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Truth, Scientific Understanding, and Haugeland's Existential Ontology
Author(s): Joseph Rouse

Source: Philosophical Topics , FALL 1999, Vol. 27, No. 2, The Intersection of Analytic
and Continental Philosophy (FALL 1999), pp. 149-176
Published by: University of Arkansas Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43154319
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS
VOL. 27, NO. 2, FALL 1999
Truth , Scientific Understanding , and

Haugeland's Existential Ontology
Joseph Rouse
Wesleyan University
John Haugeland's work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive scien

over the past two decades has been one of the most productive sites of
exchange between the "analytic" and "continental" philosophical traditio
Haugeland's innovative and iconoclastic explications of Heidegger's exis
tential analytic of Dasein have not simply been expository; many of the
most important themes have found their way into his constructive work
the philosophy of mind.1
In his most recent work Haugeland significantly extends this conver
gence between his interpretation of Heidegger and his constructive phi
sophical work in the analytic tradition.2 He has adapted his interpretation
Heidegger's conception of an authentically resolute disclosure of being
provide an interconnected response to a series of fundamental issues i
metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. Haugelan
aspires to articulate what is both unique and fundamental to human int
tional comportment, distinct from the derivative intentionality ascribable
thermostats, and the "ersatz" intentionality characteristic of animals
computers; on his account, only human being can exhibit genuine inte
tionality.3 He argues that genuine intentionality in this sense cannot
cashed out in terms of socially instituted normativity (as classically mode
on the constitutive rules of games), but requires a constitutive beholdenn
to objects. Haugeland identifies this beholdenness as "truth," but he conceiv
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of truth and truth -telling in a sense that encompasses much more than just
sentences or propositions; indeed, he proposes to account for distinctively
human intentionality without placing language or judgment at the heart of
his account. Intentionality and truth come together for Haugeland in under-
standing , which he takes to be the mark of the mental, yet understanding
turns out to be inseparable from an existentially committed involvement in
the world. Perhaps surprisingly, empirical science provides the paradigmatic
expression of such existential commitment. In developing his existential
conception of science, Haugeland offers an account of the often elusive con-
nection between understanding and scientific explanation.4 Indeed, although
much more is needed to develop this claim, Haugeland clearly aspires to
show how alethic modalities and natural laws are grounded in the normative
authority of objects, which is constituted through existentially committed
scientific research.
In what follows, I develop a sympathetic criticism of Haugeland's core
position. I think there is something fundamentally correct about each of
Haugeland's most important concepts and the claims he makes in terms of
them, but I also argue that each requires some significant reformulation. In
order to see both what I take to be important and insightful in Haugeland's
account, and the reasons for my partial divergences from it, however, I need
to recapitulate briefly his line of argument in "Truth and Rule-Following,"
the paper that most systematically develops his early Heideggerian take on
intentionality and scientific understanding.
Haugeland initially grounds the connection between his reflections on truth

and his more general concern to understand intentionality by considering the
limitations of the normative responsiveness expressed in biological func-
tioning and socially instituted practices. Biological functions, he argues,
allow no space for epistemic error, because the " content " of their functional
norms cannot be differentiated from their actual patterns of differential
responsiveness to their surroundings. Haugeland asks that we
Imagine an insectivorous species of bird that evolved in an envi-
ronment where most of the yellow butterflies are poisonous, and
most others not; and suppose it has developed a mechanism for
detecting and avoiding yellow butterflies. . . . Suppose further
that . . . this "yellow-detecting" mechanism, even when working
properly, happens also to give positive responses to a certain
unusual pattern of red and green stripes, and indeed does not
respond to yellow when it has a certain unusual mottling. Then,
in such cases, we could not say that the birds mistook the stripes
for yellow, or the mottled yellow for another color. For there is
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nothing that the response can "mean" other than whatever actu-
ally elicits it in normal birds in normal conditions.5
Note well that, although the source of Haugeland's concern is that biologi-
cal functions cannot account for truth-telling, the result is to show that they
cannot be genuinely intentionally contentful. They can be dysfunctional in
individual cases, but not wrong in their normal functioning, because such
functionality cannot express anything other than what it effectively differen-
tiates. No matter how subtle and complex the discriminations that functional
norms accomplish, their competence cannot exceed the range of their actual
performance.
Haugeland had once thought that socially instituted norms could do bet-
ter: he used to locate his own approach to intentionality (and Heidegger's) as
defending "third base" among the various "intentionality all-stars," by argu-
ing that the normativity of social practices best accounts for how intentional
holism is compatible with some version of materialism. Haugeland has now
recanted, because he thinks socially instituted norms have limitations com-
parable to those of biological functions (and he now thinks that Heidegger
was responsive to the same concern in Sein und Zeit). Individual agents can
fail to conform to norms, just as particular biological systems can malfunc-
tion, but the "general telling" of the community that institutes those norms
can no more be mistaken in its discriminations than can the functional adap-
tations of a species.
To understand how the constitution of objective accountability exceeds
mere social institution, Haugeland begins by disambiguating and further
articulating the notion of a "constitutive rule," through which games have
become an influential model for understanding the normativity of language
and social practices more generally. He draws illuminating distinctions
between four kinds of constitutive "rule": regulations that govern what
"players" do, standards that govern all phenomena within a game or prac-
tice, skills that discern whether phenomena accord with these standards, and
commitment to abide by skillfully applied standards. The constitutive skills
that determine accord with constitutive standards are in turn distinguished
from "mundane" skills for recognizing and coping with the relevant phe-
nomena in the first place. In chess, which provides a sustained example for
Haugeland's discussion, the constitutive skills amount to the ability to tell a
legal from an illegal move; their mundane counterparts enable recognition
of and appropriate responsiveness to the objects and phenomena (pieces,
moves, and situations on the board) to which these standards apply.
Haugeland claims that, unlike merely instituted norms, such skills and
standards (together, as we shall see, with a commitment to abide by them)
constitute a domain of
"objective phenomena" in the following three-fold sense: (i)

mundane skills are responsive to and/or can affect them (they
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are accessible ); (ii) they have normative status as criterial for
the correct exercise of objective skills (they are authoritative );
and (iii) they are independent not only of particular exercises
but also of any mere consensus (they are autonomous).6
Haugeland distinguishes such skillful "constitution" of objective phenom-

