**From German Idealism to American Pragmatism - and back | Prof Robert Brandom — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/german-idealism-american-pragmatism-robert-brandom/ Prof Robert Brandom explores the roots of American pragmatism in German idealism, focusing on Kant's normative turn and pragmatist methodology. ## Key Takeaways - American pragmatism is deeply influenced by Kantian German idealism, contrary to analytic philosophy’s rejection. - Judgments are normative commitments that define responsibility and agency, not mere natural responses. - Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception is a model for rational integration of beliefs and actions. - The minimal unit of awareness and responsibility is the judgment, not the concept. - Pragmatism involves understanding semantics through pragmatics, emphasizing the role of practical endorsement. ## What the video covers - The video traces the living tradition of American pragmatism back to its roots in German idealism, particularly Kant. - Kant is described as a foundational figure for contemporary philosophy and classical American pragmatists alike. - The analytic philosophy tradition, led by figures like Russell and Moore, rejected German idealism, viewing it as flawed. - Brandom highlights two key Kantian ideas: the normative turn and a pragmatist methodology. - Kant’s normative turn centers on the idea that judgments and actions are subject to normative assessment and responsibility. - Judgments and actions are commitments governed by rules or concepts that bind the agent to normative standards. - Kant’s concept of synthetic unity of apperception involves integrating judgments into a rational, systematic unity through inferential relations. - Judgments, not concepts, are the minimal units of awareness and responsibility, marking a methodological inversion in philosophy. - Kant’s approach prioritizes propositional content and the explanatory primacy of judgments over concepts, influencing later thinkers like Frege and Wittgenstein. - This methodology reflects a broad pragmatist commitment where semantics must be understood in terms of pragmatic use and responsibility. Answers ## Questions about this video What is the main focus of Prof Robert Brandom's lecture? The lecture focuses on tracing the roots of American pragmatism in German idealism, especially Kant's normative turn and pragmatist methodology. How does Brandom describe Kant's normative turn? Kant's normative turn is the idea that judgments and actions are normative commitments for which agents are responsible, governed by rules and concepts. Why does Brandom emphasize judgments over concepts? Brandom explains that judgments, not concepts, are the minimal units of awareness and responsibility, marking a key methodological shift in understanding propositional content. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A [Applause] Well, my ultimate aim is to suggest a direction that I think what I see as the living tradition of pragmatism, of an American philosophy that didn't end with the Second World War but is still a developing tradition, to suggest some directions in which we might move. But perhaps characteristically for the way I approach things, to do that I want to start going back and looking at the roots of American pragmatism in the German idealist tradition. I think developments over the last four decades have secured Emanuel Kant's status as being for contemporary philosophers what the sea was for the poet Swinburne, the great gray mother of us all. And Kant mattered as much for the classical American pragmatists as he does for us today. But we look back at that sepia-toned age across an extended period during which anglophone philosophy largely read Kant out of its canon. The founding ideology of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, articulating the rationale and fighting faith of the rising tide of analytic philosophy, was forged in a recoil from the perceived defects of a British idealism inspired by Hegel and mindful of the massive debt evidently and self-avowedly owed by Hegel to Kant. And putting aside neo-Kantian readings of Kant as an empiricist philosopher of science that would have cast him in a light they found more favorable, Russell and Moore diagnosed the idealist rot as having set in already with Kant. And for them and for many of their followers down through the years, the progressive current in philosophy should be seen to have run directly from Locke, Hume to Mill and Frege without any dangerous diversion into the oxbow of German idealism. What is it that I take the pragmatist to have learned from Kant? I want to focus on two of his master ideas: what I'll call Kant's normative turn and what I'll call, tendentiously but only proleptically, his pragmatist methodology. I think we should still care about these ideas today, ideas which were for complicated reasons largely invisible to classical analytic philosophy. As I understand his work, Kant's most basic idea, the axis around which all of his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we're in a distinctive sense responsible for. They're kinds of commitments that we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action bind the concept user. They commit her. They make her responsible by opening her up to normative assessment according to rules she's made herself subject to. For Kant, the responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility. It's a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one's success at doing, is integrating one's judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity, what he called the synthetic unity of apperception. It's a systematic rational unity dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one's judgments and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving the characteristically sapient form of awareness is discursive, that is conceptual awareness, for it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, that one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments, and new joint consequences can ensue which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in light of their rational relations to the new ones. Kant's new normative conception of what the activity of judging consists in, of what one must be doing in order thereby to count as judging, puts important structural constraints on how he understands the judgable contents for which one is taking responsibility in judgment. The dominant order of logical and semantic explanation in the tradition Kant inherited begins with a doctrine of terms or concepts, and on that basis a doctrine of judgments was erected, and then finally a doctrine of consequences or syllogisms. But Kant saw that the minimum unit of responsibility is not the concept but the judgment. It's judgments, not concepts, that one can invest one's authority in, commit oneself to by integrating them into an evolving constellation that exhibits the rational synthetic unity characteristic of our perception. Accordingly, in a radical break with his predecessors, Kant takes judgments to be the minimal units of awareness and so experience. Concepts are to be understood analytically as functions of judgment, that is in terms of the contribution they make to judgable contents. To be candidates for synthesis into a system exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of our perception, judgments must stand to one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility. So if one is to understand judging also as the application of concepts, the first question one must ask about the contents of those concepts is how the use of one or another concept affects those rational relations among the judgable contents that result. This methodological inversion is Kant's commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional. It's