Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Sociality of Action

Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Socialityof Action

Steven Levine

Abstract: In this paper I argue against Brandom’s two-ply theory of action. ForBrandom, action is the result of an agent acknowledging a practical commitmentand then causally responding to that commitment by acting. Action is socialbecause the content of the commitment upon which one acts is socially conferredin the game of giving and asking for reasons. On my proposal, instead of seeingaction as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowledge commitments anda non-rational capacity to reliably respond to these commitments, we should seeaction as the coupling, or potential coupling, of a capacity to reason practicallyand a capacity to act on habits and bodily skills. In putting forward thisalternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom’s rationalist brand ofPragmatism with a more classical kind, one that will let us see action as socialnot only at the level of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills.

1.

One of the great advantages of Robert Brandom’s theory of action is that it isable to incorporate the essentially social nature of human action. It can do sobecause of Brandom’s social-pragmatic account of the reasons for which we act.For Brandom, the reasons that enter into practical reasoning and justification arepublic reasons whose content and practical purport is conferred on them by theirnormatively governed role in the inter-subjective game of giving and asking forreasons.1 Reasons are not internal psychological states as they are on a standardDavidsonian construal, nor are they facts or states of the world as they are forreason externalists. Rather, reasons are inferentially articulated commitmentswhose discursive content and practical purport is cashed out in what Brandomcalls deontic scorekeeping. I will say more about what this means later. For nowI can simply say that while the actions that we undertake depend upon thereasons that we acknowledge or take to be the basis of our action, the meaningand normative validity of these very reasons, and so the actions undertaken inlight of those reasons, are conferred by their deontic status in a normative socialpractice, which itself depends upon how other scorekeepers take or treat thesereasons and actions in the game of deontic scorekeeping.

Brandom has another thesis, however, that cuts against the conclusion thathuman action is essentially social. Notice that sociality enters into Brandom’saccount of action only at the level of reasons. The question still stands, however,as to whether bodily action itself is essentially social. That there are doubts on this

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DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00530.x

European Journal of Philosophy ••:•• ISSN 0966-8373 pp. ••–•• © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

score owes to the fact that Brandom’s model of action is a two-ply model: Actionis a language exit transition that depends on reliable dispositions to responddifferentially to an acknowledged practical commitment (an intention). So whilewe take up a practical commitment by making inferences from reasons whosecontent and practical purport are socially conferred in the space of reasons,action exits this space when our bodies causally respond to the stimuli providedby the acknowledgment of this commitment. But if one is to hold that bodilyaction itself is social, then the socially articulated reasons that inform practicalreasoning cannot just eventuate in a practical commitment, which is then causallyresponded to by a bodily action; rather reasoning and the commitment it resultsin must be manifest in bodily action itself.

John McDowell and Rowland Stout have recently criticized Brandom on thisscore, claiming that his dual-component theory places bodily action outside thespace of reasons.2 Both authors are not interested in arguing for the sociality ofaction per se, but rather for the more limited thesis that bodily action is a directexpression of conceptually articulated reasons. I agree with McDowell andStout’s diagnosis of Brandom’s two-ply model of action. However, I take adifferent approach than either of them to articulating the thought that bodilyaction is not a response to an antecedent exercise of reason but a manifestationof it. Instead of seeing action as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowl-edge commitments and a non-rational capacity to reliably respond to theseacknowledgments, my proposal is that we should see action as the coupling, orpotential coupling, of an active capacity to reason practically and a passiverational capacity to act on habits and bodily skills.3 In putting forward thisalternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom’s rationalist brand ofPragmatism with a more classical kind, one in which intentional action isessentially embedded in bodily habits and skills. My ultimate goal is to arguethat these features can be brought into an account of rational action, and thatsuch an account allows us to provide a picture of action as social not only at thelevel of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills.

2.

Let me begin with Brandom’s account of the social nature of human action.Brandom’s thought about action begins traditionally with the question of whatdistinguishes action from mere behavior. His answer is also traditional: Some-thing is an action, as opposed to a piece of mere behavior, when it is appropriateto demand a reason for it. ‘Action is behavior that is rational, in the sense thatthe question of what reasons can be given for actions is always, at least inprinciple, in order. Actions are performances that are caught up in our practicesof giving and asking reasons as moves for which reasons can be proffered andsought’ (Brandom 2001: 11). Actions are things done intentionally or for areason,4 and to engage in action is to open oneself up to the responsibility ofjustifying the intention upon which one acts, of showing that one is entitled to it

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© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

as a product of one’s practical rationality. One meets this justificatory responsi-bility by being able to exhibit, even if after the fact, the practical reasoning thatresults in the intention upon which one acts. In other words, one justifies whatone does by showing that the intention upon which one acts suitably followsfrom the premises that inform one’s practical reasoning. These premises, whichcan be both beliefs and other practical commitments, are the reasons for whichone does what one does. In showing how our intention follows from thesereasons we rationalize our intention, show how we are rationally entitled to it,how the action that results from it is expressive of our rational agency.

While the actions that one undertakes depend upon the reasons that oneacknowledges or takes as binding, the very ability of actors to give reasonsdepends upon their general capacity ‘to engage in a specifically linguistic socialpractice’ (Brandom 1994: 231). This is because for Brandom our rationality orsapience is bound up with our capacity to make intra-linguistic moves in thespace of reasons, i.e., to make inferential moves. The ability to non-inferentiallyrespond to the world by either perceiving it or acting on it is a derivativecapacity insofar as, if these responses are rational rather than a product of ourmerely animal natures, they must be able to be defended by linguisticallyarticulated reasons. ‘Giving reasons for actions is possible only in the context ofpractices of giving and asking for reasons generally—that is, of practices ofmaking and defending claims. The structure of entitlement for practical commit-ments is not autonomous, but presupposes doxastic ones’ (ibid.: 243). As a firstpass we could say that action is social because the reasons that we can givefor an action are essentially caught up in a wider linguistic practice that isitself social.

The importance of linguistic social practices for understanding action is,however, deeper than this. ‘For the propositional contents of the intentionalstates appealed to in practical reasoning presuppose assertional-inferential pro-prieties, and hence linguistic social practices’ (ibid.: 231). In other words, wedon’t just need to take part in a linguistic social practice to reason practically(insofar as claims and assertions are necessary to formulate premises of practicalreasoning), or to justify that reasoning and hence what we do in light of it, weneed to take part in a linguistic social practice to so much as be able to entertaincontentful practical intentional states, most importantly, the intentions uponwhich we act. This is because the very content of these intentions is sociallyarticulated in the game of giving and asking for reasons.

Intentions for Brandom are acknowledged practical commitments to do some-thing. Brandom proposes that we think of such commitments on the model ofbeliefs or what he calls doxastic commitments. Just as one says yes to aproposition (asserts it as true), one says yes to an action (as what one ought todo). In saying yes to these performances, in putting them forward as correct(as true or normatively right), one acknowledges a commitment to them. Onecan express this acknowledgment ‘out loud’ by saying ‘I believe that so and sois the case’ or ‘I shall do so and so’, or one can say yes to them in ‘one’s heart’,i.e., in inner speech or thought.5

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The content of practical commitments is ‘to making true a claim’ (ibid.: 233).So while practical commitments have a practical component that doxasticcommitments don’t, namely, to the making-true of a claim by bringing about astate of affairs through acting, what one is committed to making true is specifiedby the content of a propositionally articulated claim that is included within thepractical commitment. Practical commitments thereby incorporate claims thatspecify the conditions that would have to be met for successfully fulfilling thecommitment. It is for this reason that practical ‘commitments and their contentsare intelligible only in a context that includes also the taking-true of claims. Forit is in terms of such assertional taking true that the success of actions, thefulfillment of practical commitments, must be understood’ (ibid.: 233). Becauseof this, the content of our intentions is largely inherited from the content ofcorresponding beliefs, both of which are inferentially articulated in the game ofgiving and asking for reasons.