ena, which lets them be what they (only thereby) are, from both the incred-
ible sense of objects or phenomena being created by us ex nihilo and the
all-too-limited sense of already intelligible objects coming to "count as"
something else. Constitution in this sense is Haugeland' s gloss on Heidegger's
concept of disclosure [. Erschliessung ]: only because chess has already been
constituted (disclosed) as an intelligible domain could one ever discover a
rook threatening a bishop or a weakness in the center.7
Yet examples such as chess seem ultimately unsatisfying to Haugeland
precisely because they are invented, and hence seem not to provide a fully
independent normative constraint upon human performance. To overcome
this limitation, Haugeland imagines variants on chess which gradually push
it toward greater independence from us (esoteric chess, played in a medium
in which pieces and moves are difficult to recognize; automatic chess, in
which the pieces themselves have to make some or all of the moves, and do
so legally and appropriately; and ultimately, empirical chess, which com-
bines the previous two - here, the challenge is to discover whether there
really is a game being played according to discernible standards). In the end,
these variants of chess were introduced as a stalking horse for science, i.e.,
for the project of disclosing whether and how the world is intelligible. In
science, as in the imagined "empirical chess," it is quite possible that things
will not reliably conform to the forms of "telling" through which we aspire
to disclose them. The enterprise of science is in question in its very possi-
bility, in a way that Haugeland thinks typically does not hold for constituted
domains that we invent.
What distinguishes any constituted domain, whether scientific, ludic, or
otherwise, is an "excluded zone," a space of intelligible "possibilities" that
are nevertheless ruled out by the domain's constitutive standards. The mun-
dane skills of chess make intelligible what it would be for a rook to move
on a diagonal, while its constitutive skills prohibit the occurrence of any
such thing: a rook-moving-on-a-diagonal is simultaneously constituted as
conceivable but impossible. In chess, the impossibility of the excluded zone
of illegal moves is sustained by the mutual vigilance of the players (and to
a much lesser extent by the "compliance and inertness" of the pieces and
board - left to their own devices, they won't wander off, move illegally,
change to a different kind of piece, etc.). In science, however, the preserva-
tion of an excluded zone requires a kind of "precarious equilibrium"
between a resilient persistence in double-checking and adjusting skills and
standards to undo any apparent breach of the excluded zone, and an open-
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ness to the possibility that no such response will do, in which case the entire
practice must be reconstituted.
Such a space between the conceivable and the possible is precisely
what Haugeland thinks cannot be achieved through biological functionality
or socially enforced conformity. Nothing is "impossible" biologically or
socially, except what is de facto indiscriminable; the limits of their domains
are coextensive with their actual differential responsiveness and general
telling, respectively. What ultimately makes the difference that sustains
an excluded zone of impossible possibilities is a kind of self-generated
accountability, expressed in a commitment to abide by the constitutive stan-
dards of a practice. Such a commitment to skillful disclosure must be both
resilient (unwilling to abandon a domain of skills and practices at the first
sign of apparent difficulty, which would be not to take its achievements or
one's own skills seriously) and resolute (willing ultimately to give up the
practice, to avoid acquiescence in the violation of its standards). Such com-
mitment thereby goes beyond any merely socially instituted obligations,
Haugeland suggests, in the way in which faith or love transcend the more
limited obligations imposed by monastic or marriage vows. Existential com-
mitment, then, is the final, and most fundamental sense of a constitutive
"rule" or norm of accountability, and the one without which the others could
not have normative, and hence constitutive, force or authority.
Existential commitment alone establishes a normative accountability to
something beyond its control, Haugeland thinks. Such "beholdenness" to
the capacities of what is disclosed through constitutive and mundane skills
is what Haugeland means by "truth." While the truth claims of empirical
science are conspicuous examples of an existentially committed beholden-
ness to objects, however, it is not their discursive character that Haugeland
holds to be paradigmatic. Truth is an existential and ontological matter for
Haugeland, not semantic or epistemic. Any domain in which it matters that
things go rightly , such that anyone engaged with that domain ought to be
attentive and responsive to, and responsible for breaches of standards, dis-
closes objective phenomena. Thus, Haugeland endorses Heidegger's use of
the word "truth" for a more general phenomenon of which descriptive cor-
rectness is a special case. For example, using a hammer properly as a ham-
mer is also true in this more general sense - using the hammer discovers the
hammer as an entity and "gets it right." Such true comportments "let enti-
ties be," "let them show themselves," or "set them free." The idea is that
entities first lie hidden , either because they have not yet been noticed, or
because they have since been somehow disguised or even forgotten. True
comportments bring them out of this hiddenness - out into the open}
Only beings to whom the standards for such "lightness" matter, and who
can commit themselves to sustaining the excluded zones that confer intelligi-
bility on the phenomena surrounding them, can be genuinely intentional on
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Haugelanďs account. Intentionality and its normative responsibility thus
cannot be adequately articulated from a disengaged perspective, but require
an interpretive stance of participatory involvement .9 Intentionality is not
merely the carrying of information, but must involve an understanding of it,
where understanding amounts to "recognition] as being in accord with the
standards constitutive for their domain."10 Intentional directedness thereby
projects truth conditions (in this more general conception of truth) as its
"content." A striking consequence of this claim is that the patterns disclosed
by taking up Dennett's intentional stance, while they make up an important
domain of possible inquiry, are not themselves intentional
[Animals and computers] may exhibit . . . behavioral regulari-
ties that are best characterized as informed goal directedness;
but they don't understand what they're doing at all. Dennett has
hoped to demystify such notions as belief and desire by assimi-
lating them to the posits of the intentional stance. . . . But
"beliefs" and "desires", in the complete absence of any under-
standing, indeed the absence of any possibility of understand-
ing, what they are about, could hardly be of the same order as
what we ordinarily understand by these words. So ... the
démystification fails.11
What would disclose genuine, understanding intentional directedness,

Haugeland concludes, is not the intentional stance, but the existential ana-
lytic of Dasein.
II
We are now prepared to consider my critical response to this project and its
execution. I shall focus upon four points. In this section, I take up
Haugeland's distinction between the constitution of "objective phenomena"
and the social institution of norms that cannot hold the "general telling" of
a community to account. Subsequent sections will consider his conception
of objects as what truthful comportments are beholden to, his aspiration to
discover ontological differences among distinct ways of being, and his
account of existential commitment as the source or "ground" of our respon-
sibility to comport ourselves truthfully.
Haugeland's concept of constitution emerges from his attempt to dis-
ambiguate and further articulate the notion of a "constitutive rule," through
which games have been an influential model for understanding the norma-
tivity of language and social practices more generally. The central concerns
here are to understand both the normative authority of constitutive rules and
their normative force or efficacy. My concern is not with the concept of con-
stitution (or disclosure) itself, but with Haugeland's distinction of constitu-
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tion from social-normative institution, and its relation to distinctions
between science and games, and between objects in general and "things"
specifically. Whereas constitutive skills and commitments are accountable
to objective phenomena, for norms instituted through social practices, sup-
posedly, there is no higher authority than the "general telling" of the com-
munity that engages in those practices. A community as a whole supposedly
cannot be mistaken about the correct performance of greeting gestures or the
correct pronunciation of words, in the way that it can be mistaken about the
chemical structure of water or the existence of weak neutral currents.
A second related distinction is between science and games. In contrast
to science, Haugeland argues, "the artificiality and ultimate inadequacy of
chess and all game analogies come most blatantly into the open."12 The
intelligibility of science clearly turns on matters beyond the control of those
who engage in its practices, so that "the essential difference between science
and games, is that the enterprise itself is always in question."13 Scientific
practice can fail empirically in a way that chess cannot, and Haugeland's
imaginative variations on chess are intended to articulate that difference by
displaying some conceivable intermediate positions between correct play or
performance and genuinely objective correctness. The third distinction that
concerns me is between the more general category of objects, which
includes such non-substantial items as rooks, beliefs, or numbers, and the
specific objective domain of things, "integral individual bearer[s] of multi-
ple variable properties."14
The reader may be initially tempted to align these three distinctions
quite closely: science would then constitute objective things by its empiri-
cal vulnerability to standards beyond its control, whereas games would
exemplify a merely instituted accountability to community norms. That will
not do, however. Chess phenomena are also constituted on Haugeland's
account (as are the non-substantial patterns discernible from the intentional
stance), so that the difference between science and chess is a difference
between constituted domains rather than between constitution and institu-
tion. At the other end, electrons or quarks, electromagnetic fields, or eco-
logical niches are not "things" by Haugeland's criteria, not to mention the
objects of cognitive science, anthropology, or economics, so that the empir-
ically vulnerable standards of sciences are not just "more specific, more
explicit, and, above all, stricter" than the constitutive standards for the ontol-
ogy of things, but instead crosscut these categories.15
I have two points to make about these distinctions: first, that Haugeland
has misconstrued the significance of the differences between sciences and
games and, second, that "socially instituted normativity" turns out to be an
empty category, a philosophers' fiction that we should reject. In ironic rever-
sal of a view Haugeland attributes to his own earlier philosophical self, I
conclude that "all institution is constitution."
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For Haugeland, the empirical invulnerability of games seems rooted in
their player-centeredness as well as their artificiality. "In games like chess
and baseball, all the 'action' is initiated and largely controlled by the play-
ers; the constituted paraphernalia, by contrast, are required merely to remain
suitably at their disposal - a kind of compliance and inertness clause."16
There are problems from the outset in this distinction between players and
other constituted paraphernalia. Haugeland notes that baseball could not
require of the pitched ball that it pause in midair before it then hurtles on
toward the plate, but it also cannot require that the pitcher throw the ball to
the batter from five hundred feet away. Games are answerable to the capac-
ities of all their constituents, players and paraphernalia alike.
Yet answerability to the capacities of objects supposedly makes science
uniquely vulnerable to normative failure. If things turn out not to comply in
the right way, we may have to give up the enterprise in its present form by
fundamentally altering "the very skills and concepts that are the form and
substance of the domain itself."17 Haugeland is wrong about games, how-
ever, for their constitutive standards are also empirically vulnerable. A
provocative example arises in Bobby Fischer's recent proposal for a funda-
mental revision in the constitutive standards of chess. Fischer argues that the
extensive documentation of standard openings and responses, augmented by
computer analysis, has fundamentally transformed chess such that a tradi-
tionally skillful player can be defeated by brute mnemonic force. Fischer
claims that this development removes the point of chess as a test of intel-
lectual skill and fortitude. He then proposes a fundamental revision of the
constitutive standards of chess, in order to be true to the game .18 Fischer
may or may not be correct in his diagnosis of the present state of chess, and
his prescription may or may not be an adequate or appropriate response. My
point is that his claim is intelligible and debatable by appeal to empirical
evidence. If the practice of chess playing were to evolve such that the game
became a test of memory rather than of analytical skill, or that the outcomes
were predictable as in tic-tac-toe, then the point of playing the game would
have been lost, and a revision or repair of its constitutive standards would
be called for by the evolution of play itself.
A similar oversight afflicts Haugeland's conception of merely instituted
norms. Haugeland cites greeting gestures, folk dance performances, and
conventional traffic regulations as examples of norms for which the com-
munity's "general telling" could not in principle be wrong.19 If everyone
agrees to greet one another in a distinctive way (and to respond differen-
tially to inappropriate gestures), or to drive on the right rather than the left,
then there may seem to be no standard according to which they could be
wrong. Haugeland's analysis suppresses the community's accountability to
what is at stake in such practices, however. In the traffic case, driving on the
right or the left is entirely up to the community only because of a conceptu-
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ally prior determination that this choice makes no difference to what is at
stake in driving practices. If predominant human neural organization turned
out to cause more accidents in countries where oncoming traffic was to
drivers' left, if maintaining an unusual national standard were to be eco-
nomically disastrous to automobile or tourist industries, or if converting to
the dominant practice elsewhere would undermine national identity in ways
that matter to its inhabitants' lives (whether that would be a good thing or
bad!), then the community as a whole could be wrong about which standard
to adopt.20 Likewise, whether a greeting gesture is performed incorrectly
rather than merely differently depends upon what is at stake in their perfor-
mance (e.g., recognition of an intention to greet, reaffirmation of commu-
nity, submission to authority, or elegance of bodily presentation). There
must be an excluded zone , at least implicitly, that would demarcate genuine
nonconformity from inconsequential variations on the normal. The first
moral to draw from Haugeland, then, is that "objectivity" does not uniquely
express an accountability of practices to something authoritative over the
community participating in them . Granted, it may not yet be fully evident
what is at stake in a practice, the stakes may themselves be contested and
may change over time, but none of these points reduces what is at stake in
the "institution" of norms to what a community merely happens to agree
upon.
With this background in mind, we can now see how Haugeland is also
mistaken in his characterization of the stakes in scientific practices.
Haugeland only allows for scientists' accountability to the "objective cor-
rectness" of their theories and their experimental and instrumental manipu-
lations. Incorrectness is neither the only nor the primary way in which
scientific work can go wrong, however. Achieving results that are trivial,
imprecise, uninteresting, inelegant, misleading, or confused also mark fun-
damental failures in scientific work.21 Moreover, incorrectness itself is not
as simple and straightforward as Haugeland makes it appear. He recognizes
the complexities introduced by the holism of hypothesis testing, such that
resilient adjustments of skills are needed to maintain a "precarious equilib-
rium" in the face of apparently incompatible results. What escapes his notice
is that the constitutive standards of the sciences are themselves rich and
complex, focused by what makes the practice and its outcomes significant.
This point emerges especially clearly in recent work on the history of sci-
entific objectivity. "Objectivity" is not one generic virtue, but a contested,
historically specific field, in which scientific practitioners are accountable to
what has shown itself to be at stake in their reflexive engagement with the
world and their own practices.22
Should we then conclude that sciences are just like games? Of course
not. There are many important differences in what is at stake in games and
sciences, and how those stakes are attended to in the standards, skills, and
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commitments that govern the practices. My point is that these differences
are not usefully expressed in terms of a generic structural difference
between two kinds of normative accountability and vulnerability to failure.
Part of what makes science supposedly different in kind according to
Haugeland is that it is distinctively hard. People play legal chess without
much difficulty, but engaging in scientific research is more prone to a fun-
damental failure of its constitutive standards and skills. Here, however,
Haugeland goes astray by failing to recognize different ways of being
involved in each of these practices. Both science and chess allow for partic-
ipation in a form that is relatively "easy," but which is also incapable of
transforming the practice. Thus, like playing legal beginning or intermedi-
ate chess, doing high school or undergraduate science exercises can be a
straightforward exercise of skills, but cannot "put the enterprise itself in
question." To be sure, how and why innovative, transformative chess play
matters, and how innovative, creative science matters, are not the same; but
how and why innovative, creative science matters in different fields is also
not the same. I conclude that it is only when one discusses the normativity
of scientific practices at too high a level of generality and abstraction that it
becomes less distinguishable from the normativity and empirical vulnera-
bility of games.
What are the consequences for Haugeland' s account if we give up the
concept of social institution and instead take all significant human practices
to constitute objective phenomena? I can see only two plausible ways in
which retaining a place for "institution" within his overall understanding of
human comportment might seem important. First, social institution plays a
role in Haugeland's imagined evolutionary story about how genuinely inten-
tional comportment might have first non-mysteriously emerged from non-
intentional ones:
the emergence and maintenance of basic social norms is to be

