Brandom

12/3/2013

AK and Preface

  1. Here are two ideas about Hegel that are fundamental to my reading, and at first glance seem to stand in considerable tension with one another:

First Idea: Conceptual Realism, Objective Idealism, Conceptual Idealism

Hegel’s non-psychological conception of the conceptual, according to which to be conceptually articulated is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and (so) material consequence to other such conceptually structured items (his view of the metaphysical structure shared by things and thoughts as presenting a universe consisting of NAND gates), allows us to see thoughts on the side of subjects and objective states of affairs as alike conceptually structured, so that thought and fact can share a structure and differ only in form. This hylomorphic, nonpsychological conception of the conceptual explains both what it means for the “conceptual to have no outer boundary,” in McD’s terms, and how the GKC can be satisfied and, when all goes well, the way things appear for us and how they are in themselves can coincide. Here we might subdivide the idea of conceptual realism(cf. [798]) into two:

a1) “The conceptual has no outer boundary” read in terms of non-psychological conception of conceptual structure and corresponding functional conception of conceptual content as role w/res to that structure. (Note: it will be important below that content be understood in terms of functional role w/res to a process rather than a structure.) This is an assimilation of phenomena to noumena as of the same kind, namely conceptually contentful.

a2) Hylomorphically reading this conceptual kind as inovlvingtwo forms of one content, in the case where things are for consciousness what they are in themselves (the appearance of the reality is veridical). “When I think, and mean, that things are thus-and-so, my thought and my meaning do not stop anywhere short of the fact that things are thus-and-so.” (PI §95) The “identity theory of truth.”

The invocation of the distinction between justificatory and explanatory reasons in (1) is meant to fill in some details of this conception of two forms, from a more familiar direction.

Grice usefully distinguishes justificatory reasons from explanatory reasons (possibly following Hume, though Hume is not mentioned in this connection). (He also has a third, mixed category of explanatory-justificatory reasons, where an agent’s doings are explained by what justified them. This third category might be of use in reading Hegel, if there is any reason to think he focuses on it and abstracts the other two from it. I doubt this, but it is a possible line to explore. Cf. “Reason is purposive action,” [22]) For my purposes, this is a much more helpful way of drawing a line than the practical/theoretical reasons line—which Grice, I think, confuses with it.

a) Justificatory reasons relate the deontic statuses or attitudes of subjects, such as commitments and entitlements. Explanatory reasons relate objective states of affairs.

b)The two do line up roughly, according to something like the principle that if the belief that A justifies the belief that B, then the fact that A would explain the fact that B. Of course this is extremely crude, and would need to be hedged and qualified in many ways.

c)Here one might think, on the side of justifying reasons, of Ryle’s claim that every inference involves a certain generality (“If today is Tuesday, tomorrow will be Wednesday.”) As I would put it, inferences are good as instances of patterns of good inference, even when their goodness is material rather than formal. This could be laid alongside the hoary Hempel-Oppenheimer DN model of explanation. The thought would be that each of these thoughts is trying to get at some phenomenon (structure, form) common to justificatory and explanatory reasons.

d)It might be that Frege’s apparently eccentric insistence that one can only make inferences from true claims (that in making an inference, one is taking the premises to be true) reflects, on the side of justificatory reasons, the demand that explanatory reasons be factive at both ends.

e)The behavior of common modals, and especially subjunctive conditionals, that Grice begins to explore surely does reflect the notion of reason common to the justificatory and explanatory uses.

f)A way of putting my pragmatic metavocabulary view of the relations between what is expressed by deontic and alethic modal vocabulary would then be that what one must do in order thereby to be taking A to explain the fact that B is to treat commitment to the belief that A as justifying the belief that B. This would be a version of the claim in (b), and would need similar sharpening. But it is moving toward conceptual idealism.

g)That there is a common generic notion of reason in play here (Grice’s good central thought), explicable by appeal to (or just intricated with) a single notion of inference, seems to me to be one of Hegel’s central ideas. It is crucial for him that there must be a single generic notion that must take these two forms or exhibit these two species. (The objective idealist thesis of reciprocal sense-dependence might be articulating only part of or one aspect of this idea.) It is what stands behind the idea that the objective world, just as it is apart from our involvement with it, is rational (exhibits a rational structure) in the same generic sense that our thought does. (“On he who looks on the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.”)

h)Hegel’s rationalist-idealist strategy is to use this amphibiousness of reasons (one aspect of Grice’s “equivocality” [This is a terrible terminological choice because of its reminiscence of “equivocation.” He uses it because he wants to be noncommittal on whether common modals are univocal across what he thinks of as the practical/theoretical divide, or equally and correspondingly multivocal.]) to understand the intentional nexus common to knowledge and agency. That it is reasons and inference that he invokes for this purpose, rather than representation, is the great conceptual sea-change he recommends already in the Introduction, as necessary and sufficient to avoid the skepticism (failure to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition) that inevitably (he claims) ensues from focusing on representation. I should represent this strategic recommendation as Hegel’s central idea in the area. At its core is the phenomenon of reason being Janus-faced, essentially, and not just accidentally, coming in the two paired forms of justificatory and explanatory reasons. Hegel’s Big Idea is to put this phenomenon at the center of our understanding of intentionality (of “the Idea as the unity of Thought and Being”) rather than representation.

