I hate to point out that I find some aspects of Robert Brandom’s philosophy to be morally rebarbative for two reasons. First, I don’t think it follows from this that he’s a bad person. I’ve never met him, but have had the pleasure to meet many of his students and I have every reason to think that he is a good soul. Second, I think that Brandom is one of the three most important living philosophers, and that the dialectic does in fact go through him. Unfortunately though, our age of media gotchaism has infected philosophy. Just as it’s appropriate to judge a celebrity by their worst public moment, it’s somehow appropriate to judge philosophers by the worst aspects of their systems. Heidegger’s Nazism has absolutely nothing to do with the interpretations of Heidegger by the overwhelming number of American Heideggerians. But tying the Nazism to some part of his system (with more and less plausibility)* suffices in our debased celebrity culture. It’s very convenient because it gives us an excuse not to read Heidegger.** Moreover, even if, unlike Heidegger, Brandom’s rebarbative views about those who don’t speak really is implicated deeply in his philosophical achievements, this wouldn’t be a reason not to read him, any more than Cartesian vivisectionists mean we should stop reading Descartes.
Now here is a biographical prelimary. One of my daughter’s best friends has apraxia of speech. Every weekend Audrey’s friend with apraxia and her sister either come over to our house, or she goes over to their house. It’s only recently that Audrey’s friend with apraxia has started talking with her sister and Audrey when they are playing together. For a couple of years she didn’t speak, and some people with apraxia of speech never talk. In addition, I know two people who suffered severe aphasia after a stroke. Both recovered their ability to speak. But for many people, aphasia is a permanent state. Finally, people born deaf in communities with no sign language often end up being permanently non-linguistic. There is a largish literature on people in this situation who are taught a first language at later ages, examining how their difficulties tie with the lessened ability to learn a second language as you get older. But many such people never learn a language.
I hope that anyone reading this will agree that any view that denies moral worth to those with severe apraxia, aphasia, and deafness is in fact a wicked view. And, to the extent that one can separate moral and epistemological concerns, anyone who actually knows or has studied people with apraxia, aphasia, and deafness who do not have language will not deny sentience to these people. Yet Robert Brandom does both.
There is a long history of Brandom talking about all mute animals as mere automatons (nearly any time he mentions parrots) which will strike many as morally problematic for just these reasons. But perhaps that was just philosophy of mind and there would be some way he could, qua philosopher of mind, accommodate research on these disabilities. Perhaps his philosophy of mind didn’t have the expected ethical consequences? No. His discussion of pain in his recent Perspectives on Pragmatism makes it clear that those of us morally bothered by that aspect of his philosophy of mind were right to have been.
What matters for us morally, and so ultimately politically, is not in the end to be understood in terms of goals available from the inevitably reductive perspective of the naturalist: paradigmatically, the avoidance of mammalian pain. It is the capacity each of us discursive creatures has to say things that no one else has ever said, things furthermore that would never have been said if we did not say them. It is our capacity to transform the vocabularies in which we live and move and have our being, and so to create new ways of being (for creatures like us). Our moral worth is our dignity as potential contributors to the Conversation. This is what our political institutions have a duty to recognize, secure, and promote. Seen from this point of view, it is a contingent fact about us that physiological agony is such a distraction from sprightly repartee and the production of fruitful novel utterances. But it is a fact nonetheless. And for that reason, pain, and like it various sorts of social and economic deprivation, have a secondhand, but nonetheless genuine moral significance [152].
Note that this is similar to the line that some social contract theorists and Kantians take about the moral status of animals. In themselves, animals have no moral status, but if we are cruel to animals we are more likely to be cruel to humans. But there is nothing wrong in itself with cruelty to animals, which would be fine if it didn’t have the tendency of making adult humans cruel to one another. This is not an abstract problem, since the idea that cruelty to animals actually makes us cruel to one another is false, so long as the cruelty is mechanized and hid from most humans as it is in factory farms. For Brandom, pain as well as deprivation of animals or humans only has a secondary moral significance. It is not bad in itself, but bad only to the extent that it contingently contributes to actual moral harms, in this case preventing the creative exercise of language.
I’m not interested in the possible ableism of Brandom being committed to the idea that to be mute as a result of apraxia, aphasia, or deafness (plus lack of exposure to sign language) is to suffer a natural evil, indeed, the only natural evil admitted by Brandom’s metaphysics. Such a view is clearly problematic, but I want to let it pass to focus on the aspect of his view that I find much more disturbing: his commitment to the idea that causing pain and deprivation, and death for that matter, to mute people is not intrinsically evil. This is morally outrageous as well as dangerous, dangerous given not only the systematic murder of the disabled as the run-up to the Holocaust, but also the way we continue to treat disabled people decades after the Holocaust.
