Brandom's Pragmatism

Brandom's PragmatismAuthor(s): Steven LevineReviewed work(s):Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Spring 2012), pp. 125-140Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.48.2.125 .

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125

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETYVol. 48, No. 2 ©2012

AbstractI examine Robert Brandom’s reading of the classical pragmatists, as given in his new book Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary. I argue that his reading is deficient in certain fundamental respects, and that this deficiency illuminates important blind spots in Brandom’s overall theoretical project. Specifically, I focus on Brandom’s rationalist pragmatism and its rejection of the classical pragmatic concep-tion of experience. I argue that this rejec-tion is based on an overly instrumental reading of the classical figures, as well as on an incorrect interpretation of them as suc-cumbing to the Myth of the Given. My overall goal is to demonstrate that Brandom is lead astray in his encounter with the clas-sical pragmatists because of his unwilling-ness to integrate into his theoretical picture the essentially embodied nature of human cognitive and practical activity.

Keywords: Robert Brandom, rationalist pragmatism, classical pragmatism, experience, semantic instrumentalism, the Myth of the Given

1.What makes one a pragmatist? Since Love-joy this question has haunted the pragmatic tradition. One might think that of all tradi-tions, pragmatism—in light of its pluralism —would be the least worried about its identity, happy to think of itself using family resemblance concepts. But this has not usually been the case. Instead, the tradition has been accompanied by an intense meta- thinking about its identity and boundaries. Does pragmatism only re-fer to the classical figures or does it also in-clude analytical philosophers who, in the

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wake of C. I. Lewis, integrated pragmatist themes into their thought? Does pragmatism only refer to a tradition of thinking that takes cer-tain classical texts as its basis, or does it include any thinker in any tradition who thinks similar thoughts to those of the authors of these classical texts?

In his new book Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary, Robert Brandom answers both questions in the more inclusive way. He argues that the pragmatic tradition includes, in addi-tion to the classical figures, Quine, Sellars, Rorty, Heidegger (and Hei-deggarians like Dreyfus), Wittgenstein, contemporary philosophers like Huw Price, and of course, Brandom himself. The chapters of the book follow from this understanding. After a lengthy and substantive introduction situating Brandom’s view in a wider pragmatic field, there are two chapters on the classical pragmatists, one on Sellars, two on Rorty, one on Brandom’s own analytical pragmatism, and one on Huw Price’s pragmatic anti- representationalism. All of these chapters are ex-tremely rich and thought provoking. Even those who, like me, disagree with Brandom, especially on his reading of the classical pragmatists, still have much to learn from this volume.

For all of the book’s insight, however, Brandom’s reading of the classical pragmatists is deficient in certain fundamental respects, and this deficiency, I am going to argue, illuminates important blind spots in Brandom’s overall theoretical project. Specifically, I focus on Bran-dom’s rejection of the pragmatic conception of experience. I argue that this rejection is based on an overly instrumental reading of the classical figures, as well as on an incorrect interpretation of them as succumb-ing to the Myth of the Given. My overall goal is to demonstrate that Brandom is lead astray in his encounter with the classical pragmatists because of his unwillingness to integrate into his theoretical picture the essentially embodied nature of human cognitive and practical activity.

2.Let’s begin with Brandom’s inclusive understanding of the pragmatic tradition. The question that of course arises is: what criterion does Brandom use to count one a pragmatist? All of the figures he counts as pragmatists are what he calls ‘fundamental pragmatists’, meaning that they all “understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how . . . That is, believing that things are thus and so is to be understood in terms of practical abilities to do something.”1 So what Brandom thinks is most salient about pragmatism, in all of its guises, is a claim about the ‘prior-ity of the practical’, the view that explicit beliefs and representations depend on and are somehow emergent from a background of implicit practical abilities. Here, pragmatism is seen as most opposed to an



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intellectualism in which our ability to think and act are underwritten by an ability to explicitly grasp and apply rules or principles.

Here things get a bit tricky because on a typical construal intellectu-alism is the chief vice of rationalism, and so one might think that fun-damental pragmatism would be opposed to any form of rationalism. But this is not how Brandom sees things, calling his view a type of ra-tionalist pragmatism, one that “is not a form of intellectualism that stands opposed to fundamental pragmatism” (PP 31). Brandom’s ratio-nalist pragmatism is not a form of intellectualism because according to it discursive intentionality (believing that something is the case) is to be explained in terms of a prior kind of practical intentionality, i.e., “the kind that includes practices of making claims and giving and asking for reasons” (PP: 31). In other words, to know that something is the case a subject must be able to do something, namely, to play the social game of giving and asking for reasons by having a practical mastery of the inferential relations involved in the game.