i)Indeed, this hylomorphic thesis about the relation between justificatory and explanatory reasons is what stands behind the Preface claim that “everything depends on understanding [what there is] not only as substance but as subject.” Cf. the Reason chapter’s claim that “consciousness’s certainty of being all reality” (BewußtseinsGewißheit, alleRealitätzusein) is the essential expression of idealism.

j)What I have focused on as Hegel’s “non-psychological conception of the conceptual,” according to which conceptual contents articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence can show up both in deontic and alethic forms, is a more specific way of working out the broader claim, which can usefully be put in terms of justificatory and explanatory reasons. I should try first characterizing Hegel’s idealism in terms of these two species of the genus reason, and only then move to the more specific conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by such reasons. I can do that in my discussion of the Preface.

k)Spinoza: “The order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas.” But the latter is normative, and the former is alethic.

Objective Idealism and Conceptual Idealism:

a)Straight lines are objective relations. Curved lines are subjective processes/practices. Arrows indicate that the recollectivepracticesinstitute the objective representational relations.

b)Objective idealism just concerns the sense-dependence between objective relations of determinate negation=material incompatibility, on the one hand, and subjective processes of resolving incompatible commitments. This is just a matter of what happens within the inner square and circle.

c)The next question is about the whole constellation [intended to be a term neutral between (causal) objective relations and (normative) subjective practices/processes. The question is: How does it stand between the objective and subjective aspects of this constellation? How should they be understood (construed)?

d)There are two possible forms of answer:

i)Objective relations (represented by straight lines);

ii)Subjective processes/practices represented by curved lines);

e)Conceptualidealism says that the way to understand the whole constellation is that subjectiveprocesses institute objective relations (of reference) between the subjective and the objective. (Compare: semantic government and epistemic tracking, in MEMRTA.)

f)The way this happens is by recollection, the second, reflective, reconstructive, recollective, phase of forgiveness that goes with the first, experiential phase of error that needs to be confessed.

Second Idea: Immediacy as Conceptual Instability:

Hegel’s successor conception to Kant’s (and everyone else’s) empiricist construal of sensuous immediacy as conceptually inexhaustibility, in the sense that there will always be more true observation-judgments to make. It is the idea that the sense in which the richness of content provided by the senses outruns what can be captured in concepts—what McD responds to by pointing at demonstrative concepts—consists rather in the instability of any system of determinate OED concepts. Slogan: from conceptual inexhaustibility of the richness of sensuously immediate content to the conceptual instability of the concepts that mediate sensuous immediacy. There is no set of determinate OED concepts (including but not limited to ones with observational uses) whose proper use—correctly following out the norms that implicitly govern their use—will not eventually lead us to acknowledge commitments that are incompatible according to those very norms, thus obliging us to change those conceptual norms. We will always be obliged to acknowledge that our previous claims were not exactly right. Cf. Aristotle on “hand”: “chairos”. “I have two hands.” But notice that we can retrospectively institute an extensional reading of this claim, according to which what he said was true, because he was—though he did not know it—referring to hands, not the things he thought he was talking about. This is moving from the Fregean to the Hegelian conception of reference.

The richness and fecundity of the immediate sensuous experience of particulars—the way it is bound to overflow any conceptual classification—is manifested primarily not in its necessary inexhaustibility by any finite set of empirical judgments, but rather in the necessary instability of any set of determinate empirical concepts. There is and can in principle be no set of determinate concepts whose correct application in empirical judgment will not eventually require us to revise and reject some of them. For that reason, any set of determinate empirical judgments is not only incomplete and fallible, but is guaranteed to be incorrect. That is, it not only mustomit some claims that are true and may contain some claims that are not true, it must contain some claims that are not true. In short, as I want to put the point, Hegel is not just an epistemic fallibilist about the truth of empirical judgments, but a semantic pessimist about the adequacy of empirical concepts. It is not just that we are necessarily ignorant of some truths and possibly in error about others, the necessary inadequacy and incorrectness of our concepts means we are necessarily in error.

[63]: We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way.

There are weaker and stronger versions of the thought that it is in the inadequacy and instability of every constellation of empirical concepts—the way each such system breaks down and point beyond itself to another—that the conceptual inexhaustibility of the empirical consists.

Weak: The addition of any new bit of knowledge may require a change of concepts. But it need not. It may be entirely compatible with our prior beliefs, and bring in its train no alteration in the counterfactual-supporting inference potentials of other sentences. This is only semantic fallibilism, not yet semantic pessimism. It adds to traditional epistemic fallibilism only the minimal lessons required by rejecting the semantic atomism of the Enlightenment.

Strong: “nature shows us a countless number of individual forms and phenomena”[1] or “nature…runs on into endless detail in all directions.”[2] When he says, for instance, that “In this motley play of the world…there is nowhere a firm footing to be found,”[3] he might not mean just that we can’t be sure that what seems now to be firm won’t at a later point slip.