a methodological commitment that will be seconded by Frege, whose begift is structured by the observation that it's only judgable contents to which pragmatic force can attach, and then again by Wittgenstein, who in the Investigations gives pride of place to sentences as the only kind of linguistic expression that can be used to make a move in a language game. Kant's thought here, I think, is that alongside the local order of explanation, which looks to the contents of the particular concepts applied in judging to explain the specific possibilities of rational integration of judgable contents containing them, that is their inferential grounds, consequences, and incompatibilities, beside that there's a global order of explanation according to which one must understand what conceptual content is in terms of what judgable contents are and must understand that in terms of what one is doing in judging, that is in making oneself responsible for such contents. The functionalism in a broad sense about conceptual contents that consists in understanding them as functions of judgment, which is the practical expression of the methodological commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional, is motivated by an overarching methodological pragmatism according to which semantics must answer to pragmatics in a broad sense. It's the strategy of understanding discursive content in terms of what one is doing in endorsing or applying it, of approaching the notions of judgable and therefore conceptual content generally in terms of constraints put on it by the requirements derived from the account of the activity of judging. Now, though I have for expository reasons focused my sketch on the cognitive theoretical side of Kant's thought, it's... 00:22 Speaker A developing tradition uh to to suggest uh some directions in which we might move but perhaps characteristic ically for the way I approach things. Uh to do that I I want to start going back and looking at the roots of American pragmatism in 00:40 Speaker A the German idealist tradition. I think developments over the last four decades have secured uh Emanuel Kant's status as being for contemporary philosophers what the sea was for the poet Swinburn, the great gray mother of us all. 01:00 Speaker A And Kant mattered as much for the classical American pragmatists as he does for us today. 01:06 Speaker A But we look back at that sepiaoned age across an extended period during which anglophone philosophy largely read Kant out of its canon. The founding ideology of Bertrand Russell and GE Moore, articulating the rationale and fighting faith of the rising tide of analytic 01:26 Speaker A philosophy was forged in a recoil from the perceived defects of a British idealism inspired by Hegel and mindful of the massive debt evidently and self-avouedly owed by Hegel to Kant and putting aside neocontian readings of Kant as an 01:44 Speaker A empiricist philosopher of science, that would have cast him in a light they found more favorable. Russell and Moore diagnosed the idealist rot as having set in already with Kant. And for them and for many of their followers down through 01:59 Speaker A the years, the progressive current in philosophy should be seen to have run directly from Lach Linets and Hume to Mill and Fraga without any dangerous diversion into the oxbow of German idealism. 02:14 Speaker A What is it that I take the pragmatist to have learned from Kant? I want to focus on two of his master ideas. What I'll call Kant's normative turn and what I'll call tendentiously but only prolleptically his pragmatist methodology. 02:31 Speaker A I think we should still care about these ideas today. Ideas which were for complicated reasons largely invisible to classical analytic philosophy. 02:41 Speaker A As I understand his work, Kant's most basic idea, the axis around which all of his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to 03:01 Speaker A distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we're in a distinctive sense responsible for. 03:09 Speaker A They're kinds of commitments that we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. 03:25 Speaker A Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action bind the concept user. They commit her. They make her responsible by opening her up to normative assessment according to rules she's made herself subject to. 03:41 Speaker A For Kant, the responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility. It's a commitment to do something. 03:50 Speaker A On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one's success at doing is integrating one's judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity, what he called the 04:05 Speaker A synthetic unity of apperception. It's a systematic rational unity dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one's judgments and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. 04:24 Speaker A App perceiving the characteristically sapient form of awareness is discursive that is conceptual awareness for it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. 04:42 Speaker A And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules that is the concepts that one binds oneself by in making the judgments. 04:54 Speaker A Each new episode of experience paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment requires integration into and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. 05:06 Speaker A New incompatibilities can arise which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments and new joint consequences can ensue which must be acknowledged or rejected. 05:20 Speaker A The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in light of their 05:39 Speaker A rational relations to the new ones. Kant's new normative conception of what the activity of judging consists in of what one must be doing in order thereby to count as judging puts important structural constraints on how he understands the judgable contents for 05:57 Speaker A which one is taking responsibility in judgment. The dominant order of logical and semantic explanation in the tradition Kant inherited begins with a doctrine of terms or concepts and on that basis a doctrine of judgments was erected and then finally a doctrine of consequences 06:16 Speaker A or syllogisms. But Kant saw that the minimum unit of responsibility is not the concept but the judgment. It's judgments, not concepts, that one can invest one's authority in, commit oneself to by integrating them into an evolving constellation that exhibits the rational 06:35 Speaker A synthetic unity unity characteristic of our perception. Accordingly, in a radical break with his predecessors, Kant takes judgments to be the minimal units of awareness and so experience. 06:49 Speaker A Concepts are to be understood analytically as functions of judgment. that is in terms of the contribution they make to judgeable contents. 06:59 Speaker A To be candidates for synthesis into a system exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of our perception, judgments must stand to one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility. 07:12 Speaker A So if one is to understand judging also as the application of concepts, the first question one must ask about the contents of those concepts is how the use of one or another concepts affects those rational relations among the 07:27 Speaker A judgable contents that result. This methodological inversion is Kant's commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional. 