Practical commitments, like doxastic or assertional commitments . . . arediscursive or conceptually contentful commitments in virtue of theinferential articulation of their pragmatic significance. The scorekeepingsignificance of practical commitments is analogous to that of doxasticcommitments—indeed the inferential and incompatibility relations thatthe contents of practical commitments stand in are largely inherited fromthose of corresponding doxastic commitments. (ibid.: 237)

To say that the content of a commitment is inferentially articulated is to say thatgrasp of a concept included in such a content requires having ‘practical masteryover the inferences it is involved in—to know, in the practical sense of being ableto distinguish, what follows from the applicability of a concept and what itfollows from’ (ibid.: 89). So for example, to have an understanding of the conceptred 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” ’ (ibid.: 89).In appreciating a concept’s significance ‘as a reason for making further claimsand acquiring further beliefs, and its role in justifying some further attitudes andperformances and ruling out others’ (ibid.: 89) one grasps its normative prag-matic significance, i.e., the norms that implicitly govern the inferences andincompatibilities in which it is caught up. To understand the content of aconceptually articulated commitment is accordingly to have practical mastery ofthe normative proprieties that operate implicitly in the concepts that comprise thecommitment. ‘The significance of being committed to a certain claim or assertiblecontent is normative. It has to do with what else one is committed or entitled to.It is articulated by proprieties of scorekeeping and consists of the properantecedents and consequences of that status’ (ibid.: 260).

We should think of the content of practical commitments in a parallel way, butinstead of it just giving us reason to acquire certain further beliefs and claimsand avoid others by making certain inferences, a practical commitment will inaddition give us reasons to do certain further things and avoid others, i.e., thosethat make-true the belief and claims included in our practical commitment. So

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for example, if one is to grasp the content of an instrumental practical commit-ment to stay dry, a commitment based on agent-relative reasons, one must havepractical mastery of the fact that to make-true this commitment one ought to docertain things in certain contexts (when it is raining to stand under an awning,use an umbrella, etc.), or not do certain things (step out from under the awning,etc.). Or if one is to grasp the content of a categorical practical commitment toavoid cruelty, a commitment based on agent-neutral reasons, one must have apractical grasp of the fact that for this intention to be made-true one ought notto laugh at someone’s appearance, or pass on malicious gossip, and that oneought to engage in certain types of actions (those that are kind or morallyneutral). While the content of a practical commitment is thus partly specified interms of the normative pragmatic significance of the beliefs or claims (about rain,cruelty, etc.) included in inferences which articulate part of the content of thecommitment, it is also specified by patterns of normative propriety that directlyconcern what we ought and ought not to do to make that commitment true. Inother words, when we use practical/normative concepts specifically to articulatean intention we commit ourselves to acting in some ways and not in others,ways that make the beliefs and claims included in the intention true.

Action is social because the patterns of normative propriety that articulate thecontent of the intention upon which we act, and which determine what we oughtand ought not to do to make the intention true, are intrinsically social. They areintrinsically social because for Brandom norms are not self-standing deonticstatuses that reside in a Fregian third realm, but are rather instituted by practicalattitudes whereby agents take or treat these normative proprieties as committingand entitling other agents and themselves to further beliefs and actions.

The natural world does not come with commitments and entitlementsin it; they are products of human activity. In particular, they arecreatures of the attitudes of taking, treating, or responding to someonein practice as committed or entitled (for instance, to various otherperformances). Mastering this sort of norm-instituting social practice isa kind of practical know-how—a matter of keeping deontic score bykeeping track of one’s own and other’s commitments and entitlementsto those commitments, and altering the score in systematic ways basedon the performances each practitioner produces. The norms that governthe use of linguistic expressions are implicit in these deontic scorekeep-ing practices. (ibid.: xiv)

The important point is this: On this deontic scorekeeping conception of ourdiscursive practices agents can have commitments and entitlements only if theyare taken or treated as having those commitments and entitlements by otherscorekeepers. This is so because without other scorekeepers attributing norma-tive statuses to them, whatever commitments and entitlements that seem rightto them would be right.6 But if whatever seemed right to an agent were right,then the notion of being right would have no sense because there would be noway for an agent to be wrong about the commitments and entitlements they



take themselves to have. For one to have a sense of incorrectness, and thereforeof correctness, concerning one’s commitments and entitlements an agent musttherefore take part in a social practice that ‘essentially involves a distinction ofsocial perspective, between what one is doing in acknowledging a commitment(to oneself) and attributing a commitment (to someone else)’ (Brandom 2010a:298). By internalizing this distinction of social perspective through taking partin a linguistic social practice, scorekeepers acquire a practical mastery of theconcept of objectivity—i.e., the notion that there is a difference, for others andthemselves, between an agent’s actual commitments and entitlements, the onesthat are properly attributed to them and which they have in fact undertaken,and the commitments and entitlements they take themselves to have. This socialarticulation of conceptual norms therefore allows us to say that even if an agentdoes not acknowledge that a norm or a reason speaks in favor of doingsomething (making an inference or acting in a certain way), because that normor reason is socially articulated we can say that that agent is wrong to ignorethat norm or reason, that the inference or action which the norm or reasonspeaks in favor of does in fact follows from their own commitments.7

Sociality enters into the very content of our intentions because the patterns ofnormative propriety that govern the inferences that articulate the content of ourintentions, and which determine what we ought and ought not to do to makethose intentions true, are dependent upon the normative attributions and assess-ments of other players of the deontic game, on whether they take or treat theseinferences and actions as correct or incorrect, proper or improper. There are twosides to this dependence, a subjective and an objective side. On the subjectiveside we can say that the very possibility of making assessments in one’sdeliberation about what intention one ought to acknowledge and what oneought to do based on that acknowledgment, depends on the internalization ofthe normative patterns of assessment that have been negotiated interpersonallyin the social lifeworld. ‘First person deliberation is the internalization of suchthird-person assessment’ (Brandom 1994: 231). So while, as we just saw, onemight not in specific cases recognize what one is obligated or committed todoing in acknowledging an intention, the very ability to entertain that intentionas a contentful state depends upon one’s general ability to incorporate into one’spractical reasoning and doing patterns of normative assessment and proprietythat are inter-personally conferred in deontic scorekeeping. One could not ingeneral ignore these patterns of normative propriety and still be considered arational agent.

On the objective side, the very ability of an agent to internalize the patternsof normative assessment and propriety that articulate the contents of theirpractical commitments depends on there being socially conferred norms in thefirst place. Were agents to act in light of norms that were not taken or treated asnorms by other scorekeepers, the action would not be an action at all but a pieceof mere behavior. This applies not only to the norms or reasons in light of whichan action is done, but also to bodily action itself as a material public performance.In most cases, actions are performed in the absence of avowed intentions. In

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these cases, actions are taken or treated as correct or incorrect and as incurringcommitments and entitlements by scorekeepers without the mediation of reasongiving on the part of the acting agent. Scorekeepers assess these actions based onattributed intentions, and the normative pragmatic significance of the action isinstituted by the normative attitudes of scorekeepers (by their attributions).Thus, a bodily action, to be an action rather than a piece of mere behavior, mustnot only be the product of an agent’s (in this case ascribed) intention (and soundertaken in light of the norms implicit in that ascribed intention), it must alsobe taken or treated as an intentional action by other scorekeepers. In this case,action is social because its very meaning as an intentional performance dependsupon its being taken or treated as an intentional performance by other actors inthe social lifeworld.

3.