understood in terms of a package of (in the first place, biologi-
cal) . . . meta-dispositions [through which] community members
effectively promote similarities in how they and their fellows
. . . behave relative to circumstances. . . . [T]his institutes a
community with a common set of social customs and mores.23
Second, "mere" social institution could express a derivative falling-away

from constitutive existential commitments once the latter have been initially
achieved.24 Having effectively lost sight of the standards to which a prac-
tice once was held accountable, practitioners might nevertheless still insist
(perhaps all the more stringently) upon strict conformity to its mere perfor-
mative regimen, or alternatively might find their practice subject to ongoing
normative "drift."25
At most, however, the evolutionary story only posits social institution
within some pre-human (or at least pre-Dasein) group, as a stage toward the
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evolution of a constitutive beholdenness to objective phenomena. There is
nothing inconsistent with Haugeland's conformist story if the initial emer-
gence of genuinely constitutive norms were then to bring all human com-
portment within the "space of constitutive commitments." Moreover, the
particulars of that story are not themselves crucial; if constitutive normativ-
ity is not to remain mysterious, there must be some way in which it first
emerged within biologically functional hominids, but there is nothing cru-
cial to Haugeland's account that the "correct" story be one in which social
institution emerged as a distinct intermediary. A story in which accountabil-
ity to others and beholdenness to phenomena emerged together might well
turn out to be a more adequate interpretation of the non-supernatural gene-
sis of normativity.
"Fallen" disclosure, meanwhile, is not really identical with social-nor-
mative institution as Haugeland has described it. A practice whose intelligi-
bility once depended upon a sustained commitment to standards that
mattered might well become increasingly detached from those standards in
practice. Yet such detachment would not (indeed, could not) thereby lose all
contact with its constitutive commitments, and what was at stake in sus-
taining them. Going on with a practice without attending to our responsibil-
ities within it is always a possibility for us, but such comportment does not
remove those responsibilities altogether. As Haugeland himself noted, "irre-
sponsibility is just a deficient mode of responsibility."26 Just as we encounter
unfamiliar paraphernalia not as meaningless stuff, but as meaningfully
involved equipment whose significance we do not understand, so fallen
comportment is always recognized, however dimly, as having lost sight of
or failed to understand what is at stake in the maintenance of constitutive
standards.
My second point, concerning Haugeland's discussion of truth as beholden-