07:37 Speaker A It's a methodological commitment that will be seconded by Fraga whose begift is structured by the observation that it's only judgable contents to which pragmatic force can attach and then again by Vitkinstein who in the investigations gives pride of place to 07:52 Speaker A sentences as the only kind of linguistic expression that can be used to make a move in a language game. 08:00 Speaker A Kant's thought here, I think, is that alongside the local order of explanation, which looks to the contents of the particular concepts applied in judging to explain the specific possibilities of rational integration of judgable contents containing them, that is their inferential grounds, 08:16 Speaker A consequences, and incompatibilities. Beside that there's a global order of explanation according to which one must understand what conceptual content is in terms of what judgible contents are and must understand that in terms of what one is doing in judging that is in 08:33 Speaker A making oneself responsible for such contents. The functionalism in a broad sense about conceptual contents that consists in understanding them as functions of judgment which is the practical expression of the methodological commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional is motivated by an 08:54 Speaker A overarching methodological pragmatism according to which semantics must answer to pragmatics in a broad sense. It's the strategy of understanding discursive content in terms of what one is doing in endorsing or applying it of approaching the notions of judgable and therefore 09:13 Speaker A conceptual content generally in terms of constraints put on it by the requirements derived from the account of the activity of judging. 09:23 Speaker A Now though I have for expository reasons focused my sketch on the cognitive theoretical side of Kant's thought it's important to be clear that pragmatism in the sense I'm attributing to Kant is not a matter of giving explanatory priority 09:38 Speaker A to the practical over the theoretical to exercises of agency over exercises of cognition rather within both the practical and the theoretical spheres it's understanding content in terms of force in Fragus a sense what is judged, believed or done 09:57 Speaker A in terms of what one must do, what activity one must engage in to be judging, believing or intentionally doing it. Kant, I'm claiming should be thought of as a pragmatist avonra because of the way his normative theory of conceptual activity both theoretical 10:15 Speaker A and practical shapes his account of conceptual content both theoretical and practical. And I read Hegel as taking over from Kant commitment both to a normative account of conceptual doings and to a broadly pragmatist approach to understanding the contents of our 10:36 Speaker A cognitive and practical commitments in terms of what we're doing in undertaking those commitments. I see him as taking an important step towards naturalizing the picture of conceptual norms by taking those norms to be instituted by public social recognitive practices. 10:55 Speaker A Further, Hegel tells a story about the very same social practice of rational integration of commitments undertaking by applying concepts that is the synthesis for him at once of recognized and recognizing individual subjects and of their recognitive communities. 11:15 Speaker A Saying that that's at the very same time the historical process by which the norms that articulate the contents of the concepts applied are instituted. 11:24 Speaker A determined and developed. He calls that ongoing social historical process experience far and he no longer sees it as taking place principally between the ears of an individual. 11:40 Speaker A Closer to our own time, we've seen a version of this development repeated as Quin in a pragmatist spirit at least rejects Carnab's two-phase picture according to which first one institutes meanings a language and then applies them, adopts a theory in favor for Quin 12:00 Speaker A of a unitary process and practice of using expressions that must be intelligible at every stage as settling both what one means and how one is taking things to be. 12:19 Speaker A Now as I understand them in the broadest terms the classical American pragmatists the triumvirate above all of Pur James and Dwey developed this German idealist tradition by completing the process of naturalizing it which had begun already with Hegel. 12:38 Speaker A In their hands it was to take the form of an empirical scientific account of us and our transactions with our environment. 12:46 Speaker A The sort of understanding they sought was decisively shaped by two new models of scientific explanation codifying two new forms of intelligibility characteristic of late 19th century science. 12:59 Speaker A Principal among these of course was Darwinian evolutionary explanations. The other form of explanation that was coming to maturity in the science of the day was statistical explanation. 13:12 Speaker A Pragmatism begins with a philosophy of science. pioneered by Pierce that saw these two explanatory innovations as aspects of one conceptual revolution in science. 13:25 Speaker A One dimension along which evolutionary and statistical explanations differ from those of the older mathematical physics concern the dominant modality in which they're expressed. The modality of Newtonian laws is necessity. One explains something by showing that it's necessitated by eternal exceptionless 13:45 Speaker A universal laws. But evolutionary and statistical explanations explain contingent happenings by displaying conditions under which they can be seen to have been at least probable. Both are ways of making intelligible the contingent emergence of collective order from individual randomness. 14:08 Speaker A The original subject matter of evolutionary explanations was of course the process by which biological species arise and diversify. 14:17 Speaker A Taking his cue from the way in which the statistical statistical explanation had been generalized from its its original applications in social science to provide the basis for the triumph of thermodynamics and physics. Pur substantially generalized evolutionary statistical forms of intelligibility 14:36 Speaker A along two different dimensions. Most important was the idea that was picked up and developed by James and above all by Dwey. This was the recognition that evolution at the le at the level of species and learning at the 14:51 Speaker A level of individuals share a common selectional structure. Both can be understood as processes of adaptation in which interaction with the environment preserves and reproduces that is selects some elements while eliminating others. 15:09 Speaker A This insight is encapsulated in the concept habit and the picture of individual learning as the evolution by selection of a population of habits. 15:20 Speaker A This master idea made possible the naturalistic conrle of a cognitive continuum that runs from the still skillful coping of the competent predator through the practical intelligence of primitive hominins down to the traditional practices and common sense of civilized humans all the way to 15:39 Speaker A the most sophisticated theorizing of contemporary scientists. All are seen as of a peace with and intelligible in the same general terms as biological evolution. 15:52 Speaker A The other direction in which pur generalized the evolutionary statistical selectional model of explanation was to inorganic nature. 16:02 Speaker A What those older scientific naturalists for whom the paradigm of scientific understanding was Newtonian physics rather than Darwinian biology had taken to be eternal, immutable, necessary, universal laws of nature. Pur now sees as themsself as themselves in the largest sense habits of the universe. A 16:24 Speaker A kind of order that's arisen contingently but ultimately statistically explicably by a selectional adaptational habitat to which all must collectively adapt. A selectional adaptational process operating on a population of such regularities. 