As we have seen, Brandom accounts for the social nature of human action byclaiming that the content of the reasons for which we act is social conferred andthat our bodily movements are ascribed significance in the social practice ofdeontic scorekeeping. Brandom, however, also has a model of action thatundercuts the sociality of action. In this section we are going to canvass thismodel, and see how it places bodily action outside the socially constituted spaceof reasons.

Brandom’s deepest commitment in the theory of action is to the notion thatthe structure of action can be modeled on the structure of perception. His goalis to exploit ‘the structural analogies between discursive exit transitions in actionand discursive entry transitions in perception to show how the rational will canbe understood as no more philosophically mysterious than our capacity to noticered things’ (Brandom 2000: 79). To put it in Brandom’s idiom, while perceptualbelief is made possible by our having reliable dispositions to respond diffe-rentially to environmental states of affairs by acknowledging certain sorts ofdoxastic commitments, ‘[a]ction depends on reliable dispositions to responddifferentially to the acknowledging of certain sorts of commitments (the adopt-ing of deontic attitudes) by bringing about various kinds of states of affairs’(Brandom 1994: 235). In other words, while in perception we non-inferentiallyrespond to environmental stimuli by taking up a position in the space of reasons,in action we non-inferentially respond to our own taking up of a practicalcommitment or intention (in the space of reasons) by bringing about a non-linguistic state of affairs through bodily action. ‘In action, alterations of deonticattitude, specifically acknowledgements of practical commitments, serve asstimuli eliciting nonlinguistic performances’ (ibid.: 235). Here we need reliabledispositions to respond differentially to stimuli—not to acquire beliefs, as withperception—but to ‘fulfill acknowledged commitments’.

What is the problem with this account of action? Rowland Stout puts itthis way:



Brandom’s attempt to explain the process of acting according to reasonas a two-stage process of acknowledging a norm and then responding tothat acknowledgment can give us a distorted conception of the causalprocess that constitutes action. The distortion arises if in the two-stagemodel the rationality characteristic of agency is confined to the firststage—the production of attitudes . . . [T]he first state involves sensitivityto norms (or reasons), but does not involve anything actually happening,and the second stage involves things actually being made to happen butinvolves no sensitivity to norms (or reasons). This fails to take seriouslythe idea of action as a process of rationally transforming the world—i.e., a process in which the changes characteristic of the action involvethe rationality characteristic of agency. Instead the rationality character-istic of agency is manifested in the production of attitudes; the trans-formation of the world characteristic of action is not taken to be amanifestation of rationality in action, but rather a response to such amanifestation. (Stout 2010: 148)

The point here is that rationality is confined to our activity in the space ofreasons, to the rational production of attitudes (of acknowledgments of com-mitments) through practical reasoning. When this process of being sensitive tothe norms implicit in our own commitments eventuates in the explicit acknow-ledgment of a practical commitment or intention (when we take a norm to be thereason in light of which we act), our bodies causally respond to this stimuli byexercising a reliable response disposition, which (attempts to) bring about thecontent of that intention. But if this causal response is truly causal, a mereexercise of a reliable response disposition, then it is not ‘a manifestation ofrationality in action, but rather only a response to such a manifestation’. Ourfurther claim is that in not manifesting rationality, bodily action is also not amanifestation of sociality. Bodily action is a response to something social—theacknowledgment of a socially conferred norm or deontic status—or it is some-thing that is taken to be social by other scorekeepers. On either account, however,bodily action is social at once remove, it is not in either case an expression ofsociality.8

Brandom, in a response to Stout, tries to resist the suggestion ‘that a two-stagestory must inevitably . . . restrict rationality to one stage’ (Brandom 2010b: 330).He offers two arguments in support of his view. His first argument is that Stoutis wrong to think that reasons only apply to the adoption of practical attitudes.For, ‘reasons for action are reasons to make a claim true, that is, to makean actual difference in the world. The reasons reach all the way out to theperformance. They are reasons to adopt an attitude—to acknowledge thatcommitment—only in a secondary and derivative sense’ (ibid.: 329). In otherwords, because reasons primarily pertain to what our practical attitudes areabout—the states of affairs that ought or ought not to be made-true throughacting—rather than which practical attitude (understood as elements of ourpsychology) to adopt, these reasons are reasons for acting in one way or another.

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But even if this argument is cogent, it does not address the point that is ofinterest for us, namely, whether bodily action expresses or manifests rationality inaction. For even if reason giving pertains primarily to the question of whethera state of affairs ought to be made true by acting, the body, insofar as it isbrought into play by a response disposition, is still understood as a causalinstrument for making-true the content of a claim by bringing about a worldlystate of affairs.

Brandom’s second argument addresses this concern head on. When a subjectresponds to the undertaking of a practical commitment to push a button let’s sayby doing something, i.e., by pushing a button, ‘the responsive capacity inquestion is itself a rational capacity. For in each case, the response must “fit” thestimulus, and that “fit” is a matter of the proper applicability of concepts . . . [I]naction one must respond to a commitment to make-true some claimable byproducing a situation in which it is true. The capacity to do that—in eitherdirection—is a rational capacity’ (ibid.: 329). To ensure a fit between commitmentand the state of affairs that makes the commitment true we must consider ourreliable differential response dispositions to be rational capacities that aresensitive to both the content of our normative attitudes and to what must be doneto bring about that content. This requires a flexibility in our bodily responses thatcannot be accounted for in mechanistic terms but only if such responses are theresult of the application of concepts.

The question is whether Brandom is entitled to a picture in which ourresponse dispositions display this two-way form of rational sensitivity. Myargument, which I make in the next section, is that he is not so entitled.

4.

To see why Brandom is not entitled to a view where our bodily capacities to actare themselves rational capacities, rather than causal responses to the exercise ofprior rational capacities, we must put his two-ply theory of action in context.Brandom’s two-ply theory is articulated in the way that it is to avoid the practicalmyth of the given. This is the myth that a theory of action can be grounded on‘intrinsically motivating preferences or desires’, which for Brandom are ‘theempiricist analogs, on the side of agency, to the pre-conceptual episodes ofawareness to which epistemic authority is traced on the side of cognition’(Brandom 2000: 31). When we understand Brandom’s view of what is necessaryin a theory of action to avoid the practical myth of the given we will be in aposition to understand why he is not entitled to the thought that bodily responsecapacities are rational capacities.

In its more famous epistemological iteration, the myth of the given ‘is the ideathat there could be a kind of state or episode, say perceptual experiences, suchthat the capacity to be in such a state or undergo such an episode bothpresupposes no mastery of concepts and also constitutes knowing something, orhaving evidence for a claim’ (Brandom 2010c: 320). In other words, the myth of



the given is the myth that there can be non-conceptual episodes of immediateawareness that have epistemic authority simply through being entertained, i.e.,through being given. What is special about an episode of the given is that it hasthis authoritative status independently of all other items in our system ofknowledge (insofar as it stands outside of the conceptually articulated spaceof reasons), yet it is also epistemically efficacious with respect to these itemsinsofar as it can pass on its positive epistemic status to non-basic episodes. Thenotion that there are episodes that are independent yet epistemically efficacious isa myth because to be epistemically efficacious these episodes must pass onepistemic warrant to items in the space of reasons, and to do this they cannottruly be independent of items in this space. Because the efficacy and indepen-dence condition cannot be met by a single episode, the notion that there is asingle episode that meets both of these conditions is a myth.