Of course Brandom probably does think that the mute have a secondary moral significance, but (analogous to the Kantian and social contract theorist opponent of animal and children’s rights) it can only be to the extent that mistreating them will cause those of us who can speak to be less likely to say novel things. I think that such a view would be outrageous even if its wide-spread acceptance wouldn’t lead to more cruelty to the mute. But in fact, as with factory farming, it would lead to much more cruelty. When Stalin said that killing one person is a tragedy and killing a million a statistic, part of what he meant is that people adapt to systematic, widespread, and predictable cruelty. Again, think of factory farming mistreatment of animals. In no way does this make us more cruel to other humans. On the other hand, someone who learns to be cruel to the family pet probably will move on to humans. And it is, I think, a constraint on moral theorizing that one not be forced to say that opening salvo of the Holocaust, the organized murder of the disabled, was wrong merely because it led to other people saying less novel things. Not only is it not clear that this is true, but the connection to novelty is at best a non-sequitur.
I want to stop here, because any other criticism seems to me to weaken the severity of the charge. But there are a few other things worth pointing out in this context.
First, one of the most difficult things about reading Rorty is that his catchall term “vocabulary” is confusing precisely because it elides the distinction between saying something new in the sense of imparting new information and just using new words to say the same things. This was actually intentional on Rorty’s part because he takes Quine to have deconstructed the distinction between information relevant to word meaning and collateral information involving that word.
But this is a misreading of Quine; what Quine did was undermine the way this distinction was being used to provide an account of necessity, where all necessary truths are true in virtue of meaning. Brandom, at his best, also shows how such uses of the distinction trace back to Kant and moreover undermine our ability to make sense of how we talk about new things. But Brandom also notes that in linguistic contexts, we have to mark the distinction. And many of Rorty’s and Brandom’s contexts are such. Consider the phrase “say things no one else has ever said” in the above quote. If by “things” you mean merely uttering new strings of words, yes, the awesome combinatorics of language makes it the case that people are saying new things all the time. But it’s not at all clear why this on its own is important. In fact it’s not, everyone might just be saying the same old things in new ways. How is that possibly morally relevant?
But even if by “things” you mean new strings of words with new meanings, it’s still not clear why that’s relevant. For an infinite number of “n” one can assert that there are n objects. There are always new things to say about the existence of larger numbers. But who cares? Instead, what Brandom must mean to reference is the ability to talk about new (in the non-trivial sense) and worthwhile things. He admits as much in the third to last sentence of the above quote, when he qualifies things with “new and fruitful.” But then this seems to be begging the question. What’s morally relevant is the ability not to utter sequences of words that have never been uttered before, but to use this ability to say new and fruitful things. But what makes an utterance fruitful? Brandom should say that an utterance is fruitful if it gets us closer to truth, goodness, and beauty, but he can’t then circularly define “goodness” in terms of producing novel fruitful utterances. So we must conclude that Brandom’s circle is not only morally vicious, but conceptually so as well.
Second, and related, Brandom’s discussion of moral status is a false dichotomy. He pits vulgar hedonistic utilitarianism against he and Rorty’s view that “conversation” is the only intrinsic good. If one had to pick, one should pick utilitarianism. But it’s beyond silliness to think that one has to pick one of these. One can be a moral externalist/realist and a pluralist about the kinds of goods on offer in the universe. Again, truth, beauty, and goodness are a decent place to start.
Third, we need to be very careful to separate Brandom’s quasi-existentialist (and hence quasi-Kantian) view from another form of Kantianism, one defended ably by Julian Friedland in his debate with me on my abortion post. Friedland was trying to defend the idea that pain might not be morally significant in the sense that the ability to empathize might not be a necessary part of being a virtuous moral agent. The (Parfit’s?) fictitious planet of virtuous sociopaths is brought in to motivate this view. But it is consistent with this strong form of Kantianism (I’m not sure Kant subscribed to it) that suffering pain makes one a moral patient, that pain, pleasure, and deprivation do not merely have a secondary moral status (and I know that Korsgaard has written on this, but I haven’t read it yet). In this context, the just sociopaths could reason their way into realizing that those of us who can’t speak are still moral patients and moral agents. Though of course much would need to be said on this score. But Brandom’s hyper-Kantianism can’t accommodate this.
Finally, the manner in which Brandom argues himself (and Rorty) into such a wicked view that the only intrinsic normativity concerns the goodness saying novel things is beyond the scope of this post. But let me note that taking truth, beauty, and goodness (in a sense to include pleasure and preclude deprivation and agony) to be intrinsically valuable was never actually never a living option for Brandom, for three interconnected reasons: (1) because of he and Rorty’s radical reading of Sellars’ myth of the given which prevents pain from being both causal and normative, (2) their ultimate positivistic commitment to moral internalism, and (3) Brandom’s dismissal of functionalist explanations that bootstrap beliefs and desires out of actions and pre-existing goal directing norms (not just survival and reproduction but beauty, truth, and goodness) as primary. Both (2) and (3) follow from the misreading of the myth of the given, though (3) gains plausibility from Brandom’s false dichotomy between classical pragmatist views that define belief in terms of desire and acts and his own inversion of this. Again, this neglects views such as Mark Okrent’s which have beliefs and desires simultaneously bootstrapping up out a realm of goals and acts. Contra Brandom’s take on the myth of the given, I would say that we subscribe to it not when we think something is both causal and normative, but rather when we treat things that are normative and causal as if they were merely causal. In this respect, Brandom (but not McDowell) on pain is no different from empiricists on sense data.***
[Notes:
*A certain kind of existentialist voluntarism, emphasis on the wonder working powers of the German language, the way he articulates the history of being, and his critique of technology can all be tied to some of the German Romantic strains that led to Nazism. But even this is beside the point. Existentialism is false. Sympathetic readers of Heidegger’s own essays on art and animals, and proper interpreters of the anti-Cartesian accomplishment of Being and Time’s first division, see the language stuff as in fact hostile to his own project. The history of being stuff is a noble attempt at anti-foundationalism, but it leads either to a facile relativism, or the chauvinism of the language stuff. The critique of technology is correct. But these things stand or fall completely separate from considerations of their role in Nazism. And they are all distinct from Heidegger’s anti-Cartesian accomplishment.