16:43 Speaker A There's no guarantee that any such accommodation will succeed permanently. As with the habits learned by individuals, some of the law-like regularities may prove to be more robust and others more fragile. 16:56 Speaker A The older picture of laws shows up as at best only approximately true, an idealization extrapolating a situation that actuality approaches at most asmtoically. 17:08 Speaker A The naturalism of the classical American pragmatists was shaped by the new sort of nature they'd been taught about by the best science of their times. a nature viewed through the lens of the new forms of statistical and selectional 17:23 Speaker A explanation. And the pragmatist's new form of naturalism was coupled with a new form of empiricism. 17:32 Speaker A The experimental scientific method is seen as just the explicit principled distillation of the selectional learning process that is the practical form common to intelligent creatures at all stages of their development. 17:48 Speaker A Dwiey's term for that process in all its varieties is experience. the actual axial concept of such central works as experience and nature and art as experience. 18:01 Speaker A Indeed, so central is the concept to Dwiey's thought that it sometimes is difficult in reading these works to overcome the impression that he is, as my Dr. Fery once put it, using the term experience just as an incantatory device 18:16 Speaker A to blur every conceivable distinction. I I don't think that's right. But uh experience in this sense is not the ignition of some internal cartisian light. It's not the occurrence of a self-intimating event of pure awareness, transparent and encourageable to the 18:34 Speaker A subject of experience. Experience is work, the application of force through distance. It's something done rather than something that merely happens. It's a process. It's engaging in a practice. 18:48 Speaker A It's the exercise of abilities rather than any kind of episode. It's experience not in the sense of eress or empendong but of Hegel's farum. It's the decidedly non-cartisian sense of experience in which a wantad can specify no experience necessary without 19:07 Speaker A intending to invite applications from zombies. Earlier empiricists had thought of experience as the occurrence of conscious episodes that provide the raw materials for learning via processes such as association, comparison, and abstraction. 19:26 Speaker A For the pragmatists though, experience isn't an input to the learning process. It just is the learning process. The process of perception and performance followed by perception and assessment of the results of performance and then further performance exhibiting the 19:43 Speaker A iterative adaptive conditional branching structure of a test operate test exit loop. The result of experience is not best thought of as the possession of something items of knowledge but as a kind of practical understanding a kind of adaptive attunement to the 20:01 Speaker A environment. the development of habits apt for successful coping with contingencies. It's knowing how rather than knowing that. 20:13 Speaker A Now, ontological naturalism and epistemological empiricism were both encouraged by the idea that the rise of modern science, the most spectacularly successful social institution of the past 300 years, can teach philosophers the most important lessons both about how things are and about what it is to 20:33 Speaker A understand them. But from the beginning, naturalism and empiricism have typically stood in significant tension with one another. 20:43 Speaker A The furniture of Newton's world doesn't include the contents of Lach's mind. And Hume can find nothing in experience by which we could come to know or understand laws such as Newton's as having the necessity that distinguishes laws from mere regularities. 21:02 Speaker A And nor is that tension between them a characteristic only of the enlightenment forms of naturalism and empiricism. 21:10 Speaker A It equally afflicts their 20th century forms. The two principal wings of the Vienna circle, which Carnap struggled heroically to keep from flying off in different directions, were distinguished precisely by their answers to the question, "When empiricism and naturalism conflict, which should be 21:29 Speaker A relaxed or given up?" Schlick urged the preeminence of empiricism while Nurat was committed to the priority of naturalism. 21:38 Speaker A Their descendant Quin never fully reconciled his logical empiricist hostility to modality with his naturalist privileging of the deliverances of science, including its teaching us about laws. 21:53 Speaker A But the classical pragmatist versions of naturalism and empiricism fit together much better than the than the versions that historically preceded them in the Enlightenment and succeeded them in logical empiricism. 22:09 Speaker A Far from being intention, the pragmatist versions complement and mutually support one another. Both the world and our knowledge of it are construed on a single model as mutable contingent products of statistical selectional adaptational processes that allow order to pop to the surface and float in a sea 22:30 Speaker A of random variability. Both nature and experience are to be understood in terms of the processes by which relatively stable constellations of habits arise and sustain themselves through their interactions with an environment that includes a population of competing habits. 22:48 Speaker A There is no princip problem in principle in finding a place for experience construed as learning in nature construed as evolving. 22:58 Speaker A Nor is there any analog of the traditional complimentary problem of understanding how experience construed as the dynamic evolution of habits can give its subjects epistemic access to the modally robust habits of the things those knowowers and agents interact with 23:14 Speaker A adapt and adapt to. The pragmatist forms of naturalism and empiricism unlike the enlightenment forms and the logical positivist forms are two sides of one coin. 23:29 Speaker A The pragmatist's conception of experience is recognizably a naturalized version of the rational process of critically winnowing and actively extrapolating commitments according to the material incompatibility and consequence relations they stand into one another that Kant described already as producing and exhibiting the 23:50 Speaker A distinctive unity of synthetic app perception. for that developmental process too is selectional though not statistical. 24:01 Speaker A Some commitments for Kant both theoretical and practical thrive and persist in concert with their fellows while others are modified or rejected as unable to flourish in that environment. 24:15 Speaker A It might be thought fanciful of me to focus on this common structure in light of the substantial difference between the conceptions. 24:24 Speaker A Kant's process, one might say, is structured by rational, conceptual, normative relations of incompatibility and consequence, while the pragmatist's version is structured by natural, causal, alth relations of incompatibility and consequence. 24:43 Speaker A But I think the pragmatists would disagree with such an objection for they introduce not only a new con conception of experience but also a new conception of reason. 24:54 Speaker A They understand the rationality of the theoretical physicist is continuous with the intelligence of the culturally primitive hunter and the skill of the non-human predator. 25:05 Speaker A The grooming and development of discursive cognitive and practical commitments is a learning process of a piece and sharing a structure with the achievement of practical attunement to an environment and the acquisition of habits successful in that environment that in one form or another is a part of 25:23 Speaker A the natural history of all sentient organisms. Reason and intelligence in this sense can be seen albeit in an inflexible and unlearned form already in the maintenance of an equilibrium by that emblem of the industrial revolution the flywheel governor. 