The myth of the practical given, in contrast, is the myth that there are givenstates of our selves, preferences or desires, that are both practically efficacious withrespect to our bringing about a certain end or state of affairs, yet independent ofthe system of conceptually articulated commitments and beliefs that couldspecify what it would be to successfully achieve that end, and therefore guideus in the proper selection of means to that end. To be practically efficacious andindependent at the same time one must think that these given states ‘can havethe properties both of itches and of the conceptually contentful desires thatengage with conceptually contentful beliefs in practical reasoning’ (Brandom2011: 74–5).9 In other words, to meet the independence condition one must thinkof desires on the model of noncognitive itches, while to meet the practicalefficacy condition one must think of desires as conceptually contentful propo-sitional attitudes. For the empiricist, because desires are like itches—i.e., non-conceptual states that are foreign to the realm of reason—it is easily able to meetthe independence condition. But the problem is that once it meets this conditionit cannot be practically efficacious with respect to our bringing about a desiredend. For when we have a desire we are not motivated to act in any old way, butin the way that will make-true the specific state-of affairs desired. But if desirecannot specify what it would be to successfully bring about this state of affairs byincorporating a conceptually contentful claim about it, how can it guide practicalreasoning in its selection of means to that end? For this to be possible desire mustbe able to gear into our system of conceptually articulated beliefs, and so mustnot be independent of this system.10 If desire is truly independent it cannot bepractically efficacious with respect to achieving an end because it cannot guideus in the selection of means to that end, and if it is efficacious for oursuccessfully achieving that end, then it can’t be independent of our conceptualsystem.

Brandom’s general strategy for avoiding the myth of the given is to claim thatinstead of there being a single episode that meets both the efficacy and indepen-dence condition, there are two such episodes, each meeting one of the conditions.

In the epistemological case this strategy for avoiding the given leads to atwo-ply theory of perception in which agents have reliable dispositions to

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respond differentially to various kinds of stimuli by acknowledging a discursivecommitment in the space of reasons. The ability to reliably discriminate betweenstimuli is something that full-fledged judgers share with non-rational creaturesor even, as Brandom points out, non-sentient items that respond differentially tothe environment (rusting chunks of iron). However, it is clear that this differ-ential response is not yet the expression of the distinct responsiveness charac-teristic of those who can form perceptual judgments and possess perceptualknowledge. For this, the response that is reliably elicited must be a conceptualresponse that while not a move in the space of reasons—because it is non-inferentially elicited—has an inferential status in the self-same game. Thistwo-ply theory avoids the myth of the given because it does not posit, as theground of our perceptual knowledge, states or episodes (sense-impressions) thatwhile non-conceptual and so outside the space of reasons are still epistemicallyauthoritative with respect to items within in. Rather, perceptual judgments inbeing conceptually articulated are inside the space of reasons (and so can passon epistemic warrant to other states in this space), while the differential responsedispositions that elicit these judgments are causal pre-personal responses toenvironmental stimuli. So while perceptual knowledge has causal antecedents,and is therefore constrained by the environment, these antecedents are notthemselves episodes of knowing. Brandom therefore avoids the myth of the givenby epistemically neutralizing sense-impressions, by substituting for them pre-personal causal response dispositions that play no role in the space of reasons.

Brandom has a parallel strategy in the practical case. We saw above that ifdesire were truly independent of our conceptual system it couldn’t be practi-cally efficacious with respect to our making-true a specific end or state ofaffairs, and if it were efficacious by incorporating a claim about what it wouldbe to successfully achieve a specific end it couldn’t be independent of ourconceptual system. Brandom’s response to this dilemma is to drop all talk ofdesire, just as he dropped all talk of sense-impressions, and to ascribe todifferent states and episodes the functions of practical efficacy and independ-ence. The independence condition is met—as it was in the case of perception—through the introduction of reliable differential response dispositions. Thedispositions that inform action are independent of our system of conceptsbecause their exercise is a causal response to the stimuli provided by ourpractical attitudes, our acknowledgment of commitments in the space ofreason. As such, bodily action itself is non-conceptual response to a concep-tually articulated commitment. This allows Brandom to avoid the practicalmyth of the given because the response dispositions by which we exit thespace of reasons, while independent, are not practically efficacious, are not theitems that specify what it would be to make true a given end. What specifiesthe state of affairs that is to be made true, and is in this sense responsible forour acting in the way that we do, is the acknowledgment of a contentfulpractical commitment in deontic scorekeeping.

The point of this discussion has been to show that Brandom is not entitled toa view in which our bodily response capacities display a two-way rational



sensitivity to our acknowledged commitments and to the states of affairs thatmakes these commitments true. We can now see why: To avoid the practicalmyth of the given Brandom must say that the reliable response dispositions thatare exercised in bodily action are independent of the realm of reason and socannot be an expression of reason. If such responses expressive of our rationality,the dual-component theory of action would collapse. Of course, that might notbe such a bad thing.

5.

We have argued that Brandom’s dual-component theory of action cannot dojustice to the rationality and sociality of bodily action. This is because the secondcomponent of his theory, the response dispositions that are causally elicited byacknowledgment of practical commitments, are outside the ambit of our sociallyconferred practical rationality. Now Brandom has an obvious rejoinder to thiscriticism. For besides having a notion of action that is elicited by ‘prior inten-tions’ through the exercise of reliable differential response dispositions, he alsohas a notion of ‘intention-in-action’ in which the ‘production of the performancemay be the acknowledgment of the practical commitment’ (Brandom 2000: 94).But if an action itself were the acknowledgement of a practical commitment, thenit would seem that the action is the direct expression of our practical rationality.And if we give a social-pragmatic construal of the reasons that inform practicalreasoning this would give Brandom the tools to say that bodily action is itselfsocial.

The problem with this argument is that while we can make sense of agentshaving in particular cases intentions-in-action (for example, when we act inten-tionally but without forethought), Brandom can’t offer a general model of actionbased on intentions-in-action because this would undermine his Kantian theoryof the rational will. Human rationality for Brandom depends on there being anintervening practical attitude between norms and our performances, for if therewere not such a mediating attitude it would not be possible for an actor to fallinto error by ‘failing to do what they are obliged by those norms to do, or doingwhat they are not entitled to do’ (Brandom 1994: 31). But if agents could not bein error they would not be rationally compelled by norms, but would, like naturalitems, simply be subject to them. Here we would have a new two-staged pictureof action in which the norms implicit in the deontic score lead directly to actionrather than to an acknowledgment of that norm—which then leads to action. Butthis new two-staged picture would undercut the fact that ‘for us, in contrast tomerely natural creatures, the assessment of the propriety of a performance is onething, and the performance itself is another’ (ibid.: 32). To save Brandom’spicture of human rationality we must in general separate practical attitudes andperformances, and in the case of action we can only do this by positing a stratumof prior-intentions, intentions that in not being directly expressed in actionrequire reliable dispositions to result in action.11

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6.

If, as we have tried to show, Brandom is not entitled to a view in which ‘reasonsreach all the way out to our performances’ what modification in his view couldwe envision that would provide for the possibility that our bodily capacity torespond to acknowledged commitments is ‘itself a rational capacity’? Ourproposal is that Brandom abandon the two-ply theory of action altogether bygiving up the independence condition. On this proposal, our response capacitieswould not be filled out by exercises of differential response dispositions at all,but by motor capacities that are themselves exercises of rationality. Instead ofseeing action as the coupling of a rational and a non-rational capacity, actionwould be the coupling of two rational capacities, one discursive, the otherhaving a different form of rational intelligibility. Here, we might see action as thecoupling, or the potential coupling, of an active rational capacity—the capacity tomake and take reasons in practical reasoning—with a passive rational capacity toact on standing habits or bodily skills.