In the third chapter of the book, entitled “Analyzing Pragmatism: Pragmatics and Pragmatism,” Brandom specifies various species of this pragmatic thesis. Two are particularly important. The first concerns the meaning of the concepts that enter into our judgments and expressions. A ‘semantic pragmatism’ thinks that ‘meaning is use’, that the meaning of the concepts that enter into our thought and talk depend upon the way such concepts are used in normatively governed patterns of mate-rial inference. For Brandom, to grasp the content of a concept requires having “practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in—to know, in the practical sense of being able to distinguish, what follows from the applicability of a concept and what it follows from.” So for example, to have an understanding of the concept red one must in practice “treat ‘That’s red’ as incompatible with ‘That’s green’ . . . as following from ‘That’s scarlet’ and entailing ‘That’s colored’.”2

To have a practical understanding of such compatibility and incom-patibility relations, one must, in turn, have practical mastery of ‘norms implicit in linguistic practice’, i.e., one must grasp what is correct or incorrect to do (what inferences to make). This leads to a second prag-matic thesis, namely, that the practices that confer meaning on our thought and talk are inextricably normative. But what is important here is that the ability to ‘follow a rule’ is not achieved by explicitly representing rules and principles but by having the practical ability to distinguish what does, and what does not, follow from one’s commit-ments. Here a ‘semantic pragmatism’ is seen as underwritten by a ‘nor-mative pragmatism’.3 We can now understand the full contours of Brandom’s view: his fundamental pragmatism is rationalist because what a subject must be able to do to believe that something is the case is take part in the practice of giving and asking for discursively articu-lated reasons. But this discursive demarcation of his pragmatism is not



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intellectualist because the discursive itself depends on practical mastery of normatively governed patterns of inference, i.e., depends on what one can do, not on what one can represent.

I think it is safe to say that many pragmatists would still find this view to be a recognizable form of intellectualism. For the practice that has priority over representation is the discursive practice of drawing in-ferences, and the norms of correctness implicit in this practice are norms that govern conceptual activity. So while for Brandom there is a distinction between explicit discursive performances and implicit dis-cursive practices, his pragmatism remains immanent to the realm of the discursive. But this makes it impossible for him to understand a richer sense of practice that is often at work in the classical pragmatists, namely, the bodily practices, habits, and skills through which subjects inhabit and cope with the environment, physical and social. For many pragmatists, the body is not a just an instrument that carries out orders that have their origin in the discursive realm, rather for them a subject’s sensori- motor engagements with a physical and social environment al-ready have sense before the operations of discursive reason get into the act. This type of bodily engagement is our basic way of ‘being- in- the- world’, and our representational dealings with things emerge from this background.

Brandom cannot take this richer sense of practice on board because of the way he conceptualizes the relation between the discursive and the non- discursive. Take as an example his theory of action. Following Sel-lars, Brandom thinks of action as a ‘language exit move’ in which one non- inferentially responds to one’s taking up of a practical commit-ment or intention in the space of reasons by bringing about a non- linguistic state of affairs through exercising bodily response dispositions. Action for Brandom is therefore a two- step process whereby a subject makes a commitment to act through practical reasoning, and then leaves the space of reasons by exercising a naturalistically understood reliable response disposition. Here, the sense or content of our beliefs and intentions is the product of discursive reasoning, and this sense or content can only get a grip on the body, and so on the world, through the causal exercise of meaningless bodily response dispositions. Here, there is no space for the pragmatists notion of practice, because on their construal practices—i.e., habits and bodily skills—are neither fully dis-cursive nor merely causal.4

While Brandom applauds the pragmatists impulse to explain in a broadly naturalistic fashion how discursive linguistic activity emerges from non- linguistic practices and abilities (see PP: 27), he himself has no account of it, and nor could he, given his view that the conferral of mean-ing in reasoning is a strictly intra- linguistic affair that makes no essential reference to the way our bodies get a grip on the world in action (and, as we shall see, in perception) (see MIE: 234 for this striking claim). The