25:41 Speaker A The nature of the pra the nature of the pragmatists is in their sense through and through a rational nature not just the part of it that's intelligible as actually being experience. 25:57 Speaker A The more specific strategy by which the classical American pragmatist sought to naturalize the concept of experience to demystify it and domesticate it to disentangle it from two centuries of cartisian encumbrances is what I'll call fundamental pragmatism. 26:16 Speaker A This is the idea roughly that one should understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how to put it in Riyle's terms that is believing that things are thus and so is to be understood in terms of practical abilities to do something. 26:32 Speaker A Dwey in particular saw the whole philosophical tradition down to his time as permeated by a kind of platonism or intellectualism that saw a rule or principle, something that is or could be made conceptually or propositionally explicit behind every 26:50 Speaker A bit of skillful practice. He contrasted that approach with the contrary pragmatist approach which emphasizes the implicit context of practices and practical abilities that forms the necessary background against which alone states and performances are intelligible as explicitly contentful believings and judgings. 27:12 Speaker A In this reversal of the traditional order of explanation, Dwey is joined by the H highaidiger of being in time with his project of understanding forhand height as a precipitate of the more primordial tuhanden height and again by the later victinstein. 27:30 Speaker A All three thinkers I think should be understood as downstream from Kant's fundamental insight about the normative character of cognition and agency. And all three share a commitment to the explanatory priority of norms implicit as proprieties of practice to norms 27:48 Speaker A explicit as rules or principles. I mean the rubric fundamental pragmatism to be a relatively loose and elastic description whose parameters can be adjusted or interpreted so as to fit the methodology of many thinkers who might otherwise differ in many ways. 28:09 Speaker A It's supposed for instance to include both the order of explanation that led Quine to criticize what he called the myth of the museum in thinking about meaning and that sellers employs in criticizing what he called the myth of 28:21 Speaker A the given in thinking about sensory experience. It depends on a contrast which may be filled in in different ways between something on the implicit knowhow, skill, practical ability or practice side and something on the explicit conceptual rule principle representation 28:42 Speaker A side. So we might distinguish two grades of intentionality practical and discursive. Practical intentionality is the kind of attunement to their environment that intelligent non-llinguistic animals display. The way they can practically take or treat things as prey or predator, food, sexual partner or rival, 29:06 Speaker A and cope with them accordingly. Discursive intentionality is using concepts in judgment and intentional action. being able explicitly to take things to be thus and so to entertain and evaluate propositions to formulate rules and principles of action. 29:26 Speaker A The fundamental pragmatist aspiration in these terms is to be able to exhibit discursive intentionality as a distinctive kind of practical intentionality. 29:39 Speaker A That project can take a strong reductionist form. For instance, what I've elsewhere called the pragmatist version of artificial intelligence claims that there is a set of practices or abilities that are non-discursive in the sense that each one of them can 29:56 Speaker A be engaged in or exercised by non-discursive creatures and yet which can be algorithmically elaborated into the discursive capacity to use concepts and speak an autonomous language. 30:09 Speaker A But fundamental pragmatism need not take such a strong reductive form. One might claim more modestly that discursive activity from everyday thought to the cogations of the theoretical physicist is a species of practical intentionality, a determination of that determinable and 30:28 Speaker A indeed one that's intelligible as having developed out of non-discursive practical intentionality while still maintaining that it's a wholly distinctive variety. 30:44 Speaker A Now when classical American pragmatism is looked back upon from the perspective of the analytic movement that dominated anglophone philosophy for at least the last half of the 20th century. It can easily appear that a decisive wrong turn was taken after purse. 31:02 Speaker A That pragmatist founder member was principally concerned to advance the philosophical understanding of modern logic, symbolic and natural languages and the natural sciences, a constellation of topics that remained at the center of the analytic tradition. 31:19 Speaker A In his logic of relations, Pers independently achieved the bonanza of expressive power that Russell correctly saw in Russ in Frager's logic. 31:29 Speaker A But what did Pers's successor pragmatists make of that achievement? Particularly in contrast to what Russell made of Fraga, it would seem from a later vantage point that an opportunity was missed. 31:42 Speaker A James, for instance, had little interest in logic and wrote almost nothing about it. In striking contrast to his Hegelian colleague Josiah Reus who saw in the algebraic constructions of Alfred Bray Kempa about whom he had learned from Purse a tool with which he hoped to 31:58 Speaker A solve the riddle of how to elaborate spatiotemporal relations from a purely conceptual basis. The logic Dwey wrote his late important book about was unrecognizable as such to those of his readers in 1938 whose paradigm of logic was to be found in the 32:17 Speaker A works of Frager Russell and Carnap. The only pragmatist whose concern with logic matched and was recognizable as continuing that tra the tradition the purse initiated was the homegrown neocontian CI Lewis, the founder of 20th century modal logic and who saw his own 32:35 Speaker A work as an attempt to synthesize the approaches of his teachers James and Royce and in turn passed on pragmatist ideas to his students Quine and Goodman. 32:46 Speaker A Again, though James was surely by far the best writer among the classical triumvirate, his philosophical interests focused on experience rather than language. 32:57 Speaker A Dwey did write a lot about language, what he called the tool of tools. He has many good things to say about the relations between meaning and use, particularly in chapter five of experience and nature that we just heard 33:10 Speaker A about from Dave Bicer. But he too I think would not be recognizable to later philosophers of language as one of their number. 33:24 Speaker A The linguistic turn happened largely without the American pragmatists. But by the linguistic term here, I principally mean putting language at the center of philosophical concerns and understanding philosophical problems to begin with in terms of the languages one uses to formulate them. 33:45 Speaker A But there is a more specific significance one can take language to have. By lingualism, I shall mean commitment to understanding conceptual capacities, discursiveness in general in terms of linguistic capacities. 