This view of action is one where our bodies cope with the world in amostly unreflective way through the exercise of automatic sensori-motor skillsthat are adjusted to and geared into the typical projects undertaken by ourform of life. Action is the product of a ‘potential coupling’ of an active andpassive rational capacity because there are some habitual actions that copewith a situation in a way that doesn’t draw into operation our active capaci-ties to deliberate at all. This is why we call habits and bodily skills ‘passive’;they don’t require the active intervention of reason to be operative but arerather exercised automatically in response to typical situations.12 But whilepassive, habits and bodily skills nonetheless have a rational intelligibility orsignificance that is determined by the intelligibility of the projects of whichthey are a part. When this intelligibility is disrupted because our habits andbodily skills can no longer unreflectively cope with the situation into whichthey have been drawn, the active capacities for deliberation and practicalreasoning emerge. We can see the capacity for deliberation and practical rea-soning in the same way that Brandom does, as the internalization of thegeneral capacity to play the social game of giving and asking for reasons.Here we decide what we ought to do and how we ought to do it by givingreasons (even if only to ourselves) and acknowledging commitments. Actionundertaken in light of such deliberation and practical reasoning, even ifextremely minimal and at the margin of consciousness, can be called inten-tional action. But even in action that is the product of extensive deliberation,habits and bodily skills are operative.

Why is this picture of action (to which we shall come back) not attractive toBrandom? According to him it would fall prey to the practical myth of the given.However, if Brandom’s understanding of what is necessary to avoid this mythis mistaken, then perhaps the two-ply model of action that flows from thisunderstanding is not compulsory, and our pragmatic model of action could beput in its place.



As we know, for Brandom the myth of the practical given can only be avoidedby separating the conceptually articulated reasons that circulate in the space ofreasons from the non-conceptual response dispositions by which we exit thisspace. But this is not the only way to avoid the given. The sine qua non of themyth of the given is the notion that there are states (epistemological andpractical) that simply in being given are either forms of knowledge (sense-impressions) or practically efficacious states (desires), without the benefit ofprior habituation, learning and concept formation. If we stick to the practicalcase, we can avoid this conception by recognizing that the capacities that makeaction possible—i.e., the ability to reason practically and to act on bodilyhabits—are acquired capacities that are relatively plastic, i.e., are one’s that developover time. On this view, there is nothing that can be practical efficacious that isprior to a process of habituation, learning and concept formation, i.e., nothingthat can meet the independence condition by simply being given. Giveness onthis view is nullified not by taking recourse to a rationalism that posits anabsolute break between conceptually articulated reasons and bodily responses (aremnant of the mind/body distinction), but by seeing our capacities for rationalaction as acquired capacities that develop in time due to a series of overlappingprocesses. The details of this development, while of course extremely significantin their own right, are secondary for our immediate purposes (we shall comeback to this development in Section 8). What is important now is the mere factthat a developmental story can be told that avoids the myth of the given, for thisallows us to put forward our alternative model of action.

7.

This alternative model of action will not even get off the ground, however, ifone thinks that the reliable differential response dispositions discussed byBrandom just are habits or bodily skills. For on this view, habits could not besignificant or rationally intelligible in any respect. Whether one thinks this willdepend upon whether one has a deflationary or inflationary conception of habitsor bodily skills.

A deflationary view of habits sees them as dispositions to automaticallyrepeat certain types of bodily behaviors in response to certain types of cir-cumstances, a connection that is acquired through repetition. The key point fora deflationary view is the claim that the acquisition of this connection throughrepetition can be accounted for in stimulus/response terms, and that theconnection, once acquired, is not subject to assessment as correct or incorrect.Habits, unlike actions, are not governed by norms of correctness that areimplicit in their practice. Rather, they are rote responses to stimuli that admitof causal explanation.

That Brandom’s conception of reliable differential response dispositions fitsthis deflationary conception of habits is clear from the fact that it is important forhim that we share these dispositions not only with non-rational animals but even

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with non-sentient objects that respond differentially to the environment (chunksof iron). Our response dispositions ‘are characterizable in a naturalistic, physi-calistic vocabulary’ and ‘are meant to capture the capacity we genuine knowers[and actors, SL] share with artifacts and merely sentient creatures’ (Brandom2002: 350). Although for Brandom our response dispositions are acquiredthrough stimulus-response reinforcement, rather than being innate capacities asthey are for artifacts and non-rational creatures, their exercise therefore does notdraw upon capacities that our animal natures do not already possess before theiracquisition. In other words, when we become genuine knowers and actors byacquiring the ability to take or treat our responses (to stimuli or to our ownpractical attitudes) as items that have a normative pragmatic significance in thespace of reasons, this ability does not, in a downward fashion, qualitativelymodify these responses, i.e., does not transform them from mere bodily refle-xes into rationally intelligible habits. What distinguishes the differential res-ponse dispositions exercised in human action from those of non-rationalcreatures is not the qualitative nature of the dispositions themselves, but theorigin of the exercise of the disposition, either in acknowledged reasons ornatural inclination.

Of course, if habits were more than this, if they were non-deliberatedresponses that nonetheless have a type of purposiveness and rational intelligi-bility, then Brandom’s reliable response dispositions could not be construedto be habits at all. And here we come to the inflationary conception of habits.13

We take it that the best rendering of a habit is this: Habits or bodily skillsare acquired sensori-motor coordinations that are automatically exercised inresponse to certain types of circumstances. In saying that habits are automaticwe mean that their exercise is outside of the direct control of the agent. Here ourbody copes with aspects of the world in a mostly unreflective way by coordi-nating certain of its sensori-motor responses in light of the demands of thesituation. There are two important features of these responses, both emphasizedby Dewey.

First, in responding directly to the demands of the situation, habits do notjust belong to an isolated self, but essentially involve the environment in whichthey are typically expressed. As Dewey puts it, ‘[H]abits are arts. They involveskills of sensory and motor organs . . . and objective materials . . . They areinteractions of elements contributed by the make-up of an individual withelements supplied by the out-door world’ (Dewey 1988: 16). I will have more tosay about this in the next section. Second, while habits are pre-reflectiveresponses to the demands of the environment, these responses are not mererepetitions of prior behaviors. Rather, the ‘essence of habit is an acquiredpredisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts . . . Habitmeans special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standingpredilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts’ (ibid.:32). Dewey recognizes that all habit involves a certain amount of ‘mechanical’repetition. Indeed, ‘[h]abit is impossible without setting up a mechanism ofaction, physiologically engrained, which operates “spontaneously,” automati-



cally, whenever its cue is given. But mechanization is not of necessity all thereis to habit’ (ibid.: 50). Habits on an inflationary conception are more than meremechanism not because they are something ontologically other than mechanismsof action, but because through ‘practice and use’ the mechanism that informs ourhabits ‘grows more varied, more adaptable’ (ibid.: 50–1). Dewey illustrates thepoint in a long passage:

All life operates through a mechanism, and the higher the form of lifethe more complex, sure and flexible the mechanism. This fact aloneshould save us from opposing life and mechanism, thereby reducing thelatter to unintelligent automatism and the former to an aimless splurge.How delicate, prompt, sure and varied are the movements of a violinplayer or engraver! How unerringly they phrase every shade of emotionand every turn of idea! Mechanism is indispensible. If each act has to beconsciously searched for at the moment and intentionally performed,execution is painful and the product is clumsy and halting. Nonethelessthe difference between the artist and the mere technician is unmistak-able. The artist is a masterful technician. The technique or mechanism isfused with thought and feeling. The ‘mechanical’ performer permits themechanism to dictate the performance. It is absurd to say that the latterexhibits habits and the former not. We are confronted with two kinds ofhabit, intelligent and routine. (ibid.: 51)

This distinction between intelligent and routine habits is important for ourpurposes because the former type of habit is necessary to meet Brandom’s owndesideratum that in intentional action our bodily movements, to bring about acorrespondence between the claim included in our practical commitment and thestate of affairs that makes that claim true, must themselves display a two-wayrational sensitivity to both of these factors. In his response to Stout, Brandomrecognizes that our bodies cannot bring about this correspondence in a mechani-cal fashion (through the mere exercise of a reliable response disposition), and itis for this reason that he amends his two-ply view and claims there that ourbodily movements are themselves applications of concepts. In so being, thesemovements are sensitive to assessments of what is appropriate and not appro-priate given the situation, and are amenable to revision based on these assess-ments. This gives our bodily movements the flexibility and variability necessaryto bring about the relevant correspondence.