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conferral of content can make no essential reference to action (and per-ception) because while content is inextricably normative, our existing and entering the space of reasons is a merely causal transaction between the body and the world. While in action (and perception) normatively governed content and causal response dispositions are somehow coupled, there is a gulf between them that cannot be bridged. For the classical pragmatists, of course, here we have a categorical dualism—between norm and cause, mind (the space of reasons) and body (reliable response dispositions)—that is ripe for critical dismantling. Brandom, in contrast, is simply not interested in undoing the dualisms and dichotomies passed on by the classical tradition. In this respect, Brandom rejects an essential element of the pragmatic enlightenment.5

3.When in a philological mode, Brandom well recognizes that practice for the classical figures is conceived of as “skillful, because experienced, practice—flexible, adaptable habit that has emerged in a particular en-vironment, by selection via a learning process” (PP: 38). Indeed, he recognizes the fact that the implementation of such practices in an en-vironment is experience itself.

For the pragmatists, experience is not an input to the learning pro-cess. It just is learning: the process of perception and performance, followed by perception and assessment of the results of the perfor-mance, and then further performance, exhibiting the iterative, adap-tive, conditional- branching structure of a test- operate- test- exit loop. The result of experience is not best thought of as the possession of items of knowledge, but as a kind of practical understanding, a kind of adaptive attunement to the environment, the development of habits apt for successful coping with the contingencies” (PP: 7).

But while Brandom explicates this point elegantly, he does not ac-cept it. Sometimes Brandom tries to domesticate the pragmatic concept of experience by translating it into his own terms. “The pragmatist’s conception of experience is recognizably a naturalized version of the ra-tional process of critically winnowing and actively extrapolating com-mitments, according to the material incompatibility and consequence relations they stand in to one another” (PP: 8). But most of the time he simply sides with Rorty “in rejecting the notion of experience . . . ‘Ex-perience’ is not one of my words—literally, it does not occur in Making it Explicit” (PP: 197, italics mine). Brandom rejects the pragmatic no-tion of experience for two reasons: 1) he thinks that the pragmatic no-tion of experience is based on an instrumental view of truth and meaning, and 2) he thinks it gives rise to the Myth of the Given. Let’s start with the first reason.



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Brandom argues that “the classical American pragmatists endorse a normative pragmatics, and therefore, given their fundamental pragma-tism, a normative pragmatism” (PP: 71). Surely if seen at a sufficient level of generality this claim must be right: internal to the transactions that comprise experience there are norms of correctness and incorrect-ness, and this at two levels. At the level of bodily practice, the sense of correctness and incorrectness applies to our skillful bodily coping with a social and physical world, not inferential practice. In this case, the sense of correctness and incorrectness is relative to a ‘norm’ centered on the body and its ability to optimally cope with a situation. When opti-mal coping breaks down and there is a sense of unease as to whether our transactions with things, persons, and ourselves are going sufficiently well, reflection and communicative dialogue emerge as instruments to help us deal with the disrupted situation. In such reflection and dia-logue there are also norms implicit in practice, norms that would be recognizable to Brandom as those governing discursive practices and conferring contents on our explicit beliefs and intentions. The question is: how do the classical pragmatists think of these norms?

Well, since such norms govern practices, reflection and dialogue that are instrumental to solving a problem, the norms at play here are instrumental norms, centered on the fulfillment of success conditions.

The classical American pragmatists . . . like contemporary rational choice theorists, focus exclusively on instrumental norms: assessments of performances as better or worse, correct and or incorrect, insofar as they contribute to the agent’s success in securing some end or achiev-ing some goal. This is the kind of norm they see as implicit in discur-sive practice, and (in keeping with their semantic pragmatism) as the ultimate source of specifically semantic dimensions of normative as-sessment such as truth. They understand truth in terms of usefulness and take the contents possessed by intentional states and expressed by linguistic utterances to consist in their potential contribution to suc-cess of an agent’s practical enterprises. Peirce, James, and Dewey are at base (though not always, and in every respect) instrumental norma-tive pragmatists. (PP: 71)

In his “Introduction”, written after the chapter in which this passage appears, Brandom seems to realize that this account is too bald. There, he argues in a more nuanced way that while for the classical figures truth is related to the successful achievement of a goal, and that the meaning of an item is conferred by its functional role in the goal- directed behav-ior of a organism, truth is not relative to a subject’s goals, nor is meaning a function of just a subject’s behavior, but of behavior in which “[b]its of the world are incorporated” (PP: 17). So Brandom recognizes that the ‘vulgar’ reading of the pragmatists as subjectivists is wrong. But never-theless, he argues, they still subscribe to an instrumental semantics, one