34:01 Speaker A Michael Dummit epitomizes a strong version of this order of explanation. He says, "We have opposed throughout the view of assertion as the expression of an interior act of judgment. Judgment rather is the interiorization of an external act of assertion. Dwey says 34:19 Speaker A almost exactly that in chapter 5 of experience and nature. A weaker version of lingualism would claim only that language is at least a necessary condition of discursiveness, not that it's a sufficient condition that it can at least in principle be 34:36 Speaker A made intelligible independently of talk about discursive commitments. Now I don't think that the pragmatist's afterpur just missed the linguistic turn. Dwey is an obvious exception though particularly in experience in nature. it's much less uh pervasive a topic elsewhere. 34:57 Speaker A Rather, what they did was develop their thought about language as what was distinctive of human beings within the context of a different approach to understanding that crucial phenomenon of language, one that was complimentary to the approach of the soontobe dominant 35:15 Speaker A analytic tradition. The Fraga Russell Carnap approach to language takes as its paradigm artificial formal logistical languages articulated by explicit rules. 35:28 Speaker A The American pragmatists like their fellow fundamental pragmatists, the highiger of being in time and the victinstein of the philosophical investigations address rather natural languages which they think of anthropologically as aspects of the natural history of a certain kind of being. Their focus to 35:49 Speaker A begin with is not on meaning but on use on discursive practices, skills and abilities on what one must be able to do in order to count as saying or thinking that things are thus and so. 36:05 Speaker A We can think of these two approaches as distinguished by their preferred order of explanation. 36:11 Speaker A The question is which comes first semantics the theory of meaning or pragmatics the theory of the use of expressions. 36:21 Speaker A The logistical tradition begins with semantics. It begins by stipulating the association of some kind of semantic interpretance paradigmatically extensions with basic expressions and deriving associations for more complex ones or stipulating basic rules of derivation and then seeing what consequence relation they 36:42 Speaker A jointly determine. The question of how it's appropriate to use expressions governed by those rules is then deferred to a subsequent pragmatic theory to which this current of thought has not traditionally devoted a great deal of attention. 36:56 Speaker A By contrast, the pragmatist tradition begins with pragmatics, an account precisely of how it is appropriate to use expressions, what discursive practice is. And it's true that the pragmatists correspondingly have not traditionally given a lot of attention to the 37:14 Speaker A specifics of the semantics, the theory of meaning that goes with such a pragmatics. But I think we can see two principles that govern fundamental pragmatists understanding of the relation between pragmatics and semantics in thinking about language. 37:32 Speaker A They express complimentary aspects of the sense of pragmatism in the philosophy of language that consists in insisting that semantics must answer to pragmatics. 37:43 Speaker A First is what I'll call methodological pragmatism. This is the principle that the point of associating meanings, extensions, contents or other semantically relevant what's with linguistic expressions has to be to codify that is to make it possible to express explicitly 38:02 Speaker A proprieties of their use to express the norms that implicitly govern our discursive practices. I think we can discern commitment to this methodological principle even in a semantic nihilist such as the later vitkinstein. 38:20 Speaker A For one thing he means by saying that language is a mly is that so many and so various are the uses of any expression that there are no realistic prospects of systematizing them by associating some underlying meaning on the basis of which 38:34 Speaker A one then hopes uniformly to derive their various uses. say by one rule for declarative uses, another for imperative ones, another for hypothetical and so on. If the varieties of uses is open-ended and uncurveyable, then there's no prospect for semantic 38:52 Speaker A theorizing in philosophy precisely because the only point of such theorizing would be systematizing those proprieties of use. 39:02 Speaker A The second principle governing a fundamental pragmatist understanding of the sense in which semantics should answer to pragmatics is what I'll call semantic pragmatism. 39:13 Speaker A This is the principle that in natural language all there is to affect the association of meanings, contents, extensions, rules or semantically relevant what'ss with linguistic expressions is the way those expressions are used by the linguistic practitioners themselves. 39:31 Speaker A Formal semantics for artificial languages can contend itself with the explicit stipulation of such rules or associations of meanings by the semantic theorist working in a semantic metal language. But philosophical semantics for natural languages is obliged to say what it is about the practices the users 39:51 Speaker A of those expressions engage in or the abilities they exercise in virtue of which they should be understood as governed by those rules as binding themselves by those norms or as conferring those meanings on their acts. 40:06 Speaker A Semantic pragmatism in this sense is a kind of use functionalism about meaning. Again, given his practice, I think commitment to such a principle can be attributed even to such a semantic pessimist as the later victinstein, precisely in virtue of his criticism of 40:24 Speaker A various traditional ways of thinking about meaning or content for their failure to live up to this requirement. 40:30 Speaker A And that sort of strategy is equally evident in Dwiey's criticisms of traditional intellectualist and mentalist conceptions of the content of our mental acts. 40:43 Speaker A The combination of methodological and semantic pragmatism, the two senses in which semantics can be taken to answer to pragmatics broadly construed might be called linguistic pragmatism. 40:55 Speaker A It's one natural way of applying fundamental pragmatism to systematic theorizing about language. Not because philosophy is about words, but because language is what makes us the creatures that we are. 41:10 Speaker A One of the clearest and most emphatic proponents of that conjunctive doctrine among recent philosophers is Dummit. 41:17 Speaker A Though of course he doesn't associate it with pragmatism of any kind. But Quin does carry forward this general pragmatist tradition in the philosophy of language when he criticizes Carnap's two-stage picture of language according to which first meanings are stipulated 41:38 Speaker A and only subsequently are theories formulated to determine which of the sentences with those meanings are true. 41:46 Speaker A That division of labor makes sense for artificial languages. But to understand natural languages, we have to understand how the one thing that we do, use the language, conserve at once to settle the meanings of our expressions and determine which of them we take to be 42:02 Speaker A true. Linguistic practice is not illuminated by postulating language theory or meaning belief distinctions of the Carnapian kind. As Quin famously concludes an early essay on Carnap, the lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. It's a pale gray lore, black 42:20 Speaker A with fact and white with convention. But I found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it or any quite white ones. 42:31 Speaker A In fact, though he didn't know it in making this pragmatist point against Carnap, Quin was recapitulating one of the important ways in which Hegel moved beyond Kant. 42:42 Speaker A For Kant, all of our empirical activity, cognitive and practical, is discursive activity. In endorsing judgable contents and practical maxims, knowowers and agents are applying concepts. 