Systems of Philosophy: On Robert Brandom’s “A Spirit of Trust”
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
"If you claim that the sky is blue but not colored, you’re not just saying something false — you are showing that you don’t have the relevant concepts (“blue” and “colored”) at all. At a minimum, you are violating your rational obligations. Anyone’s ability to mean anything is made possible by social practices that hold people to such rational rules of entailment and incompatibility. This approach, in Brandom’s formulations, owes much to Kant and, especially, Wittgenstein.
"The question of whether a certain sentence is true, for Brandom, is inseparable from rational standards about what it is permissible or obligatory to say or believe."
To me, this seems to be putting the cart before the horse, as if the truth of a statement is dependent on its linguistic properties. In practice, it seems to me that usage and semantics are bent to a language-independent (but imperfectly perceived) reality rather than the other way around.
Towards the end of the article, its author writes this, which strikes me as being to the point, at least with respect to the relationship between language and reality:
"Brandom’s position, in addition, is overweeningly rationalistic; I am not convinced that my obligation to believe of a blue thing that it is not also chartreuse is, all things considered, much like my obligation not to hurt people for no good reason. That is, the 'deontic' status of rational norms is fundamentally an assumption rather than a result, something that is supposed to be self-evident or entailed by our existing practices. But if I (like the arch anti-Hegelian Søren Kierkegaard, for example) resolve to embrace a paradox, or if I am simply indifferent to certain rational implications of what I already believe, how could we show this to be 'impermissible'? I’ll believe what I like, thank you very much."
I suspect that truth of a statement will depend at least in part on its linguistic properties, since the meaning of the statement will determine which part of the world will make it true or false.
I think that this is the bit that Brandom is concerned with - the question of how language gets the ability to say anything at all.
It seems to me that recognizing that usage and semantics have to respect a language-independent reality is why people will object if you claim that the sky is blue but not colored: because they recognize the language-independent reality that blue is a color. Plus the language-independent reality that if your intention is to communicate information, what you say has to be comprehensible to the listener.
In other words, "what is permissible or obligatory to say or believe" is driven by language-independent realities about facts in the world and requirements for communication to be possible.
The origin of our agreement on true or false usually comes from these things. But they are still agreements. That's why we have to teach our children language. Most children come wired to mirror their parents behavior. When we point to something blue, and say it is blue, they accept it without challenge because they haven't developed the capacity for challenge. It becomes axiomatic.
It is this same reason that "you've got to get them young" is the thesis for teaching anyone to believe something that is either difficult or questionable, because you bypass the stage of rational challenge.
I'm trying to unpack that statement. It seems like the article writer is claiming, in tortured fashion, that Brandom simply believes in axioms. Or am I missing the point?
I'd have to agree with the last statement. Ethical requirements for baseline beliefs do come from peer-pressure. There's a point where, if you disbelieve 2 + 2 = 4 you will be derided. What's interesting is how we extend those requirements, because that requires a delicacy we so often lack.
If I express “2+2” it could be evaluated to 4 (in decimal); or 11 (in trinary).
If two evaluators disagree on the truth-value of 2+2=11 then one possible explanation is that they disagree on the number-system in which the expression was made.
That leads to the usual consensus problems in computer science: leader election etc.
It can’t be solved without one side “changing its mind” - or, at least translating its expressions for the target evaluator.
Consensus requires linguistic norms.
Let us call the property of a thing that is both only blue and only chartreuse — blue and solely blue, not chartreuse, in being chartreuse, and chartreuse and solely chartreuse, not blue, in being blue — blutreuse.
Would not Brandom would point out that the author does not, in fact, believe that a blutreuse thing exists? I don't think it even reaches the level of what Brandom seems to be talking about, which would be more of a Heideggerian truth-as-in-the-flight-of-an-arrow, or truth as in soundness.
The author may believe that he could believe that a bluetreuse thing existed, may "embrace the paradox" and refuse his 'obligation' to admit that there can be no bluetreuse thing, but in fact he is going to do nothing of value with the paradox and cannot even imagine a bluetreuse thing, regardless of what he claims.
The review touches on this:
> This sounds quite as though it is going to descend into a coherence theory of truth, or even into the sort of linguistic idealism and relativism often associated with Rorty. Brandom is concerned to answer such criticisms, though not merely to reject them ...Brandom’s take on the relation of human intelligence to the real world is complex and cannot be fully captured in this space, and rarely has any philosopher given a more elaborate account of any matter than Brandom gives this one.
So Brandom has an answer for you - but you're going to have to buy the book to hear it haha.
Additionally, you quote:
> I am not convinced that my obligation to believe of a blue thing that it is not also chartreuse is, all things considered, much like my obligation not to hurt people for no good reason.
This is interesting! My guess is that this intuition will be common amongst people who have a non-skeptical view of morality. If you think that morality is part of the fabric of the universe, then it's more plausible that obligations will come in different varieties, and an obligation such as "don't hurt others for no reason" will have a special status.
On the other hand, if you are a moral skeptic and you believe that ethics is essentially about people-trying-to-get-what they-want, Brandom's view perfectly plausible.
My position is that language consists of the symbolic representation of distinctions and connections, and we humans are able to have these because as animals we have sense and brain systems that can make distinctions and connections about the real world.
Does Brandom talk about how, according to the scientists, first animals developed these abilities, and then humans added in the symbolization?
Or does he leave this out, and make it look as if language exists independently of the animal realm? Which would seem to imply it dropped down from the heavens, which would fit with Hegel's metaphysical idealism. Or perhaps he has some third position.