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that that cashes our meaning in terms of the role that beliefs have in leading to potentially successful actions (however success is now defined) rather than, as Brandom does, in terms of inferential compatibility and incompatibility relations. So his specific criticism is that the pragmatists, in their theory of content, just look ‘downstream’ at the consequences of a belief, to the difference it makes in what one does, whereas to under-stand content one must also look ‘upstream’ at how that belief is the conclusion of prior inferences and processes of belief formation (see PP: 49 for this language). The content of a belief is conferred not just by the potential actions it leads to, or even the inferences that one can and can-not make from it to other beliefs, but also by the inferences that do and do not lead to it.

There are two questions here: 1) what are we to make of the specific criticism that the pragmatists only look ‘downstream’ to consequences of belief for action, and 2) what are we to make of the standard and tradi-tional general criticism that the classical figures are instrumentalists? With respect to the first specific criticism, I think that all of the classical pragmatists avoid it quite easily, for an essential feature of their view is that action and inquiry are temporal and have a feed back structure. Any synthetic move made in an inquiry—i.e., any abductive inference whose predicted consequences are seen as according with experience through inductive testing—relies on a background of taken for granted commit-ments and beliefs that give sense to the terms that enter the inference. When abduction is successful—when the belief arrived at comports with experience and coheres with the rest of one’s beliefs and commit-ments—the belief feeds back into our background set of beliefs and commitments, changing, however slightly, their meaning. The key point is that this change in the horizon of meaning changes the meaning of the terms that will be used in future inquiry. Because of this meaning ho-lism, the downstream consequences of belief for actions and other be-liefs depend on what has already happened upstream in prior inquiry, i.e., on the prior constitution of the meaning of the belief which one takes as the basis of future inference and action. Because of the temporal flow of inquiry, this constitution, in turn, involves not just the conse-quences of the belief, but its antecedents, and so on.6

Concerning the second overall criticism that the classical pragma-tists are instrumentalists, many current pragmatists argue that it com-pletely misses the mark. I think this is an overstatement. Brandom’s point—that instead of seeing the norms that confer meaning as the result of intersubjective communicative relations between persons the classical pragmatists see meaning (and truth) as primarily a product of an organism’s ongoing instrumental interaction with an environment—has some purchase, especially with respect to James and Dewey. But even in their case, Brandom’s claim is one- sided.7



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The important point is that James and Dewey think that what suc-cess means changes radically depending on the context of action and inquiry, i.e., whether one is engaged in science, religion, ethics, art, politics, etc. What it is to be ‘successful’ in looking at an artwork, namely, having an integrated experience, is different from what it is to be successful in fixing belief, namely, having a belief that withstands all well- formed challenges from the community of inquirers, which, in turn, is distinct from what it is for a political proposal to legitimately be the basis of collective action. In the latter two cases it is clear that, at least for Dewey, one cannot just focus on an organism’s instrumental dealings with nature or with other persons, one must also have an ac-count of ‘communicative rationality’ and its norms. While it might be true that Dewey did not do the work necessary for giving a satisfactory account of the dialogical and communicative dimension of human life, this is different than claiming, as Brandom does, that Dewey, because of his pervasive instrumentalism, did not even see the need for such an account. He surely did.

In the case of Peirce, on the other hand, Brandom’s criticism does miss the mark completely. For Brandom does not seem to realize that Peirce has a social- pragmatic account of communication that is akin to his inferentialism, nor that he has a theory of truth that is in no way relativised to achieving a subject’s practical goals. The early semiotic critique of Cartesianism, the infinite community of inquirers, truth as what such a community would agree on at the end of inquiry, the real-ist idea that the goal of inquiry is to let one’s beliefs be fixed not by what inquirers agree on but by what those beliefs are about, which is ‘nothing human’—all of these concepts are nowhere to be found in Brandom’s book. The classical pragmatic tradition as Brandom conceives of it is for the most part Rorty’s, one where, as Rorty notoriously said, Peirce is only important insofar as he gave pragmatism its name.8