But as we argued above, Brandom is not entitled to this amended two-plyview in which our bodily movements are themselves manifestation of rationality.Rather he is only entitled to his two-ply model of action in which bodilymovement is the result of reliable dispositions to causally respond to antecedentacknowledgments of practical commitments. And this model is subject to aproblem that afflicts all Rationalist theories of action: namely, that on thisconception bodily movement is, as Dewey puts it, ‘clumsy and halting’, if notimpossible. In other words, if bodily movements need to be guided in each ofits tasks by an antecedent exercise of reason, by an antecedent intention or plan,

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then one will not be able to do justice to the fluidity of action, to the fact thatbodily movements seem to be, for the most part, integrated without theintervention of reflective consciousness.14 This is where our account comes in.Our pragmatic account claims that for an actor to make-true the claim includedin her practical commitment she must flexibly and fluidly take advantage of thepossibilities afforded by the environment, and for this her reflective conscious-ness must offload most of its tasks to automatic yet rationally intelligible bodilyhabits and skills. Here, one’s intention guides bodily action, not by leading to afurther application of concepts (as Brandom argues in his amended two-plyview), but by activating rationally intelligible sensori-motor coordinations andskills.15

Of course, for this account to be cogent our bodily habits and skills must haverational intelligibility. But do they? There are three features that make habits andbodily skills rationally intelligible: their purposiveness; their normative account-ability; and the fact that they can be indirectly ‘intervened on’. With respect tothe first feature, the important point is this: When we exercise bodily habits orskills we activate patterns of sensori-motor response the configuration of whichis organized by the project of which they are a part. In other words, the demands ofthe project one is engaged in determines the sensori-motor responses that oneproduces in response to them.

These responses are therefore purposive for completing the project of whichthey are a part. For example, if a batter (in baseball) has the habit of cocking hisleg before swinging, this sensori-motor coordination is not merely a mechanicalresponse to the situation, but a purposive response, its purpose being providedby the goal of the overall project (hitting the ball).16 It would therefore be wrongto say that the batter does not have a reason to cock his leg just because he doesso without the mediation of conscious decision. He does have a reason, namelyto successfully hit the ball.

But for reason to reach all the way to habits and bodily skills requires morethan their purposiveness, it requires that a sense of correctness and incorrectnesscan get a grip with respect to them. The particular sense of correctness andincorrectness at play here is centered on what, following Merleau-Ponty, wecould call a ‘norm of optimality’—a norm that pertains to whether our sensori-motor responses are organized in a sufficiently optimal way to cope with thesituation at hand.17 The norm is not a cognitive norm, one that governs ourconscious intentional activity, but rather one that pre-reflectively governs ourhabits and bodily skills. Here is how Dreyfus puts it:

Merleau-Ponty argues that what we might call absorbed coping does notrequire that the agent’s movements be governed by an intention inaction that represents the action’s success conditions, i.e., what the agentis trying to achieve. Rather, in absorbed coping the agent’s body is ledto move so as to reduce a sense of derivation from a satisfactory gestaltwithout the agent knowing what this satisfactory gestalt will be like inadvance of achieving it. (Dreyfus 2000: 293)18



If we put this second feature together with the first, we have a picture in whichhabits ‘are purposive without purpose’, i.e., are purposively yet non-intentionally organized around a norm that is immanent to the body. Of course,the projects that one intentionally undertakes determine, in a large amount ofcases, the ‘intentional pole’ around which the norm of optimality organizes oursensori-motor responses. As we shall see in the next section, this fact will playa major role in the explanation of the sociality of our habits and bodily skills. Butthe important point for now is this: The specification of whether our bodilyhabits and skills have coped successfully with the situation at hand is notdetermined by reason and its reflective monitoring, but by the situation itself, i.e.,through whether the action made possible by such habits and skills continues inan unimpeded fashion or not. When action is impeded, the norm of optimalityis contravened in practice, signaling to reflective consciousness that habits orbodily skills by themselves cannot cope with the situation. One must then meetthe situation with the conceptual resources that are provided by our activecapacity to deliberate and reason practically.

Brandom too, of course, has a pragmatic notion of norms operating implicitlyin our practices. This is necessary to avoid what he calls regulism, i.e., the notionthat norms only guide our performances (theoretical and practical) as explicit rulesthat are self-consciously followed. Regulism is problematic because it generates a‘regress of rules’ which can only be avoided, Brandom thinks, by holding thatexplicit rule following can only take place in a context where there is ‘a notion ofprimitive correctnesses of performance implicit in practice that precede and arepresupposed by their explicit formulation in rules and principles’ (Brandom 1994:21). In other words, to explicitly follow a rule, an agent must already have apractical mastery, a know-how, which allows them to sort correct from incorrectperformances (other’s and their own) in practice. But we can immediately see thedifference between Brandom’s Pragmatism and the one we are outlining: ForBrandom, norms are implicit in our conceptual practices of applying concepts anddrawing inferences, while the norm of optimality is one that pertains to the wayour bodily habits gear into our worldly projects. Brandom is therefore right to callhis view a rationalist Pragmatism.19 In our view, however, this misses a layer ofsignificance or rational intelligibility that pertains not to our discursive practicesbut to the practices by which our bodies cope with the world. The point is not tosay that this layer of bodily significance could replace the significance that isinstituted by the norm-governed conceptual practices that Brandom identifies, itis just to say that any satisfactory account of human action, and as we shall see,its sociality, must also countenance this type of bodily intelligibility.

Now Brandom, or any rationalist theory of action, might argue against ourview by claiming that anything that contributes to an action that is outside theimmediate control of the acting agent cannot be part of an understanding of theirrational agency and action. In response we must make a common sense distinc-tion: while bodily habits and skills operate unreflectively, they can, unlike merereflex actions or sub-personal bodily processes, be brought under rationalcontrol, at least to a degree. This should be clear for habits that have an explicitly

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purposive origin. The batter who has the habit of cocking his leg can reflect onthis habit and try to change it by inculcating new and better habits. But of coursemany of our habits are so much a part of ourselves that it is difficult to gain anyreflective distance on them. This comes out especially through a consideration ofbad habits. Take the example of someone who while driving has the habit oflooking into their rearview mirror far too often (I suffer from this particularaffliction). Because this propensity is a habit, it has what Dewey calls a propul-sive force, it actively asserts itself in the right circumstances. (Habits are ‘passive’not because they don’t assert themselves, but because they are not the productof active reasoning.) However, this propulsive force can be counteracted by myfirst coming to realize that I have the habit (either through my noticing it or bysomeone else telling me about it), and second by my undertaking different typesof behaviors. As we all know from experience, this process is difficult and willoften fail. But the fact that it is manifestly possible shows that even if we do nothave direct control over our habits and bodily skills we have an indirect capacityto, as Bill Pollard puts it, ‘intervene’ on them (Pollard 2006). This ability tointervene on habits shows that they are a part of our rational agency and mustbe included in the explanation of action.20

8.

