for philosophers, but for the culture at
large. There is a lot we don’t understand about these things. But we
are not without clues. The trove of ideas in the vicinity that we have
inherited and have not yet begun to squeeze dry make this an
altogether invigorating time to be doing philosophy.

3:AM: And for the readers here at 3:AM, are there five books that
you could recommend to us that would help us delve further into
your philosophical world?

RB: Of my own books, Making It Explicit and Between Saying and

Doing are the most important, but any of the more recent ones offer
a general overview. The contemporary philosopher whose
development of pragmatism I find most consistently interesting and
stimulating is Huw Price, whose Naturalism Without
Mirrors serves as a good introduction. The two recent books I have
found to be most original and transformative are Mark Wilson’s
Wandering Significance, which takes our understanding of how
empirical concepts actually work to a new level, and Danielle
Macbeth’s Realizing Reason, for its sweeping historical
reconceptualization of discursive understanding, seen through the
lens of its most perfect realization in the concepts of mathematics.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Buy his book here to keep him biding!

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, June 19th, 2015.
 

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