ness, emerges directly from this discussion of constitution and institution.
One reason that truth is central to Haugeland's concern with the metaphysics
of mind is his conviction that some prominent theorists of intentionality
(notably Brandom, Davidson, and perhaps Sellars) fail to account for the
objective normativity of human understanding precisely because they settle
for merely instituted normativity or coherence of beliefs. Davidson explic-
itly acknowledges that his account, in the end, is a coherence theory of sorts,
whereas Brandom holds out for genuine objective accountability (and thinks
that his theory fails if he cannot explicate such accountability in his terms).27
Yet Haugeland claims that is precisely what Brandom's approach cannot
accomplish, concluding that "the proofs show ... no legal move, in
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Brandom's system, from 'Everybody believes 'p' . . . to 'p. ' But they don't
show anything at all about what could legitimate 'p ' instead; . . . [or] how
'p' could 'answer to how things actually are. . .'"28 Brandom's consequent
failure to have an adequate conception of truth, according to Haugeland, is
twofold: his understanding of normativity as deontic rather than existential
cannot take us beyond merely socially instituted normativity,29 and his "phe-
nomenalist" route from discursive practices to objective accountability can-
not genuinely get to objects. I locate their disagreement differently:
Haugeland still aspires to say something general about what "could legiti-
mate % "' whereas for Brandom (or Davidson), "there is no bird's-eye view
above the fray of competing claims from which those that deserve to prevail
can be identified."30
My own concern with Haugeland's conception of truth as beholdenness
is directed toward his identification of objects as what our practices are
beholden to. I begin by noting a strategic difference between Haugeland's
approach to intentionality and those he criticizes as lacking an adequate con-
ception of truth. Whereas Brandom and Davidson begin by discussing dis-
cursive practice and propositional contentfulness, Haugeland begins instead
with resilient, skillful, practical dealings with the world, and never quite gets
around to discursive practices. Haugeland's account could indeed be inter-
estingly extended to display the constitutive standards and the resilient con-
stitutive and mundane skills that would constitute linguistic understanding.
That he does not do so, however, shows how strongly he accords priority to
practical responsiveness over discursive articulation. This strategic differ-
ence may then seem to mark a sharp divide between those who claim that
all understanding (or cognitive content) must be expressible in language and
those, like Haugeland, who take seriously the possibility that language pre-
supposes a bodily or practical "background" intentionality that cannot be
made explicit.
I argue elsewhere that this difference is merely apparent and that, when
properly worked out, these two starting points are interchangeable.31 If I am
right, Brandom's strategy of explicating practical/perceptual coping as infer-
entially significant components of discursive practice and Haugeland's
implied strategy of explicating semantic contentfulness as constituted by
resilient practical/perceptual skills ought to converge in the end. Such con-
vergence is blocked, however, by a crucial ambiguity in Haugeland's
account. Sometimes Haugeland argues that constitutive standards govern the
phenomena that (can) occur within a constituted domain.32 At other times,
however, he speaks of standards and skills as making constitutive contact
with objects . Haugeland clearly intends to use the terms "objects" and
(objective) "phenomena" interchangeably; in particular, he introduces
"object" as a technical term for whatever is "the locus of incompatibility
among [various mundane skillful performances], . . . that point of intersec-
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tion, at which the many results concur, and the one stands apart."33 Yet there
is one crucial context in which he draws a relevant distinction, such that
phenomena are the practical correlates of judgments rather than of subjects
or predicates. The ambiguity then shows up this way in Haugeland's chess
examples: in one version, the constitutive standards and skills of chess rule
out the phenomenon of a-rook-moving-along-a-diagonal; in the other, the
constitutive standards and skills rule out the identity of a rook and a diago-
nal-mover. This distinction parallels the difference between semantic theo-
ries that explicate reference through its contribution to truth and those that
explicate truth in terms of reference. Haugeland is drawn to the latter strat-
egy, both because he aspires to link the objective accountability of practical
norms to the modal characteristics of objects and because he hopes that "the
basic structure of objectivity might be delineable independently of any par-
ticular doctrine of judgment [to represent combination in the object ]."34
Yet by beginning with object-recognition skills, and only then account-
ing for the practical correlate of judgment as combination-in-an-object,
Haugeland does not remain independent of particular doctrines of judgment.
Moreover, his argument for this strategy fails. In chess, for example, he
claims that "the skills for recognizing pieces and moves must be separate
and exercisable independently of one another. So, to recognize a piece of a
certain type moving in a certain way requires (at least) three recognitive
abilities: for the type of piece, for the way it is moving, and for, so to speak,
their combination (in the same piece)."35 It is true that "recognizing that
something is a rook cannot amount simply to recognizing that it is presently
moving along a rank or file."36 That truth by itself, however, does not deter-
mine how best to account for it. One might, as Haugeland suggests, start
with object-recognition skills, but one might instead proceed from practical-
inferential capacities for dealing with phenomena. Recognizing something
moving along a rank does not commit me to its being a rook, but it removes
my entitlement to regard it as a bishop, while preserving whatever entitle-
ment I had to take it as a rook. The incompatibilities that establish an
"excluded zone" of conceivable but impossible phenomena need not be
grounded in distinct skills for recognizing objects and their behaviors; they
may instead be the ground for recognizing object-boundaries.
Indeed, Haugeland's suggested strategy of distinguishing three recog-
nitive abilities has an underlying problem: how does the third ability actu-
ally connect in practice to what is recognized by the other two? If one needs
the explicit practical recognition of combination-in-an-object to bring
together the recognitions of pieces and moves, it is unclear how that need
could be satisfied by an additional practical recognition skill, whose relation
to the first two skills would seem to present a problem similar to the one
they present to one another. Haugeland might try to avoid the regress by
insisting that this additional skill for recognizing combinations is different
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in kind from the skills for recognizing pieces and moves (i.e., subjects and
predicates).37 But this response starkly displays the failure of his attempt to
circumvent any specific doctrine of judgment (or its skillful/practical corre-
late). For then he cannot avoid talking about what the practical correlate to
judgment as combination-in-an-object amounts to, and how it is different in
kind from recognizing its constituent parts. The intelligibility of his account
would turn upon this admittedly undeveloped conception of the practical
correlate to judgment.
IV
I have discussed Haugeland's ambivalence about objects and phenomena at

some length because I think the priority he accords to objects in accounting
for the supposedly distinctive constitutive normativity of empirical science
is mistaken. The reason for his ambivalence seems clear to me. On the one
hand, the normative accountability of scientific practices applies to phe-
nomena (i.e., the material correlate of judgments): what are excluded as
"conceivable but unintelligible" by current theoretical models and experi-
mental practices are impossible phenomena, not impossible objects. Yet
Haugeland will not settle for that, because he still wants to do early-
Heideggerian ontology, distinguishing different ways to be that are consti-
tuted by different interpretive stances. Accountability to phenomena does
not make for an ontological difference between socially instituted practices,
where correctness and excellence of performance supposedly exhaust nor-
mative accountability, and science, in which even correctly performed dis-
criminations can yield incorrect determinations.
Here emerges my third point of contention. Haugeland explicitly adapts
Dennett's "stance stance" to do ontological work: different stances suppos-
edly disclose different ways of being. As a result, for both Dennett and
Haugeland, "the being of the intentional and the being of the physical, are .
. . central to the account,"38 but for rather different reasons. For Dennett, all
stances are on a par ontologically, and the physical, design, and intentional
stances are interesting only because of their predictive success relevant to
our purposes. For Haugeland, the being of the intentional and the being of
the physical are importantly different ontologically from the ways of being
disclosed from any other stance. The physical must be different because sci-
entific practices are empirically vulnerable to the objective domain they con-
stitute, and not merely to the performative norms that they institute.
Meanwhile, human understanding must be different from what the phe-
nomena constituted through any particular stance disclose, because it
embodies "the underlying unity that binds [the various constitutive stances]
all together, that makes them all distinctions among ways of being.1'39 Thus,
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genuine (human) intentionality supposedly involves the existential commit-
ment that constitutively discloses being at all, by insistently holding oneself
and other people and things accountable to norms. That is why animals and
computers can only have "ersatz intentionality" for Haugeland, and why the
third-person pattern disclosed by the intentional stance in the end does not
adequately disclose intentionality: it cannot express the first-person involve-
ment and commitment that Haugeland finds indispensable to normative
accountability.
So why do I think Haugeland is wrong to confer such Heideggerian-
ontological significance upon the physical and the intentional or, more pre-
cisely, upon objective, social-normative, and existential ways of being
(roughly, Vorhandensein , Zuhandensein , and Dasein)!40 Given an accep-
tance of Haugeland's account of constitution as "letting be," and his dis-
tinction between disclosure and discovery, why shouldn't we also accept
that there are essential, ontological differences between various ways of
being? I begin with Haugeland's well-known arguments against the token
identity thesis, which forcefully show that the supervenience of the inten-
tional upon the physical should not be construed as an identity between
mental states and states of particular physical things.41 The mental super-
venes upon the physical only globally, and in any case the relation between
mind and world should not be regarded as an interface, but as an intimate
entanglement. Likewise, Haugeland has argued that social-normatively con-
stituted objects like chess pieces are not identical with any physical sub-
stance: rooks are not plastic figurines, ivory carvings, or physical tokens of
standard chess notation. All true.
What Haugeland's own account of "excluded zones" and "power to the
phenomena" properly shows, however, is that the "object systems" consti-
tuted within scientific practices are not things either. Science discloses, and
is accountable to, not objects, but objects-in-phenomena.42 This point is
already well known from quantum mechanics, which permits no coherent
explanation of measured phenomena in terms of definite positions and
momenta assignable to well-defined objects. Following Karen Barad, I think
we should understand quantum physics as assigning measurement outcomes
to the entire (reproducible) arrangement of apparatus-cum-object that
locates within that phenomenon a practical cut between agencies of obser-
vation and object. Moreover, this priority of phenomena over the objects
constituted within them is not limited to microphysics, or to the physical:
macroscopic trajectories and their causal determinants, organisms and their
selective environments, or meanings and truths acquire definite bounds only
within phenomena, the reproducible patterns of practical intra-actions.43
Haugeland cites mass as an exemplary nonrelational property of a thing, but
that is not so. Mass only becomes assignable to an object through its resis-
tance to acceleration in reproducibly configured phenomena: spring balances,
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gravitational "systems," elastic or inelastic scatterings, etc., in which the
correct assignment of mass is a component of the conservation of energy
within the entire system.44
This recognition makes it easier to express the proper sense in which
we should all be "vapid materialists" for whom everything temporal and
contingent is material.45 Haugeland's account of the weak or global super-
venience of the mental upon the physical already undermines any identifi-
cation of mental states or performances with determinate states of perduring
physical objects. One step in his argument was to show that even some
physical phenomena, such as the intersection of a wave with a bobbing cork,
were not identical to determinate states of perduring physical objects. But
Barad's and my arguments suggest that no physical phenomena are token-
identical to determinate states of perduring physical objects, and hence that
nothing distinctive about intentionality is manifest in its non-token-identity
with the physical. In Haugeland's own words, "the problem lies with
expressing the primacy of the physical in terms of identities ,"46 even in the
case of the physical itself: the objects of scientific measurements are not
identical with any substance, any more than rooks or beliefs are. Yet this
argument also means that the sense in which every intentional phenomenon
is manifest in material intra-actions is more comprehensible, since it entails
no object- or state-identities. The intentional is material in the sense that its
interpretation must always be normatively accountable to publicly accessi-
ble marks on bodies.
What, then, of Haugeland's claim for the ontological priority of Dasein ,