On this issue it is instructive to compare Brandom with another philosopher who has a normative pragmatic account of linguistic ac-tivity, i.e., Habermas.9 While Habermas is critical of the pragmatists in various ways, he recognizes Peirce and Mead as essential resources to institute his intersubjective normative pragmatics and his account of individualization as a product of socialization. Brandom, in contrast, completely ignores this strain of the classical pragmatic tradition. There is only one mention of Mead, and in that one mention his name is misspelled. When it comes to Peirce, in the semantic realm Bran-dom’s few mentions of him only see him through the prism of his early formulation of the pragmatic maxim. But again, Brandom overlooks Peirce’s labors to integrate the pragmatic maxim, which on a narrow reading sees the content of a concept as a function of the consequences it has for action and inquiry, with his semiotics, where the content of signs are a function of the role they play in a triadic, essentially



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intersubjective, semiotic process. The difficult issue, and potentially the most enlightening to investigate, is how Peirce and Mead try to integrate the anthropological stress on action and inquiry, on our abil-ity to cope with a threatening and hostile nature, with the ‘rationalist’ point that the semantic content of thought and talk emerges only, in Peirce’s terms, at the level of ‘thirdness’. It is here that Brandom could have had a true dialogue with the classical pragmatists. But because he has a single story to tell about their semantics, on this issue the classi-cal figures can only be foils for Brandom.

4.We now turn to Brandom’s other reason for rejecting the pragmatic no-tion of experience, namely that it gives rise to the Myth of the Given. In its famous epistemological iteration, the Myth of the Given is, ac-cording to Brandom, “the idea that there could be a kind of state or epi-sode, say perceptual experiences, such that the capacity to be in such a state or undergo such an episode both presupposes no mastery of con-cepts and also constitutes knowing something, or having evidence for a claim.”10 In other words, the Myth of the Given is the myth that there can be non- conceptual episodes of immediate awareness that have epis-temic authority simply through being given. What is special about epi-sodes of the given is that they have this authoritative status independently of all other items in our system of knowledge (insofar as they stand outside of the conceptually articulated space of reasons), yet they are also epistemically efficacious with respect to these items insofar as they can pass on positive epistemic status to them. The problem with this view is that no single item can be independent and efficacious at one and the same time, for if an item is truly independent it can’t pass on warrant to other episodes, and if it is efficacious in passing on warrant then it is not independent.11

To avoid the epistemological Given Brandom takes recourse to a Sellarsian two- ply theory of perception, one akin to the two- step theory of action mentioned above. According to this view, perception, which for Brandom is equal to the ability to make non- inferential perceptual judgments, is “the product of two distinguishable sorts of abilities: the capacity reliably to discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli, and the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons.”12 The first component of perceptual judgments, the ability to discriminate reliably between stimuli, is something that full- fledged judgers share with merely sentient creatures or even, as Bran-dom points out, chunks of iron. Insofar as a chunk of iron rusts in some environments but not in others it responds differentially to its environ-ment. However, it is clear that this differential response is not yet an expression of the distinct responsiveness characteristic of those who have perceptual knowledge. For this, one’s response must “count as the



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application of a concept,” and this requires “the making of a certain kind of move or the taking up of a certain kind of position in a game of giving and asking for reasons.”13

This two- ply theory of perception avoids the Myth of the Given because it does not posit, as the ground of our perceptual knowledge, states or episodes (sense- impressions) that while non- conceptual, and so outside the space of reasons, are still epistemically authoritative with respect to items within that space. Rather, perceptual judgments, in being conceptually articulated, are inside the space of reasons (and so can pass on epistemic warrant to other states in this space), while the differential response dispositions that elicit these judgments are causal pre- personal responses to environmental stimuli. So while perceptual knowledge has causal antecedents, and is therefore constrained by the environment, these antecedents are not themselves episodes of knowing. Brandom therefore avoids the Myth of the Given by epistemically neu-tralizing sense- impressions, by substituting for them pre- personal causal response dispositions that play no role in the space of reasons. As Bran-dom puts it, in placing “the interface between non- conceptual causal stimuli and conceptual response at the point where environing stimuli cause perceptual judgments” his view avoids “the Myth by seeing noth-ing non- judgmental that could serve to justify perceptual judgments, rather than just to cause them.”14

Here we can see the motivation for Brandom’s claim that ‘experience is not one of his words’. For by all accounts experience is prior to judg-ment, yet it is not a mere causal response to stimuli. Rather, experience and what one experiences has significance or sense for the agent whose experience it is. Experience is therefore something pre- judgmental, and therefore for Brandom pre- conceptual (insofar as concepts are essen-tially components of judgments), which, in having significance or sense, is nonetheless able to justify perceptual judgments rather than just cause them. On this conception then, experience has both causal and the conceptual properties that makes it fit to serve as an interface between mind and world. But in doing so it falls prey to the Myth of the Given.