42:56 Speaker A In fact, in a strict sense, all contient knowowers and agents can do is apply concepts. 43:03 Speaker A Though further though further concepts may be developed thereby for instance by judgments of reflection one must always already have concepts in order to be apperceptively aware of or experience anything. 43:18 Speaker A Hegel thought that Kant was uncharacteristically but still culpably uncritical about the origin of our primordial concepts. 43:27 Speaker A The locust of those concepts, Hegel thought, lies in language, not in some kind of experience understood as pre-linguistic. 43:36 Speaker A Language, he said, is the daine of gist. That is, of the whole normatively articulated discursive realm. 43:46 Speaker A In this connection, looking over his shoulder at Hegel, Dwey says, "Language in its widest sense is the medium in which culture exists and through which it's transmitted. 43:57 Speaker A For Hegel, no less than for Quine and for Dwey, we must understand linguistic practices as both instituting conceptual norms and applying them. It's precisely by applying concepts in judging and acting that conceptual content is made more determinate going forward and shows 44:16 Speaker A up as always already determinate in the only sense in which conceptual contents are determinate when we look back over a course of experience. 44:28 Speaker A Pragmatists who have made the linguistic turn take it that the most important feature of the natural history of creatures like us is that we have come into language come to engage in distinctively linguistic practices and to exercise distinctively linguistic abilities. This 44:47 Speaker A notion of coming into language is gaining currency in contemporary uh linguistics. Uh by contrast to what Dwey had already diagnosed as an unreasonably cartisian notion that we learn language. 45:03 Speaker A Uh what we do is come into the practices of language. This is both an anttogenetic and a filogenetic achievement understanding. 45:15 Speaker A It requires at a minimum addressing three large interconnected kinds of questions. These concern what I'll call the issues of demarcation, of emergence and of leverage. 45:29 Speaker A The demarcation question is definitional. How are linguistic practices and abilities? And hence the lingualist about discursivity like Dwey claims discursive ones. How are linguistic discursive practices and abilities to be distinguished from non-llinguistic non-discursive ones? 45:51 Speaker A The emergence question concerns the requirement that any account of language that aspires to being naturalistic in even a very broad sense must explain the possibility of the transition from the non-llinguistic non-discursive to the linguistic discursive practices and abilities. How are the abilities that we 46:11 Speaker A can see in non or pre-linguistic creatures recruited, deployed, and transformed so as to amount to linguistic ones? 46:20 Speaker A The leverage question is then how to characterize and explain the massive qualitative differences in capacity between linguistic and non-llinguistic creatures. the bonanza of new abilities and possibilities that language opens up for those that do make the transition, the transition to culture. 46:41 Speaker A One of the principal accomplishments of the classical American pragmatists is the attention they gave to the problem of emergence to displaying the continuities that make it naturalistically intelligible that species and individuals should be able to cross the boundary separating the 46:57 Speaker A pre-linguistic from the linguistic. In experience in nature, Dwey sets up the emergence problem this way. He says, "Upon the whole professed transcendentalists have been more aware than have professed empiricists of the fact that language makes the difference between brute and man. The trouble is 47:16 Speaker A they've lacked a naturalistic conception of its origin and status." And in the logic he expands on this thought. Any theory that rests upon a naturalistic postulate must face the problem of the extraordinary differences that mark off the activities and 47:32 Speaker A achievements of human beings from those of other biological forms. It's these differences that have led to the idea that man is completely separated from other animals by properties that come from a non-natural source. The development of language in its widest 47:47 Speaker A sense out of prior biological activities is in its connection with wider cultural forces the key to this transformation. 47:58 Speaker A The hallmark of an untenable intellectualism Dwey thinks is an appeal to an inexplicable saltation. The ultimately miraculous dawning of consciousness or self-consciousness the infusion of reason into a brute. The desire to provide a more satisfactory response to the emergence question than 48:17 Speaker A that sort of cartisian approach can offer binds Dwey together with the later victinstein in a common enterprise. 48:25 Speaker A After all, the point of many of the toybachiel that the latter describes is to show us how features of discourse that might seem mysterious in a sense that calls for the invocation of a cartisian discontinuity can be seen to 48:39 Speaker A be exhibited already in practices that we can see how intelligent but non-llinguistic hominins could already master. 48:49 Speaker A When we turn to the demarcation question, however, I think the pragmatists disappoint. What is distinctive of linguistic or discursive practices? 49:00 Speaker A What sets them apart from pre-linguistic or non-discursive practices? It's one's answer to this question that ties together the emergence question with the leverage question. For the criteria of adequacy for answers to those questions turn on its being the 49:18 Speaker A same kind of practices and abilities that one has told a story about the non-miraculous emergence of in answering the emergence question that one must then show can intelligably account for the huge differences in capabilities cognitive and practical that come with 49:35 Speaker A the advent of language in answering a leverage question. Now to ask this demarcation question, we need not assume that the emergence of language is an all ornone thing. One might with Vidkinstein want to deny that there is or need be a bright line 49:51 Speaker A separating the discursive from the non-discursive in favor of some sort of family resemblance view. Perhaps a pluralist incrementalist response to the demarcation question makes the emergence question easier to answer, but it makes the leverage question correspondingly more difficult. 50:10 Speaker A I don't think Dwiey's meta instrumentalist tool of tools line can be made to work to bring the emergence and leverage issues into harmony. But I've argued that elsewhere and I'm not going to rehearse my complaints here. 50:22 Speaker A And I'm not going to address the allimportant leverage question again. I've talked about that later uh elsewhere. But the demarcation question is prior. 50:34 Speaker A After all, if one is going to say how gist precipitates out of Natur and how it transforms sentient organisms into sapient ones, one should try to say what it is. 50:46 Speaker A The challenge is to offer satisfactory responses to both the emergence question and the leverage question. Focusing on just one of them makes it too easy. 50:57 Speaker A In the passage I cited a minute ago, Dwey says in effect that the neocartian intellectualists make the leverage question too easy to respond to by ignoring or even making it impossible to address the question of emergence. 51:10 Speaker A And I've just in effect accused Dwey of making the complimentary mistake. In any case, it's clear that the hinge that connects the issues of emergence and leverage is the question of demarcation. 