the being whose own being is at issue for it, and who consequently is capa-
ble of understanding and disclosing the being of anything else? Here we
need to recognize a difference between two distinctions, which Heidegger
conflated in Sein und Zeit , and whose conflation Haugeland implicitly
endorses. First, there is the distinction between disclosure or constitution
("ontological truth") and the discovery of entities: the discovery of an entity
as what it is ("ontical truth") is possible only because of the disclosure of
standards or stakes (and responsibility to them) which allows there to be a
difference between correct and incorrect discovery. This distinction corre-
sponds to the fundamental distinction in Heidegger between beings and
being (or better, between beings and the meaning, "clearing," or truth of
being).47 Second, there is a distinction between the way of being of a par-
ticular being, Dasein , and other ways of being. In Sein und Zeit , Heidegger
brought these together in the crucial claim, which Haugeland (1989) has
cogently explicated, that "Dasein is its disclosedness."48 To the extent that
this claim identifies disclosedness with the way of being of a particular
being, however, it is mistaken.49 Adapting Haugeland's own terminology,
we can say that in any situation there is indeed always a cut between a
"locus of responsibility" and the "locus of (possible) incompatibility" to
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which "it" is responsible, but who or what is at each "locus" is not deter-
mined in advance, and need not remain stable over time or across situations
and settings.50 Agency, responsibility, and understanding are not capacities
which "we" exercise through our natural or cultural endowments, but struc-
tural features of the entire field of intelligibility that allows the disclosure of
anything at all. Thus, my point in rejecting Haugeland's attempt to demar-
cate distinct ontological regions is not to deny ontological differentiation,
but to deny that such differentiation is discretely articulated into internally
homogeneous "regions" or "ways" of being.51
Ironically, Haugeland himself has been among those most sensitive to
this point, in his insistence upon the worldliness of understanding and the
intentional directedness it expresses. For example, he reminds us:
Even in so self-conscious a domain as a scientific laboratory, . . .
much of the intelligent ability to investigate, distinguish, and
manipulate natural phenomena is embodied in the specialized
instrumentation, the manual and perceptual skills required to use
and maintain it, and the general laboratory ethos of cleanliness,
deliberation, and record keeping. Without those, science would
be impossible; they are integral to it. . . . [Thus,] intelligence
abides in the meaningful world: not just books and records, but
roads and plows, offices, laboratories, and communities. . . .
[T]he "great furniture of information" that civilization has accu-
mulated belongs with the rest of its furniture in the abode of its
understanding.52
There is indeed a sense in which it is appropriate to say that we human

beings are the beings that understand, but that sense is the outcome of an
ongoing, historically constituted material configuration of the world as
meaningful and accountable. We are not agents or subjects apart from
or "prior" to participation in such practical configurations of a world.
Moreover, "we" in this sense, as Haugeland rightly insists in his explication
of Heidegger on the finitude of understanding, are not the biological organ-
isms that can perish, or the merely social beings whose demise has social
consequences.53 We, as responsible beings, always already belong to an
integral configuration of the world as a meaningful field of possibilities for
being.
This rejection of Haugeland's attempt to do fundamental ontology
brings us back to consideration of scientific understanding. Haugeland's con-
structive account of truth, and how truth matters in science, arose precisely
from his concern for what is ontologically distinctive about being human.
Science supposedly marked the preeminent case of constitutive beholden-
ness to objective phenomena beyond our authority or control. If the stakes in
scientific understanding do not mark the ontological difference Haugeland
seeks between institution and constitution, however, then how should we
articulate the normative accountability of scientific understanding? How is
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scientific practice beholden to the world? Part of the answer is that the core
of Haugeland's answer remains correct: objective phenomena and scientific
beholdenness to them are constituted together. An important clue for extend-
ing that answer comes from the temporal orientation of scientific practices
and scientific understanding. Haugeland starts out right by thinking of sci-
ence as ongoing research rather than the retrospective assessment of knowl-
edge. It is the ongoing, resilient adaptation of scientists' constitutive and
mundane skills to account for newly discovered phenomena, entities, or fea-
tures that belongs to a constitutive disclosure of the world. Yet Haugeland
then feels compelled to express the normative accountability of such for-
ward-looking constitutive practices as accountability to objects already
there. To be sure, there is an obvious and crucial sense in which the physi-
cal world is already there; the problem is that, without appropriate practices
and norms, it is not yet there in its intelligibility, nor in its articulation into
objects.
To capture the temporality of scientific practices adequately, their
accountability should be expressed in futurai rather than retrospective terms.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger usefully suggests how to do so. For Rheinberger, the
proximal foci of research practices are experimental systems, which are
repeatable material phenomena. Such systems are developed to disclose
"epistemic things," which are not yet adequately understood and articulated,
yet are sufficiently stabilized by the technical conditions of experimental
practice to be an intelligible object of inquiry:
"Epistemic things" are material entities or processes . . . that
present themselves in a characteristic, irreducible vagueness.
This vagueness is inevitable because, paradoxically, epistemic
things embody what one does not yet know. Scientific objects
have the precarious status of being absent in their experimental
presence; they are not simply hidden things to be brought to
light through sophisticated manipulations.54
The concept of epistemic things expresses how the material systems that
focus scientific research always outrun our projections and conceptualiza-
tions of them, precisely the point that Haugeland hoped to characterize in
terms of objective correctness. Without some technical control of their com-
ponents and conceptual grasp of their configuration, experimental systems
cannot even pose explorable questions; yet, to the extent that these systems
are interesting or important, genuinely disclosive of the world, they undo
their own conceptualization. As Rheinberger notes,
Experimental systems grow slowly into a kind of scientific
hardware within which the more fragile software of epistemic
things - this amalgam of halfway-concepts, no-longer-tech-
niques, and not-yet-values-and-standards - is articulated, con-
nected, disconnected, placed, and displaced. Certainly they
delineate the realm of the possible. But as a rule they do not cre-
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ate rigid orientations. On the contrary, it is the hallmark of pro-
ductive experimental systems that their differential reproduction
leads to events that may induce major shifts of perspective
within or beyond their own confines.55
Haugeland shares some of Rheinberger^ concerns. In characterizing

the "constitutive standards" that disclose a domain of objects, he recognizes
that scientists' skills and conceptualizations must be resilient, open to revi-
sion and repair in the face of the recalcitrance of things. Yet Haugeland
insists upon severe limits to such internal adjustments in order to emphasize
differences between incorrect performance and incorrect determinations by
correct performance:
by ruling out the bulk of conceivable combinations, [constitu-