For the classical pragmatists there is no good reason to think that having a robust account of experience—one that in being lived through can serve as a reason for an eventual judgment that something is thus and so rather than just being a causal input to judgment—commits one to the Given. For all of the classical figures (except perhaps the early Peirce) experience is prior to judgment and to any explicit position tak-ing on the validity of something. While experience can give rise to judgment (and therefore knowledge) through a modification of an agent’s interests, in its primary meaning experience is, as Dewey often put it, ‘ways of doing and suffering’. But while experience is not itself a form of judgment, it is not comprised by raw sense- impressions either.



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Rather, it is ‘funded’, meaning that experience only has sense for a sub-ject by being part of a temporally extended stream of interpenetrating doings and sufferings. As is well known, the pragmatists’ account of this stream of doings and sufferings rejects in the strongest possible terms the atomism of the British Empiricists. They do so not only by claiming that relations and connections are phenomenologically given in the stream of experience in addition to sense contents (a claim that would not by itself resist Brandom’s charge of givenness), but also by claiming that the basic categories by which creatures organize the stream are not Given but in some sense discovered. As James put it in his inimitable fashion: “[e]xperience merely as such doesn’t come ticketed and labeled, we have first to discover what it is.”15 Indeed, like in Sellars’ famous Myth of Jones, James posits that the basic concepts or denkmit-tel that we find useful for organizing our experience,

may have been successfully discovered by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been veri-fied by the immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have spread, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of think-ing naturally in any other terms.16

All of the classical pragmatists have similar arguments against the Given. For Peirce it involves the mediated character of experience, while for Dewey it involves the evolved and adaptable habits that under lie our cognitive achievements. If the sine qua non of the Myth of the epistemological Given is the notion that there are states that simply in being given operate either as forms of knowledge or as evidence of knowledge without the benefit of prior habituation, learning, or concept formation (as Sellars put it), then none of the classical pragmatists are committed to the Given. For the classical figures there is simply no ten-sion between having a robust concept of experience and avoiding the Myth of the Given and the foundationalist picture it underlies.

While his account of the epistemological Given is key to under-standing Brandom’s dim view of experience, in Perspectives on Pragma-tism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary he mostly focuses on an analogous myth that concerns the role of desire or preference in the pragmatic action cycle. In what we could call the Myth of the practical Given, “intrinsically motivating preferences or desires” are seen as “the empiricist analogs, on the side of agency, to the pre- conceptual episodes of awareness to which epistemic authority is traced on the side of cogni-tion.”17 What is mythical about the notion of there being intrinsically motivating desires is the idea that they are both practically efficacious with respect to our bringing about a certain end, yet independent of the system of conceptually articulated commitments and beliefs that could



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specify what it would be to successfully achieve that end, and therefore guide us in the proper selection of means to that end. To be practically efficacious and independent at the same time one must think that these given states “have the properties both of itches and of the conceptually contentful desires that engage with conceptually contentful beliefs in practical reasoning” (PP: 74- 5). In other words, to meet the indepen-dence condition one must think of desires on the model of non- cognitive itches, while to be efficacious in bringing about a certain specified end one must think of desires as conceptually contentful propositional attitudes, for only in this way can they guide us in the selection of means to that end. But a desire cannot meet both of these conditions at once because if a desire is truly independent of one’s con-ceptual system it cannot specify the end to be brought about, and if it is efficacious in specifying that end then it isn’t independent of one’s conceptual system.18

But how is this related to the classical pragmatists? In his two chap-ters on classical pragmatism, written and published as independent ar-ticles before the more nuanced “Introduction,” Brandom retreats somewhat to the vulgar interpretation that not only do the classical pragmatists think that the contents of our thought and talk consist in their potential contribution to the success of an agent’s practical enter-prises, they also think that the criterion for success in achieving a goal is equal to the satisfaction of a subject’s desires or preferences. The problem with this latter move for Brandom is—as we just saw above—that the “notion of desire and its satisfaction required by their [the classical prag-matists] explanatory strategy is fatally equivocal. It runs together imme-diate inclination and conceptually articulated commitment in just the way Wilfrid Sellars criticizes, for beliefs rather than desires, under the rubric ‘the Myth of the Given’” (PP: 51). According to Brandom, the classical pragmatists fall prey to the Myth of the practical Given because, on the one hand, they want a naturalized account of action, one based on recognizably natural features of the world like inclination and felt satisfaction. On the other hand, they must posit desire as a conceptually articulated commitment to make sense of the fact that reflection and inquiry arise from felt dissatisfaction, and that the result of such reflec-tion and inquiry can feed back into one’s behavior to better guide us in the selection of means to our desired ends. This feed back structure would not be possible on purely non- cognitive grounds.