What does all of this have to do with the sociality of action? What we want toargue is that the introduction of habits and bodily skills into our picture ofrational action allows us to locate a stratum of sociality below the level ofreasons. What we are calling for is not the abandonment of Brandom’s socialtheory of action, but its enrichment. Action is social not only because our reasonsfor acting are social, or that our bodily movements are taken to be actions byother agents in deontic scorekeeping, but also because our bodily actions areinformed by socially inculcated habits and skills. For reasons of space we canonly gesture at this further aspect of the sociality of action.

Habits might seem to be an unpromising place to locate the sociality of actionbecause on a deflationary account they are taken to be dispositions that pertainto individuals isolated from their environment. But if habits essentially involvethe environment, as the inflationary account proposes, then this worry falls bythe wayside. There are two dimensions of this involvement, a causal/geneticdimension and a normative one.21

According to the first dimension, habits and sensori-motor skills involve theenvironment because the very acquisition of these skills is a product of theinteraction of one’s body with an environment. In the human case, it is the socialenvironment that is most important for the formation and organization of ourhabits. This is the case for the simple reason that, as Dewey puts it, ‘[e]achperson is born an infant, and every infant is subject from the first breath hedraws and the first cry he utters to the attention and demands of others. Theseothers are not just persons in general with minds in general. They are beings



with habits’ (Dewey 1988: 43). In other words, children are initially exposed notto the disembodied minds of others, but to other concrete beings who themselveshave bodily habits. The attention the child receives to meet her needs, and thegrowing demands upon the child by others as they develop, are initiallyexpressed bodily, through body language, gesture, and manual activity (holding,caressing, etc.).

This fact has important ramifications for the topology of the child’s bodilyhabits. For when the child begins to develop the sensori-motor capacities thatallow them to master their own bodies and the environment, the developmentof these capacities and skills is already coded by the bodily actions and practicesundertaken by other agents towards the child. This coding does not happen byfirst learning the symbolic significance of the various doings in their surroun-dings and tailoring their bodily response to this significance, rather, the childdirectly incorporates into their habitual repertoire the antecedently existing andtaken-for-granted practices and customs undertaken by the agents with whomthe child interacts. As Dewey puts it, ‘customs persist because individuals formtheir personal habits under conditions set by prior customs’ (ibid.: 43).

The point that a child incorporates habits based on their exposure to thebodily habits, actions, and practices of others in their immediate environment isnot just a diachronic point that pertains to a developmental stage that is leftbehind by their ascension to a ‘higher stage’. For when one gains symbolicabilities by entering the space of reasons, one’s practical relation to one’s habitsand practices, i.e., one’s pre-reflective inhabitance of them, is not superseded orleft behind. But how should we account for this inhabitance?

It cannot be fully accounted for by the causal/genetic account given abovebecause this account only explains how the child comes to incorporate beha-vioral regularities into their habitual repertoire. But as we know, on the infla-tionary conception intelligent habits and bodily skills are not mere regularities(reliable differential response dispositions or some other type of S/R connec-tions). Rather, habits and bodily skills involves a type of practical sense orembodied know-how that makes them sensitive to the specifics of a situation,meaning that before reflection and representational guidance they fluidly andflexibly adjust to variable circumstances, even in cases where there is nopre-existing regularity.

On the other hand, while habits and bodily skills are not regularities they arealso not themselves rule-governed. They are instead informed by, as Bourdieuputs it, a ‘practical sense, or if your prefer, what sports players call a feel for thegame, as the practical mastery of the logic or of the immanent necessity of thegame—a mastery acquired through experience of the game, and one whichworks outside of conscious control’ (Bourdieu 1990a: 61).22 When our habits andbodily skills are exercised in accordance with a ‘feel for the game’, their exerciseis not based upon an explicit application of a rule, or even in accord with anorm that is implicit in one’s conceptual practice (as it is for Brandom). For inthe former case, one’s account would be subject to a regress of rules,23 while inthe latter case one would have only identified a norm that is internal to the space

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of reasons, and therefore not one that is able to reach all the way to bodily habitsand skills. But how then are we to account for the fact that while habits andbodily skills are not themselves rule-governed, they are still subject to a type ofnormative accountability in which social practices get a grip on them?

This question can seem mysterious but I think that we have the resources tosketch an answer. In Section 7 we made the point, introduced by Merleau-Ponty,that the pre-reflective sense of appropriateness, of correctness and incorrectness,that informs our habits and bodily skills is centered on a ‘norm of optimality’. Withrespect to the sociality of action, the key point is this: for the norm of optimalityto determine, in practice, what it is for one’s sensori-motor activity to besufficiently optimal to cope with the situation at hand, it must be sensitive not onlyto the organization of our bodies but also to what our bodies are doing. But whatour bodies are doing is not just a feature of the body and its organization, but isalso a feature of the project or practice it is involved with and its demands on thebody. So while this norm pertains to the coordination of our sensori-motor system,and so applies to the ‘mere materiality’ of our bodies, it must also necessarily gearinto the practical logic24 of the specific project or practice one is engagedin—whether that logic is instrumental (walking), social yet monological (skiing),social yet strategic (playing a game of chess), social and collective (dancing, goingon a date), or social and institutional (getting one’s drivers license).

In all of these cases there is a ‘downward organization’ of our habits andbodily skills that is determined by the logic of these practices. As Merleau-Pontyputs it: ‘Just as nature finds its way to the core of my personal life and becomesinextricably linked with it, behavioral patterns settle into that nature, beingdeposited in the form of a cultural world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 347). Thisorganization infuses them not with conceptuality but with a type of embodiedsense, a sense of how one can—without there being a rule—meet the demandsof, and be accountable to, the logic of the practice.25 Because of this when one actsintentionally there is already a non-deliberated embodied sense of the demandsof the practice that one must engage in to make-true one’s practical commitment.Intentional action is thus embedded in a stratum of pre-reflective, yet ultimatelyrationally intelligible, habits and bodily skills, which is the most primitive waythat social practices and customs are anchored in the individual.26 This anchoringof social sense in the body is what rationalist or intellectualist accounts of action,in their exclusive concern with discursively articulate reasons, overlook. Tounderstand the sociality of action we must leave behind a disembodied view ofreason, one that pertains only to what one’s mind can achieve in the space ofreasons, and see reason as also embodied in the very practices and habits bywhich we inhabit the social world.27

Steven LevineDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Massachusetts, [email protected]



NOTES

1 To say that these reasons are public is not to say that they are always formulatedin linguistically articulated claims that are ‘spoken out loud’. Brandom follows Sellars inthinking that corresponding to linguistically articulated claims are ‘inner thought epi-sodes’ (beliefs and intentions) to which a subject has a type of privileged access. However,linguistic pragmatists like Sellars and Brandom take it that an agent can only possess suchthoughts by being able to make the linguistic claims upon which they are modeled. SeeSellars’ ‘Myth of Jones’ in Sellars 1997. In this way, the content of even an inner thoughtepisode is ultimately conferred through linguistic mechanism’s that are essentially public.

2 See Stout 2010 and lecture four of McDowell forthcoming.3 This proposal is obviously inspired by McDowell’s attempt, in his thought about

perception, to show that conceptual capacities are drawn on in sensory experience, ratherthan as a response to independent sensory inputs. However, McDowell’s way of articu-lating this idea in his thinking about action is quite different from our proposal (seeMcDowell forthcoming). He thinks that the key for vindicating the thesis that conceptualcapacities are drawn upon in bodily action, rather than action being a response to the useof such capacities, is a capacious concept of intentions-in-action. We, in contrast, think thisproposal is still too intellectualistic, and put forward in its stead a notion of habit as apassive yet rationally intelligible aspect of our rational agency.

4 For Brandom, one can act intentionally but without a reason (a so-called normativereason), for example, when one acts irrationally. For our purposes, however, we can treatacting intentionally and acting for a reason as synonymous.