tive standards] bind the totality of actual results within the nar-
row bounds of possibility. And this binding together allows
them ... to "gang up on" isolated performances whose results
are incompatible with ... the overwhelming majority.56
His homage to Popper is his insistence that the constitutive standards of sci-
entific practice be unequivocally vulnerable to the prior determinacy of
things, so that the enterprise itself can be in question.
This demand overlooks the inherent and productive ambiguities
between accountability to procedural norms and to what is disclosed
through their performance. In discussing what Haugeland would call the
normative accountability of research skills, Rheinberger insists upon the
openness of such skills to something unprecedented and unexpected, and the
consequent need not to allow such skills to become rigidly determinate and
hence confrontational.
The [experimental] web must not become too rigid. In deliber-

ating upon the manner in which a system is to be handled so as
to let the unknown intrude and invade it, Max Delbrück has spo-
ken of a "principle of measured sloppiness." "If you are too
sloppy, then you never get reproducible results, and then you
can never draw any conclusions; but if you are just a little
sloppy, then when you see something startling you [nail] it
down."57
Haugeland also wants to allow for openness to the unexpected, but in his
remarkable amalgamation of Popper, Heidegger, and Kuhn, he sees it as
authentically resolute openness to giving up one's whole way of proceeding,
a kind of existential falsification, rather than as the normal position of
research within the penumbra of the known.
In these different conceptions of the normativity of experimental sci-
ence, Haugeland and Rheinberger agree in taking scientific practices to be
fundamentally accountable to material phenomena. Where they disagree
concerns what is at stake in such accountability. For Haugeland, the
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sciences become accountable to what their skills disclose by holding insis-
tently to determinate constitutive standards. Their skills can thereby be vul-
nerable to the entities discovered in scientific practice.58 Rheinberger and I
take issue with Haugeland's commitment to the prior determinacy of the
constitutive standards of scientific practice, and thereby with his claim that
what is at stake in science is simply the objective correctness or incorrect-
ness of those standards. Haugeland's existential conception of science thus
expresses a Popperian commitment to confer a definite interpretation upon
the sciences' constitutive and mundane skills, so that those skills can pro-
vide a definite measure of the world semantically and practically. We claim
instead that scientific research always resides within the productive ambi-
guity of such ongoing experimental intra-action. What is at stake there is not
correct discovery of objects and their properties, but the disclosure of epis-
temic things as binding upon us through what is at stake in our dealings with
them. The stakes in scientific research are not what nature is, but what it is
to be nature, and how nature matters ;59 contrary to Heidegger's infamous
pronouncement, science does indeed "think."
I return, as my final concern, to Haugeland's attempt to spell out his onto-

logical distinction between human beings and other putatively intentional
systems, based upon our capacities for "existential commitment" and love.
The need for existential commitment supposedly differentiates genuine
intentionality from what is disclosed from the intentional stance, which can
be adopted toward animals, computers, or thermostats as well as human
beings. I think Haugeland is right here in two crucial respects, but still mis-
taken in another.60 First, there is a crucial difference between the intentional
directedness characteristic of human understanding and that plausibly
expressed in the comportment of computers or (most) animals. This differ-
ence arises in my view because genuinely normative responsibility accrues
not to what is disclosed through the intentional stance, but through the inten-
tional-attributive stance, which involves a mutual recognition as intentional.
Hence, those systems that "have" intentional content, but cannot attribute
intentional content to themselves and others, are intentional in only a sec-
ondary and derivative way. This emphasis upon mutual recognition comes
from Brandom rather than Haugeland. Yet what is crucial to such mutual
recognition is not just the I-thou social relationship that Brandom proposes,
but the possibility of having something at stake in understanding (one's sit-
uation in) the world, that matters in ways that are not up for choice.61 And
that is the second point on which Haugeland is right about intentional direct-
edness: the reason that machines cannot understand and thereby embody
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full-fledged intentionality is that "computers don't give a damn."62 1 believe
Haugeland's conception of being-intentional is still problematic, however,
in construing "existential commitment" as what amounts to "giving a damn"
in the relevant sense.
Two issues concern me about existential commitment. Haugeland char-
acterizes it as a "dedicated or even a devoted way of living; a determination
to maintain and carry on," an "insistence" upon constitutive standards,
whose "governing or normative 'authority' . . . comes from nowhere other
than itself . . . [through] self-discipline and resolute persistence."63 The
problem is that a ^//-determined commitment could have only the sem-
blance of authority over us, and hence could not genuinely constitute a
world to which our expressions, activities, and skills are responsible. As
Kierkegaard trenchantly noted, the authority that existential commitment
could "find" through insistent self-determination is like the authority of a
monarch in a country where revolution is legitimate.64 If the responsibility
of the sciences to phenomena (not just their de facto exercise of that respon-
sibility) is dependent upon scientists' dedication, then even dedicated scien-
tists could make no legitimate claim upon the practices of others, and hence
could find no authority in objects themselves. Moreover, scientists could
then choose to acknowledge others' stakes in their activity, but would not be
responsible to them. What we need to understand instead is how what is at
stake in our situation can have a hold on or over us. Disclosure (constitu-
tion) cannot be something we accomplish, but can only happen through us,
as a meaningful configuration of the world we find ourselves in, rather than
a chosen commitment.
In fairness to Haugeland, he would disavow the voluntarism inferable
from locutions like "insistence" or "commitment"; the " existential " char-
acter of such commitment is invoked precisely to indicate that we already
are committ ed to constitutive standards, through continuing to be who we
are. His chosen exemplars of existential commitment, love and faith, are
revealing in this respect. Neither is within our control; we do not willfully
choose to be in love or to have faith, despite our efforts, but instead find our-
selves there, or not (love and faith are modes of Befindlichkeit). But then I
do not quite grasp how Haugeland can account distinctly for the normative
force and the normative authority of existential commitment. If a self-deter-
mined commitment to constitutive standards is irrevocable, then how do we
understand our frequent failures to live up to the responsibilities such com-
mitments establish, and the authority (rather than just de facto inevitability)
of claims that we ought to do so? We can, after all, betray our commitments
without having abandoned them; otherwise, there could be no betrayal, but
only breach of contract. If our beholdenness to objects is revocable, on the
other hand, then Haugeland may not have renounced voluntarism after all.
In "Truth and Finitude," Haugeland responds to this concern by cogently
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adapting Heidegger's conception of authentic resoluteness to suggest how
one could "take back" one's existential commitments not "willfully," but out
of fidelity to those commitments themselves. This move comes into ques-
tion, however, in my second point about existential commitment.
This second issue concerns by and to whom such commitments are
made. Haugeland rightly insists that "any player of chess . . . has an invest-
ment in the legality of all the moves in the game, regardless of whose moves
they are. . . . [I]f you are to keep playing - you who are involved in this
game as a player - then you must insist that both your own and your oppo-
nent's moves be legal."65 Likewise, scientists must insist upon taking seri-
ously and responding appropriately to apparent breaches of the excluded
zone that constitutes their domain. How does an insistence that others play
legal chess or do painstaking science authoritatively bind others (and vice
versa), apart from the institutional sanctions that get one thrown out of the
tournament or barred from research and publication? An important part of
Haugeland's answer is that only then can we play chess or do science. These
practices involve us through an appreciative (and ^//-constitutive) grasp of
what Alasdair Maclntyre once called "goods internal to a practice."66
"Understanding" in Haugeland's distinctive sense incorporates such an
appreciative, constitutive grasp of the "good" attainable by participating
jointly in practices, and that is why participatory involvement is so impor-
tant: the insistence upon playing legal chess or doing rigorous science holds
little force for those who do not "get" why commitment to or success in
these practices matters.
Yet there are two aspects of this point which Haugeland's discussion of
existential commitment does not yet illuminate. One is understanding how
such failures to "get it" can be genuine normative failures: an inability to be
moved by the "goods" constituted in practices, at least in some cases, marks
a diminished humanity and/or a failure of responsibility to others. What can
Haugeland's account say to someone who purports to be unmoved by a con-
cern for scientific understanding (or, mutatis mutandis, unmoved by a situ-
ation as calling for justice or for courage)? It is one thing to reject any
particular construal of these goods as not adequate to either the situation or
to what these terms are canonically supposed to express; for such rejection
is predicated on acknowledging the importance of what is at stake. It would
be another thing altogether to find oneself (or another) unresponsive to them
at all, and an adequate account of normativity needs to be able to express
this as a failing.
A second, perhaps related issue arises precisely when, in Haugeland's
terms, "the enterprise as a whole comes into question." Some practitioners
conclude that the constituted disclosure of a domain of phenomena must be
abandoned out of "existential" fidelity to its constitutive standards; or they
proceed in directions so novel that their colleagues interpret them as having
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given up. Yet these colleagues may judge the matter differently, and regard
their course of action as betrayal rather than resolute fidelity. I fear that
Haugeland's conception of autonomously constituted domains of entities
takes over from Kuhn the most problematic feature of his understanding of
incommensurably working in different worlds: they cannot account ade-
quately for how incommensurable practices and their objects could make (or
resolve) claims upon one another.67 There remains ample room to develop
Haugeland's conception of existential commitment, and these two concerns
might then dissolve. Although I cannot argue the point here, however, I sus-
pect that can only happen if Haugeland pays more attention to the cultural
and political significance of the constitution of object-domains, and in doing
so softens the degree of autonomy he would confer upon constitutive
"stances" and the object-domains they constitute.
I conclude by reflecting briefly upon the significance of these argu-
ments, if they are cogent. It might seem as if I have challenged the most
important concepts in Haugeland's recent work (constitution, beholdenness,
objectivity, and existential commitment), and thereby am fundamentally at
odds with his account. Yet such a reading would be deeply mistaken. I have
contested his specific formulation of each of these concepts or its applica-
tion, but my challenges at that level only matter if, as I believe, Haugeland
has correctly identified and articulated the most important issues concerning
intentionality, truth, and being. To agree about that much, however, is in the
end to have endorsed his views about almost everything.
NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Central Division of the American
Philosophical Association, for an author meets critics session devoted to John Haugeland's
Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1998). I am grateful to my fellow symposiasts, Daniel Dennett, Brian Cantwell Smith, and
especially John Haugeland for their contributions and responses. Rebecca Kukla also provided
very helpful comments on the penultimate version.
1. John Haugeland, "Heidegger on Being a Person," Nous 16 (1982): 15-26; "Dasein's