In my view, this reading is a disaster. Not only does the pragmatic notion of desire not fall prey to the Myth of the practical Given, the felt satisfaction of desire is not the norm by which the success of an action or inquiry is determined. What is interesting is that there are signs that Brandom himself knows this.

Concerning the first issue, Brandom adds two notes to his discus-sion of desire, which claim that Dewey, in his aesthetics and value



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theory, recognizes the distinction between desire understood on the model of itches and desire conceived of as conceptually contentful at-titudes. This, for Dewey, is the distinction between what is desired and what is desirable, or what is valued and what is valuable. The problem, Brandom thinks, is that Dewey (who is Brandom’s target here and who stands in for the other classical figures), while aware of this distinction, “never thought through its consequences for the foundations of his ap-proach” (PP 75), i.e., never applied it to semantic theory. What Bran-dom never considers, at least in the two chapters of the book devoted to the classical pragmatists, is that Dewey never applies this distinction to his semantics because he does not think that desire is the key for determining what success means for our actions and inquiries.

In the “Introduction” Brandom seems to recognize this. There, he says, correctly, that for all of the classical figures it is not our needs that are the criterion of the correctness or truth of an action, inquiry, or idea, rather “it is the needs of the situation that are determinative” (PP: 19, my italics). The needs of the situation, in turn, depend on the con-text of action (whether it is scientific, religious, ethical, artistic, politi-cal, etc.) and the historically generated norms that govern that specific context, the predispositions and historically generated background un-derstanding and skills of the agent, and the demands of the environ-ment, physical and social, that one is transacting with. So in the scientific context, for example, the success of an idea is not determined by a subject’s felt satisfaction, but by whether the idea comports with all the norms of inquiry. Most of these norms are of course determined by the goal of inquiry, but this goal is not just a subject’s goal, determined by a subject’s desire, nor is it a practical goal (in the sense that politics and ethics are practical). Of course, other contexts of action have differ-ent goals, and therefore quite different norms. If we apply this lesson back to the semantic, as Brandom demands, what we get is a semantic pluralism in which an item has content due to the functional role it plays in specific contexts governed by specific norms of correctness. In most contexts, desire is beside the point in determining these norms.

Desire does play a role even in dispassionate forms of inquiry, for inquiry can only move forward if there is a desire on the part of the community of inquirers for truth (and hope that it can be achieved). But this ‘desire for wisdom’ is not an immediate inclination, but rather a socially determined habit of inquiry. In certain action contexts, of course, the satisfaction of a subject’s desire is important for determining success, for example, in determining whether one is having a good meal. But even in these cases desire is a funded attitude, i.e., one that has meaning by being part of a subject’s habitual posture toward the world.19 Dewey does not fall prey to the practical Myth of the Given because even when desire plays a role in determining the success condi-tions for a type of action or inquiry it does not do so as a freestanding



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and independent non- cognitive state, but as a tendency of a subject’s habitual posture, a posture which is itself not given.

Here we come back to what is, I think, Brandom’s biggest blind spot: his lack of a theory of habituation. Because of this lack, he must conceive of desire, or any attitude, as completely cognitive and concep-tual (as in the space of reasons), or as completely non- cognitive and non- conceptual (as merely causal).20 This accounts for his reading of Dewey as moving inconsistently back and forth between modeling de-sire on itches and seeing desire as a contentful propositional attitude. But for Dewey, and all the pragmatists, there is a stratum of pre- reflective yet rationally intelligible habits and bodily skills that are nei-ther conceptual nor merely causal.21 It is only once this stratum is identified that the pragmatists’ true account can come into focus.