“the Antinomies are not confined to the four special objects taken from Cosmology: they appear in all objects of every kind, in all conceptions, notions, Ideas….The principles of the metaphysical philosophy gave rise to the belief that, when cognition lapsed into contradictions, it was a mere accidental aberration, due to some subjective mistake in argument and inference.”[4]

On this reading, when Hegel says of the concrete that “the true, thus inwardly determinate, has the urge to develop,”[5] and that “The Understanding, in its pigeon-holing process, keeps the necessity and the Notion of the content to itself—all that constitutes the concreteness, the actuality, the living movement of the reality which it arranges,”[6] he means that no concepts with fixed, determinate boundaries can capture how things are in a way that will not turn out to require eventual revision. The case of the defective concept of acid* sketched above is not exceptional. We will always “learn by experience that we meant something other than what we meant to mean,” and so be obliged to “correct our meaning”.[7] We are always, and in principle, not just epistemically, but semantically in medias res. Coming to understand this is learning to think with the concept of the “true infinite” of Vernunft, in place of the “spurious infinite”, which is the “infinite of the understanding”[8], identified with the “perennial ought” and the “progress to infinity”[9] of Verstand. The difference is a matter of how we understand finite determinateness, and the infinity that it implicitly contains.

The conflict between these two ideas seems palpable. At least the (a2) limb of the first insists that the conceptual nature of objective reality means that we can get things exactly right. Our thought can be how things really are. The second idea is the idea that no set of concepts permits us to get things right.

  1. The apparent tension is only apparent. It is resolved by making three moves:

a)Appreciate the two temporal perspectives constitutive of experience: confession(a kind of acknowledgment) of error and forgiving recollection. (1b), inexhaustibility-as-instability says experience in the first (need for confession) sense will never cease. (1a), the hylomorphic construal of knowing (and acting), describes what experience in the second sense (after forgiveness) produces. This is the form of the reconciliation of these two aspects of objective immediacy=substantiality. And they are intelligible in principle only in terms of the dually temporally perspectival process of experience. Understanding this is the “science of the experience of consciousness.” This is profoundly anti-Tractarian.

b)Give up the Kant-FregeVerstand picture of conceptual contents in terms of their role in a static structure in favor of a view of them in terms of their evolving and developing functional role in the process of experience. Part of this adjustment is a new way of thinking about truth, as a “vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober,” a process, not a relation.

c)Think of immediacy as internal to conceptual content, as its restless principle of movement (“negativity”), as thoroughly mediated, but contributing the principle of movement to that mediation. “Mediated immediacy.”

The result of a successful recollection is the display of what is to consciousness the noumenon as the result of a rational expressive process passing through a sequence of phenomena: Genuine Knowledge. We need (b) to see that the fact that this identity of content in two forms is fragile and potentially temporary does not disqualify it from being genuine knowledge. Knowing is the process that passes through such stages, and is always at some such stage. Final, unrevisable nuggets of fact are an illusion of Verstand.

  1. The resolution of the tension in (4) must itself be articulated along two dimensions:

a)The subjective side of thought, where immediacy means the deliverances of noninferential reports (empirical, demonstrative).

b)The objective side of being, where immediacy means the stubbornness and recalcitrance of empirical facts.

In particular, we can ask, when we have made the reconciling moves in (2) on the side of the subject, how should that alter our picture of the objective world? Must we give up the very idea of there being a determinate way things are (way the world is)? In particular, in order to understand the True not only as substance but as self, to understand immediacy on the objective side as also self-like not only in being articulated by negativity, but by containing a principle of motion, must we understand objective reality as moving and changing in some way more radically than, say, Kant did?

No. The point is not that how the world really is is always changing. It is more the Wilson point that any set of determinate concepts is a patchwork, which can work well in some places only at the cost of not working so well at others.

My overall point, though, is that this last question, about the identification of objective substance as self-like, should be answered by answering my first question, in (1) about how to get together these two features of H’s thought about concepts: what responds to the Genuine Knowledge Condition, and immediacy as conceptual instability.

  1. Dangerous analogy invited by the claim that the conceptual has no outer boundary: It is as if the objective facts were just the beliefs of a world-believer. This is a dangerous image, because it invites the vulgar folk conception of Hegelian idealism. (Cf. John Haldane’s reading of Mind and World as a covertly theistic work.) Here one might think that such a “world assertor” would never make incompatible claims. But actually, this is wrong. Experience of error and recollection operate on the deontic side of the subject, but concern the objective realm. Finding oneself with incompatible commitments is finding oneself in a contradictory world.

But one is committed to forgiving that objective incoherence in the recollective phase of experience: finding an expressively progressive trajectory appealing to at least somewhat different concepts and contents, which are not incoherent. Cf. conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy as instability of every constellation of determinate concepts (OEDs). Putting these two points together (the need for experience as confession of incompatibility of commitments to be succeeded by recollection as forgiveness and inexhaustibility as instability) gives the sense in which objective immediacy includes the principle of restless negativity, according to which the phenomena, always already in conceptual shape, keep threatening to slip out of that shape into something contradictory, which is the showing up of noumena behind the phenomena, forcing us to recollective rational reconstruction.