Disclosedness," Southern Journal of Philosophy 28 (suppl. 1989): 51-73; "Truth and
Finitude," in Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity : Essays in Honor of Hubert L.
Dreyfus , ed. M. Wrathall and J. Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), vol. 1:
43-77.
2. Haugeland, Having Thought ; "Truth and Finitude."

3. I use the singular form, human being, advisedly. Intentionality on this account is not a
property of a particular entity, but an ontological dimension of a way of being (Dasein).
Dasein is not you, me, or anyone else, but a way of being in which we each participate.
4. Philosophers of science have increasingly come to appreciate the need to articulate the
connection between explanation and understanding and to recognize that explanation
only gets its philosophical significance from its contribution to understanding. See
Michael Friedman, "Explanation and Scientific Understanding," Journal of Philosophy
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71 (1974): 5-19; Wesley Salmon, Causality and Explanation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Bas Yan Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980). Yet, philosophers of science have also been suspicious of this
connection, and have attended almost exclusively to explanation, for fear of psycholo-
gizing explanation and thereby losing the normative authority of the world over our con-
ceptualizations of it. What Haugeland seeks is a non-psychologistic conception of
understanding, which not only permits but requires that one's comportment be responsi-
ble to the objects or phenomena to be understood.
5. Haugeland, 'Truth and Rule-Following," in his Having Thought, 310.
6. Ibid., 325.
7. Although Haugeland does not explicitly make this connection, his classification of con-
stitutive and mundane skills maps onto Heidegger's discussion ( Sein und Zeit [Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927], §32) of the "fore-structure" through which Dasein's under-
standing of a disclosed domain enables it to deal with (interpret) phenomena in that
domain as intelligible. Mundane skills incorporate what Heidegger called a Vorhabe (the
"fore-having" or "prepossession" of the interconnected components of the domain) and
a Vorsicht (a "fore-sight" or "preview" of intelligible ways of comporting oneself within
it). Constitutive skills mark the Vorgriff (the "fore-conception" or "preconception" of the
standards or norms according to which successful or unsuccessful dealings are to be
assessed). As both Haugeland and Heidegger insist, these constitutive skills or capacities
are "co-constituted" as mutually dependent upon one another in their conferral of intel-
ligibility to the domain and one's comportment within it.
8. Haugeland, 'Truth and Finitude," p. 55.
9. Haugeland mistakenly conflates the role of such participatory involvement with that of
a "first-person" stance in epistemology and philosophy of mind. What Haugeland's argu-
ment shows, however, is that the normativity of genuine understanding requires such
involvement in either a first- or third-person stance. Thanks to Rebecca Kukla for alert-
ing me to the importance of this conflation.
10. Haugeland, Having Thought, 286.
11. Ibid., 286-87.
12. Ibid., 343.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 348.

15. Ibid., 351.
16. Ibid., 321.
17. Ibid., 343.
18. Fischer's proposal is that the placement of pieces on the back rank shall be determined
randomly at the outset of each game, thereby defeating the analysis of standard openings
and requiring thoughtful analysis from the very first move.
19. Haugeland appeals to the community's "general telling" to allow for the possibility that,
coincidentally, each individual member of the community happens to misperform in the
same way at once. On such occasions, everyone in the community would be mistaken,
but only because the community as such remains in principle incorrigible.
20. I leave open for the time being how it is determined whether traffic safety, economic via-
bility, or national identity are or should be at stake in driving practices, and whether these
stakes are worthy of making an issue of the organization of those practices.
21. In discussion of this point from an earlier version of this paper, Haugeland noted that of
course there are many ways in which science can go wrong, even beyond the ones I men-
tion; the discoveries of sustainable nuclear fission and fusion, for example, might even-
tually incinerate us all. His concern was only to articulate one distinctive and important
way in which scientific work can go wrong, namely, by being objectively incorrect. But
the crucial issue is whether objective correctness stands on its own, apart from the whole
complex of involvements through which a science and its outcome matters to us.
Haugeland wants to distinguish objective correctness as what is essential to science as
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such, apart from its other involvements, but I think such a conception of the "essence"
of science is not something to which he is entitled, given his other commitments. The
"essence" of a historically constituted practice like a science cannot be some invariant
feature whose indispensability can be certified by imaginative variation, but rather its
whole interrelated complex of involvements (its in-order-to-for-the-sake-of structure).
Being right or wrong depends upon what it matters to be right or wrong about, in what
ways, with what stakes. Scientific practices are never committed to understanding or
objective correctness in general, but always in some specifically configured research set-
ting with its many interrelated involvements.
22. Lorraine Daston, "Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective," in "Symposium on the
Social History of Objectivity," Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597-618, and her
"Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity," in Rethinking
Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). See also
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40
(1992): 81-128; Peter Galison, "Judgment Against Objectivity," in Picturing Science,
Producing Art, ed. P. Galison and C. Jones (New York: Routledge, 1998), 327-59.
24. In the latter case, of course, social institution would be taken to express the normativity
of the everyday, "fallen" way of Dasein's being for which das Man is that for-the-sake-
of-which its activities and equipment are understood and interpreted.
25. Robert Brandom, "Dasein, the Being that Thematizes," Epoche 5 (1997): 1-38, con-
vincingly argues that Heidegger's account of Dasein's "falling" shows (contra
Haugeland) that Dasein is essentially a discursive, "thematizing" way of being. On
Brandom's account, it is precisely discursive practices, in which one can "pass the word
along" communicatively without attending to the inferential connections that would vin-
dicate one's responsibility for what has been said, which make possible the characteris-
tic manifestations of fallen Dasein, namely "idle talk" [Gerede], curiosity, and ambiguity.
While I agree with Brandom's argument for the indispensability of Dasein's discursive-
ness, he draws too strong a conclusion from that argument, one that parallels
Haugeland's mistaken invocation of social institution. Brandom concludes that "the pro-
prieties concerning [ordinary equipment] are exhausted by how 'one' uses a hammer . . .
if one uses hammers as others do, then one uses them correctly" (27). The mistake is to
presume that social proprieties concerning hammering are not themselves accountable to
what is at stake in hammering, and that one could not also pass along a practical corre-
late to communication without understanding, namely, mere technical competence that
has no adequate grasp of what such competence is for the sake of, i.e., what is at stake in
its deployment.
26. Haugeland, "Truth and Finitude," p. 65.
27. Donald Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Truth and
Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 307-19. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning,
Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1994).
28. Haugeland, Having Thought, 358n. 14.
29. And therefore Brandom cannot even successfully understand social normativity, whose
intelligibility he also agrees must be accountable to objects. Similarly, Haugeland
believes, Davidson's "coherence theory" cannot account for the intentionality of beliefs
because it leaves no place for their being accountable to objects rather than other beliefs.
30. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 601.
31. Joseph Rouse, Scientific Practices and Philosophical Naturalism (forthcoming).
32. This locution appears most prominently in section 7 of "Truth and Rule-Following,"
where he introduces the concept of constitutive standards, but also in section 12 where
he also describes the "excluded zone" in terms of phenomena (Haugeland, Having
Thought, 320, 331).
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34. Ibid., 332, 358-59n. 21. There may be a tension between Haugeland's strategy (which I
endorse) of explicating modality normatively in terms of responsibilities constituted
through our skillful performances and standards and the attempt to take objects rather
than phenomena as the locus of modal applicability. The history of twentieth-century
philosophy of science shows the ineliminability of modal concepts for explicating even
the most basic empirical factual determinations. Without appealing to counterfactual dis-
positions, capacities, causes, or laws, there are no intelligible facts. Thus, we cannot first
encounter an actual world and then add modal properties on top of this actuality, for the
actual is not autonomously intelligible . Haugeland's argument for the importance of con-
stitutive normativity proceeds parallel to the arguments for the ineliminability of the
modal. Biological functions and social norms, he claims, cannot "mean" anything
beyond what they actually accomplish, and hence cannot genuinely mean anything at all.
But the reason they cannot do so is not because they cannot track modally rigid proper-
ties of objects, but because they cannot sustain existential commitments to abide by con-
stitutive standards and the exclusion of conceivable but impossible phenomena.
35. Ibid., 332.
36. Ibid., 331.
37. John Haugeland, "Response to Dennett and Rouse," American Philosophical
Association, Central Division, New Orleans, La., May 7, 1999. In his response to an ear-
lier version of this paper, Haugeland explicitly proposed this response.
38. Haugeland, Having Thought, 282-83.
39. Ibid., 283.
40. In some crucial respects, Zuhandensein does not quite match up to Haugeland's concep-
tion of socially normative institution. A glass hammer is unsuitable for hammering, and
just because we all agree that it is inappropriate to hammer with it. But in "Heidegger on
Being a Person," Haugeland did originally introduce his conception of the "conformist"
dispositions that supposedly institute social normativity in his exposition of Heidegger
on das Man.
41. Ibid., chaps. 5-6, 9.