5.Notwithstanding these criticisms, I think that anyone who is interested in pragmatism should read Brandom’s book. There are several reasons for this. First, while Brandom’s view may ultimately be intellectualist, any comprehensive picture of ‘man- in- the- world’ needs an account of the ‘top- layer’ of our discursive activity, and his complex semantic pro-gram gives us important tools to articulate, in a pragmatically satisfying way, this stratum of our intellectual lives. Second, his account of what the classical pragmatists got right, the elements of what he calls the Pragmatic Enlightenment, is brilliant, and the chapters on Sellars, Rorty, and Price, which we have not discussed, are state of the art. Third, Brandom’s catholic approach to the pragmatic tradition and its boundaries is precisely the right one to have and should be a model for current pragmatic work. Those who, like me, wish to defend insights of the classical figures cannot simply ignore what’s come after, rather we must continue a process of reconstruction by using what is best in the philosophical work of the Twentieth and Twenty- first century. And it is clear to me, at least, that this process of reconstruction must intensively engage Brandom’s towering theoretical edifice.

University of Massachusetts, [email protected]

NOTES

1. Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary, (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 9. This text will henceforth be referred to as PP.

2. Both of these quotes come from Making it Explicit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 89.



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3. Here we have, in slightly different language, Brandom’s thesis from chapter one and two of Making it Explicit that an inferential semantics rests on a norma-tive pragmatics.

4. For more on this criticism of Brandom’s theory of action see my paper “Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Sociality of Action” forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy.

5. My claim is not that the classical figures were completely successful in this project of critical dismantling, but simply that they took it to be an important part of the pragmatic program. As comes out especially in his rejection of Wittgen-stein’s therapeutic quietism, this is not a part of Brandom’s program, which is constructive through and through.

6. This point is well made in Larry Hickman’s paper “Some Strange Things to Say about Pragmatism: Robert Brandom on the Pragmatists’ Semantic ‘Mistake’,” Cognitio, 8:1 (Jan/Jun 2007), pp. 105– 113. In posing this criticism that the prag-matists only look downstream in their semantics, Brandom also makes the related criticism that the classical pragmatists only look at the role of belief in producing or justifying future actions and not other beliefs. This criticism is, I think, clearly off target. Indeed, it is the ‘second misunderstanding’ of pragmatism that James aims to expose in his paper “The Pragmatist Account of Truth,” included in The Meaning of Truth, which can be found in William James: Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987).

7. For a trenchant statement of how the classical pragmatists are not subject to Brandom’s criticism, see Putnam’s reply to Brandom in the volume Pragmatism and Realism (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 59–65.

8. It is only ‘for the most part’ Rorty’s because Brandom has a brief yet insight-ful account of Peirce’s evolutionary naturalism as an advance on the mechanistic naturalism of the classical tradition.

9. “For the relation between Habermas and Brandom see Habermas “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” in the European Journal of Philosophy 8:3, 2000, pp. 322–55, and Brandom’s response, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” in the European Journal of Philosophy 8:3, 2000, pp. 356–374.”

10. Robert Brandom, “Reply to McDowell,” in B. Weiss and J. Wanderer (eds.), Reading Brandom: On Making it Explicit (London: Routledge Press, 2010), p. 320.

11. This account of the Given, which parses it in terms of a tension between independence and epistemic efficacy, follows W. DeVries and T. Triplett, Knowl-edge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002).

12. Robert, Brandom, “The Centrality of Sellars’ Two- Ply Account of Obser-vation to the Arguments of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’,” in Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 349.

13. Ibid, p. 351.14. Robert Brandom, “Non- Inferential Knowledge, Perceptual Experience,

and Secondary Qualities: Placing McDowell’s Empiricism,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (London: Routledge Press, 2002), pp. 93–4.

15. William James, “Pragmatism and Common Sense,” in Pragmatism, in-cluded in William James: Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 561.



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16. Ibid, p. 566.17. Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2000), p. 31.18. This discussion of the structure of the Practical Myth of the Given is taken

from my paper “Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Sociality of Action” forth-coming in the European Journal of Philosophy.

19. For an argument to this effect see my paper “Dewey, Motivation, and the Speculative Identity of Self and Act,” accessible at http://faculty.www.umb.edu/steven.levine/papers.html

20. Brandom thinks that causal processes, for example processes of reliability, can become reasons. But they become reasons not because they are more than merely causal processes, i.e, habits, but because they are taken as reasons by an in-terpreter or scorekeeper who keeps track, in a third person fashion, of a subject’s reliability in producing correct observations or in performing correct actions.

21. For an account of how habits can be rationally intelligible see my paper “Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Sociality of Action” forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy.



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Brandom's Pragmatism