51:24 Speaker A For the challenge is to show that the same phenomenon that one has accounted for the emergence of can leverage sentience into sapience. So demarcating the realm of linguistic or discursive practices and abilities is an absolutely essential element of the philosophical 51:40 Speaker A project I've been describing. I want to close with a suggestion as to one way fundamental pragmatists, those committed to understanding discursive intentionality as a kind of practical intentionality, who are at least weak lingualists about discursiveness, that is, who take engaging in linguistic 52:01 Speaker A practices as a necessary condition of deploying concepts, a class I'll remind you I take to include at least Pur Dwey, the early Haidiger, and the later Vitkinstein. how they might answer the demarcation question and so determine definite criteria of adequacy for 52:18 Speaker A responses to the leverage question. My idea is that pragmatism can usefully be combined with a rationalist criterion of demarcation of the linguistic and hence of discursiveness in general. By this I mean that what distinguishes the linguistic practice in virtue of which 52:37 Speaker A we're sapient and not merely sentient beings is its core practices of giving and asking for reasons. 52:45 Speaker A A necessary and sufficient condition of being a discursive practice is that some performances are accorded by it the practical pragmatic significance of claimings or assertings. 52:59 Speaker A Semantically, claimable or assertable contents are propositional contents. And syntactically, what expresses those contents is declarative sentences. 53:10 Speaker A This combination of pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic features, lining up, asserting, or claiming propositional content, and declarative sentences, is the iron triangle of discursiveness. 53:25 Speaker A The pragmatist order of explanation starts with the pragmatics. The thought is that to have the pragmatic significance of an assertion, a claim or a judgment is to be able both to serve as a reason and potentially to stand in need of reasons. 53:42 Speaker A So propositional contents, moving to the semantic, are those that can play the role both of premise and conclusion in inferences. Discursive practice is accordingly understood as essentially inferentially articulated. 54:00 Speaker A Now commitment to a rationalist criterion of demarcation of the discursive requires disagreeing with the classical American pragmatists and it requires disagreeing with vitinstein. 54:12 Speaker A Contrary to what he says, language does have a downtown and it's the practice of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. 54:20 Speaker A Other things we can do with language on this picture are ancillary to and parasitic on these essential core functions. 54:29 Speaker A On this view, most of the toy practices Vickenstein calls are vocal but not genuinely verbal. 54:37 Speaker A They're not really language games. The builder's utterance, for instance, in the opening slab practice should not be understood as imperatives. 54:47 Speaker A They're vocalizations that have the pragmatic significance of making certain responses on the part of the builder's assistant appropriate. 54:56 Speaker A But to be genuine imperatives, they have to do that by saying what it is that ought to be done. And in this full-blooded sense, no practice can contain the genuine contentful imperative, bring me a slab, unless it also contains declaratives, this is a 55:12 Speaker A slab. Vitkinstein and Dwey are together in rejecting rationalist criteria of demarcation of the linguistic and hence of the discursive. 55:23 Speaker A Indeed, I want to say they're together in resisting offering any answer at all to the demarcation question. 55:31 Speaker A In Dwiey's case, the idea of a rationalist pragmatism would probably have struck him as a contradictio in ato. 55:39 Speaker A But rationalism, as I've described it, is not a form of the intellectualism that stands opposed to fundamental pragmatism. 55:47 Speaker A It's wholly compatible with understanding discursive intentionality as a kind of practical intentionality, specifically as the kind that includes practices of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. 56:00 Speaker A It aims to say what structure a norm instituting social practice must have in order properly to be understood as a practice of claiming and giving and asking for reasons. 56:13 Speaker A It offers a specific proposal for how to understand the kind of practical knowing how that adds up to cognitive claiming or judging that. It's practical mastery of inferential relations and transitions. 56:28 Speaker A And answering the demarcation question about discursive practice in such a rationalist manner neither makes it impossible in principle to answer the emergence question nor obliges one to give a cartisian answer to it. 56:43 Speaker A Well, I began my story about a kind of pragmatism in an unconventional place with Kant's normative criteria of demarcation of the discursive. That is with his idea that what's distinctive of judgments and intentional actions and hence of us is that judgments and 57:01 Speaker A intentional actions are things that we're in a distinctive sense responsible for that they're kinds of commitments. 57:10 Speaker A But for Kant that normative criterion of demarcation was also a rationalist criterion of demarcation. 57:17 Speaker A For he understood that responsibility, that commitment as a distinctively rational responsibility and rational commitment as the justificatory responsibility to have reasons for one's theoretical and practical commitments. 57:33 Speaker A as the amplitative responsibility to acknowledge and embrace their inferential consequences and as the critical responsibility to revise commitments that are incompatible that is that serve as reasons against one another. 57:48 Speaker A What I've called Kant's pragmatism consists in his strategy of understanding semantic content in terms of what app perceiving subjects must do to fulfill those responsibilities. 58:01 Speaker A Judgeable contents have to stand to one another in relations of material inferential consequence and incompatibility. 58:08 Speaker A The inferential relations that constrain the process of synthesizing a constellation of commitments and entitlements that exhibits the distinctive unity of apperception. 58:19 Speaker A I think Vitkinstein's example teaches us that we should follow Hegel's steps towards naturalizing Kant's notion of norms by understanding norms as implicit in social practices. 58:32 Speaker A Normative statuses of responsibility and commitment are for Hegel, for Dwey, and for Vickenstein social statuses. They're creatures of our practical attitudes and practices of taking or treating each other as responsible and committed. 58:51 Speaker A The move beyond Dwey and Vickenstein to a rationalist, more specifically inferentialist pragmatism that I'm recommending is accordingly also a return to pragmatism's roots in German idealism. 59:06 Speaker A As Kant synthesized empiricism and rationalism and the pragmatists synthesized naturalism and empiricism, I'm said suggesting that a way forward for the pragmatist tradition is to synthesize pragmatism and rationalism in the form of a rationalist response to the demarcation question of the kind 59:27 Speaker A that Hegel gave. Thank you. Topics: Robert Brandom American Pragmatism German Idealism Immanuel Kant Normative Turn Synthetic Unity of Apperception Analytic Philosophy Philosophy of Judgment Pragmatist Methodology Philosophy of Language --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/german-idealism-american-pragmatism-robert-brandom/ — the same content, without the markup. Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back. Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/