5 The language in this paragraph is adopted from lecture four of McDowell’sunpublished lectures on action (McDowell forthcoming).

6 See Brandom 2010a: 298 for his expression of this Wittgensteinian point.7 Of course, the community who takes an agent to be wrong about their commitments

and entitlements might itself be wrong. Brandom thinks he can handle this point becausehe rejects an I/We conception of sociality in which the norms of a community arethemselves the standard of validity for that community, and accepts an I/Thou concep-tion in which standards of validity are negotiated through the interpersonal engagementsof scorekeepers. One might question whether the dichotomy between these conceptionsof sociality is as sharp as Brandom thinks it is.

8 Brandom has an obvious rejoinder to this criticism, one that involves the notion ofintentions-in-action. We shall address this in Section 5.

9 In the first two chapters of this book, which are devoted to the Classical Pragmatists,Brandom make the claim that Dewey falls prey to the myth of the practical given.Although, according to Brandom, in his aesthetics and value theory Dewey recognizesthe distinction between desires understood on the model of itches and desires asconceptually contentful propositional attitudes (the distinction for Dewey between whatis desired and what is desirable, or what is valued and what is valuable), he ultimatelyfalls into the myth of the practical given insofar as he tries to ground his semanticson success-conditions, success being determined naturalistically by the satisfaction ofcompletely non-cognitive desires. In my view, this reading of Dewey is a disaster. Seemy review of Brandom’s book, forthcoming in the Transactions of the Charles S. PeirceSociety.

10 This conclusion could be resisted by arguing that desire guides instrumentalreasoning mechanically, i.e., in such a way that it need not gear into our system of

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concepts. But then the problem is thrown back on the question of whether the one isworking with a conception of practical reasoning at all. For Brandom, for there to begenuine practical reasoning it must be normative, i.e., a process that can go wrong andso fail to guide us correctly. If one does not accept the normativity of practical reasoningthe critique of the practical given will have no bite, but then one will also not be entitledto speak of practical reasoning. For more on this, see Korsgaard 2008.

11 It is for this reason that in all of his writings about action Brandom takes thetwo-ply picture to be the basis of his theory and the notion of intentions-in-action to bea specialized concept within the larger theory.

12 Calling habits ‘passive’ could be misleading. Habits are passive because theirexercise is automatic and not under the conscious control of reason. Their automaticexercise in response to a typical situation, however, is not passive but propulsive andinsistent.

13 For another inflationary view of habits, see Brett 1981. Our account differs formBrett’s in emphasizing more strongly the bodily aspect of habits. In this we follow the leadof Dewey and Merleau-Ponty.

14 This is one of Merleau-Ponty’s most trenchant criticisms of rationalist or intellec-tualist accounts of action. See Part 1, Chapter 3 of Merleau-Ponty 1962.

15 It should be pointed out that on a fully pragmatic account of action the directionof influence between intentions and habits goes both ways: intentions activate habits, butintentions themselves arise out of pre-standing and pre-reflective habitual tendencies andprojects. Habits are not just means to ends that are activated by our acknowledging apractical commitment, rather, habits in large part comprise the tendencies and orienta-tions of the very self who undertakes these projects in the first place. For more on this,see Joas 1996.

16 As we can see from this example, many habits are purposive not only because theyhelp us achieve a goal, but also because they have a purposive origin, meaning that theyare consciously inculcated (by ourselves or others) to help us achieve projects and tasks.

17 See Merleau-Ponty 1962: 318, and Chapter 3 of Part 2 generally.18 See also Wakefield and Dreyfus 1993. Although I find Dreyfus’s approach helpful

to combat over-intellectualized accounts of action, I would like to warn the reader notto assimilate my view to his. As comes out most clearly in his debate with McDowell,Dreyfus sees absorbed coping as completely mindless and therefore completely out-side the ambit of our rationality. When coping is expert and fluid it is ‘direct andunreflective, which [is] the same as being nonconceptual and nonminded’ (Dreyfus 2007:355). I agree with Dreyfus that habits and bodily skills are nonconceptual, but this by itselfdoes not determine whether they are nonminded. In my view, it is part of Merleau-Ponty’spoint that the involvement of habits and bodily skills with projects and practices infusesthem, not with conceptual content, but nevertheless with a type of embodied sense. SeeSection 8.

19 For Brandom’s characterization of his pragmatism as rationalist, see Brandom 2011:29–32.

20 Of course, there are some habits, certain compulsions lets say, that are even moredifficult to bring under control. We must accordingly see some habits on a continuumwith bodily reflexes, and so approaching a condition of being completely outside thepurview of our agency. But to admit this is not to admit that most habitual and skillfulbodily actions are outside the purview of our agency.

21 I thank an anonymous referee for the European Journal of Philosophy for pressing meto flesh out this distinction.



22 See also Bourdieu 1990b. One might think that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is thebest way to enter these issues generally. And indeed Bourdieu’s work is attractiveinsofar as it is deeply concerned to cash out the Heideggerian/Merleau-Pontyian themeof absorbed coping in a social idiom. But there are features of Bourdieu’s work thatmake it, overall, an inappropriate model for my project. First, it is unclear whether theconcept of habitus can be separated from the general theoretical framework in which itappears, one ultimately centered on the overly instrumental notion of symbolic capital.On this issue, see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1999. Second, Bourdieu is very skeptical thatthe practices that are reproduced through habitus are at all amenable to reflectiveengagement by agents without supplement by the techniques of objectification utilizedby the social scientist. I, in contrast, am committed to the idea that agents can, with timeand effort, reflectively ‘intervene on’ many of their habits without the help of the socialscientist.

23 For a perspicuous account of the regress of rules, see Sellars 1991. For a discussionof how the regress points in the direction of their being a pre-reflective bodily under-standing, see Taylor 1995.

24 For this concept, see Bourdieu 1990b: 80–97. For Bourdieu, the logic of a practice isits immanent sense, i.e., the sense it has for one who has mastered and is involved in thepractice. While the theorist might try to account for this mastery in terms of an agent’sknowledge of the rules that constitutively govern the practice, Boudieu thinks that thisanalysis is a product of intellectualism, i.e., the product of reading into the practicefeatures that are necessary for the theorist to explain the practice. When an agent hasmastered the logic of a practice they are not following rules, but are acting in accordancewith a phronetic sense of what the occasion requires.

25 For Merleau-Ponty, this embodied sense is neither rational in the way that itemsin the space of reasons are rational, nor natural in the way that bodily reflexes orsub-personal processes are natural. Rather it is an aspect of our existence, our being-in-the-world, which has a categorical status that stands outside of the dichotomybetween the rational and the natural, the for-itself and the in-itself. See Merleau-Ponty1962: 79–80.

26 What we have shown in this paper is how intentional action depends on encultur-ated bodily habits and skills, not how the game of giving and asking for reasons thatproduces contentful intentions emerges from such embodied habits and skills. JosephRouse undertakes this more ambitious project, which would be necessary to fullyovercome Brandom’s intellectualism, in his book How Scientific Practice Matters. There, hetries to show how the intra-linguistic moves that comprise the space of reasons are notautonomous, as Brandom thinks, but are themselves extensions of integrated ‘bodilycapacities’ (Rouse 2002: 211).

27 I would like to thank Robert Pippin, Hans Joas and all of the other members of theSAIS seminar on action theory for discussion of this paper.

REFERENCES

Bourdieu, P. (1990a), In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology, trans. M.Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press.

—— (1990b), The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.Brandom, R. (1994), Making in Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.—— (2000), Articulating Reasons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Steven Levine24


—— (2001), ‘What Do Expressions of Preference Express?’ in C. Morris and A. Ripstein(eds) Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Sociality of Action