42. Cf. Karen Barad: " Phenomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is not composed of
things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena, but things-in-phenomena" ("Meeting
the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction," in
Feminism , Science, and the Philosophy of Science, ed. Nelson and Nelson [Dordrecht:
D. Reidel, 1996], 161-94; quotation, 176).
43. Rouse, Scientific Practices and Philosophical Naturalism.
44. In "Truth and Finitude," Haugeland offers a different account of physical ontology. What
is distinctive about the being of the physical is not the ontology of things, but of lawful-
ness: "the being of the physical - the essence and actuality of physical entities - is
spelled out by the laws of physics." I think that the arguments below, which challenge
Haugeland's claim that disclosedness is the way of being of a particular being (Dasein)
also require us to abandon the conception of lawfulness as the being of the physical. A
more adequate account emphasizes the causal capacities of the physical world, which
our theoretical models typically express through tradeoffs between explanatory scope
and descriptive accuracy. These tradeoffs mark one way in which the disclosure of "nat-
ural" causality and normative responsibility cannot be articulated as autonomous, but I
do not have space to argue that claim here. For some discussion of "science without
laws," and its relation to explanation and understanding, see Nancy Cartwright, The
Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (University Press, (1999); and
"Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?" Dialéctica 51 (1997): 65-78; Ronald
Giere, Science Without Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Joseph
Rouse, Engaging Science : How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), and Scientific Practices and Philosophical
Naturalism.
45. Haugeland coined the expression "vapid materialism" in Having Thought, chap. 7, to
express a commitment (along with a comparably vapid holism) that should be attributed
to all of the infielders among his "intentionality all-stars."
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47. Mark Okrent rightly reminds us that when making the contrast to beings [Seienden] ,
Heidegger almost invariably speaks not of "being," but of the meaning of being, the truth
of being, the clearing of being, or ultimately just of the ontological difference. See his
"The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy," in Heidegger: A Critical Reader,
ed. H. Dreyfus and H. Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 143-58.
48. Haugeland, "Dasein's Disclosedness."
49. I think that Heidegger also came to recognize the mistake in identifying disclosedness
with the being of Dasein. That, I suspect, is why in his later work he no longer claimed
to be doing fundamental ontology, metaphysics, or philosophy: his project of thinking
about the ontological difference did not have any metaphysical consequences, i.e., did
not determine any beings. My argument, however, stands independently from that inter-
pretation of Heidegger.
50. This conception of a constituted "cut" between agencies and objects, which does not
track pre-existing identities of pre-existing subjects or objects, figures prominently in
several articles by Karen Barad, "Meeting the Universe Halfway," and "Getting Real:
Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality," Differences: A Journal of
Feminist Cultural Studies 10 (1998): 87ff.; "Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in
Understanding Scientific Practices," in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 1-11.
51. Thanks to Brian Cantwell Smith, both for indicating the need to make this point and for
offering an insightful formulation of it, which I have only slightly adapted here.
53. Haugeland, "Truth and Finitude."
54. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History ofEpistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in
the Test Tube (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 28.
55. Ibid., 36.
57. Ibid., 78, citing Delbriick's correspondence and oral communications as presented by
Ernst Peter Fischer and Carol Lipson, Thinking About Science: Max Delbrück and the
Origins of Molecular Biology (New York: Norton, 1988).
58. I use the word "discover" quite deliberately here. Haugeland {Having Thought, 331) fol-
lows Heidegger in distinguishing ordinary or mundane "discovery" of specific findings
within a practice, from the disclosure or "meta-discovery" that the practice is intelligible
at all. In these terms, I am arguing that Haugeland still takes what is at stake in the sci-
ences to be the correctness of their discoveries rather than the configuration of their dis-
closure.
59. The double sense of nature as "mattering" is fully intended; see Barad, "Meeting the
Universe Halfway," for further explication.
60. The argument in the preceding section also requires, of course, that we reinterpret the
supposed ontological significance of this claim. The question is not which beings can
have intentionality as part of their way of being, but rather what is necessary for the "co-
constitution" of a locus of agency and responsibility, and of something at stake in the dis-
closure of being to which it is responsible.
61. Haugeland emphasizes a different way of distinguishing human intentionality from the
functional normativity of animals. What supposedly marks the distinctive intentionality
of human beings is understanding, whose norms extend beyond mere correct (or func-
tional) performance to objective truth. That is, what human beings supposedly have that
animals do not is a recognition of and responsiveness to a difference between being func-
tionally right and factually wrong ( Having Thought, 310). But as I noted earlier, that dif-
ference integrally concerns semantic contentfulness together with truth-beholdenness. In
the end, I think, Haugeland does not pay enough attention to the intradependence
between truth and meaning, and in his zeal to get beyond a merely socially instituted nor-
mativity, has not done sufficient justice to the mutuality of understanding and intentional-
attributive recognition.
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62. Ibid., 60.
63. Ibid., 341.
64. S0ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (with Fear and Trembling ), trans. W.
Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), 203.
66. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1981), chap. 14.
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Truth, Scientific Understanding, and Haugeland's Existential Ontology

Author(s): Joseph Rouse

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43154319

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Truth , Scientific Understanding , and

John Haugeland's work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive scien

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Haugeland initially grounds the connection between his reflections on truth

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"objective phenomena" in the following three-fold sense: (i)

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Haugeland distinguishes such skillful "constitution" of objective phenom-

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What would disclose genuine, understanding intentional directedness,

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the emergence and maintenance of basic social norms is to be

Second, "mere" social institution could express a derivative falling-away

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My second point, concerning Haugeland's discussion of truth as beholden-

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I have discussed Haugeland's ambivalence about objects and phenomena at

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What, then, of Haugeland's claim for the ontological priority of Dasein ,

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There is indeed a sense in which it is appropriate to say that we human

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Haugeland shares some of Rheinberger^ concerns. In characterizing

by ruling out the bulk of conceivable combinations, [constitu-

The [experimental] web must not become too rigid. In deliber-

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I return, as my final concern, to Haugeland's attempt to spell out his onto-

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1. John Haugeland, "Heidegger on Being a Person," Nous 16 (1982): 15-26; "Dasein's

2. Haugeland, Having Thought ; "Truth and Finitude."

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14. Ibid., 348.

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41. Ibid., chaps. 5-6, 9.

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