**Incidentally, most of the verbiage surrounding the analytic/continental split is in the service of having an excuse not to read relevant philosophy. It’s no accident that the latest bout of Heidegger controversy has cropped up precisely when the old continental core of German Idealism, Phenomenology, and (Post-)Structuralism has been weakened in favor of a kind of applied Critical Theory. Believing that Heidegger’s politics vitiate his philosophy allows you to feel no guilt about no longer teaching him.
***Note that McDowell’s critique of bald naturalism is a critique of the view that prevents us from treating things as both normative and causal and his appeal to Aristotlean training in virtue is a justification of our doing so as well. In addition to my take on the myth of the given, I’d like also to argue that McDowell is actually a moral externalist. This would be along the same lines of Greco’s argument that McDowell is actually an epistemic externalist. But that will require much more than a blog post. For McDowell though, the problem with sense data isn’t that it’s both causal and normative, but rather that once we realize that objects in our environment are both causal and normative, there is no reason to posit sense data.]
“It is our capacity to transform the vocabularies in which we live and move and have our being, and so to create new ways of being (for creatures like us)” this seems to be against the grain of Rorty’s democratizing (and in some sense institutionalizing/banalizing) of novelty pace Heidegger and Nietzsche, and his focus on reducing cruelty/suffering via Scarry, but I do think that there is a general overvaluing of language/speech in relation to behavior/expression writ large in these matters by most philosophers, part of why the post-Wittgenstein enactivists are a helpful corrective.
http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Puolakka.pdf
I agree, and thanks for the link. I read and enjoyed Shusterman’s book a few years ago and it will be fun to explore Puolakka’s take.
Thanks for an interesting post. While I would not want to deny that there are forms of ableist critique to which Brandom is vulnerable (the case of the non-linguistic communities you mention would, it seems, be especially difficult for him to overcome), I am not sure that the case of speech apraxia is a proper counterexample. The standard for Brandom is always *sapience*, which he defines as a responsiveness to reasons as reasons. In the first few pages of his Tales of the Mighty Dead, he offers a good summary account of a group of practices with which one must have a certain facility in order to count as being so responsive. And I think it is possible for one to be incapable of speech and yet to be interpretable as responsive to reasons according to those practices. For instance, it is possible for one to be incapable of speech and yet interpretable as recognizing a material incompatibility between two of some speaker’s commitments (say, if one should express disappointment upon learning of another’s broken promise).
If you’re interested in learning more, I’d be happy to send you a copy of a paper I have just written, forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophical Research, that deals with the topic of recognition according to discursive norms in Brandom’s work.
I agree with Wretzel that Brandom might have room for a non-linguistic account of sapience.
But I think the deeper problem with Brandom — though not with Rorty — lies in (1) the denigration of sentience as having intrinsic moral status and (2) the essentially disembodied conception of sapience that animates his work. One would not know from reading Brandom that asserting, denying, being committed, etc are all forms of human embodiment. One would not know that it’s part of human embodied sapience that speech acts can offend, even humiliate. Nor would one know that we can act on human bodies in such terrible ways as to destroy their ability to participate in the Conversation.
I found Jay Bernstein’s Torture and Dignity to be, among many other things, a critique of Brandom’s intellectualism. As with Kant, and to some extent also Heidegger and even Sellars, human animality does not make a constitutive difference to the account of discourse. It is, for Brandom, a mere fact of implementation.
Dear Joshua,
Wow. Fantastic! Please do send me the paper. I’ll love reading it.
I know that your paper will help me better integrate what I agree with in Brandom with other commitments that go against Brandom, but I’m a bit skeptical that I’ll end up reading Brandom himself that way because the debate between him and Mark Okrent hinges on this very issue, whether non-linguistic responsiveness could in principle be enough to attribute sapience. It starts with Okrent’s critique of Brandom’s reading of Heidegger in the essay in Tales of the Mighty Dead. Okrent’s response is at http://www.bates.edu/philosophy/files/2010/07/onlayer.pdf . And then Okrent actually sketched an account of how it’s possible in his book, Rational Animals.
For Okrent, Brandom goes wrong by taking his opponent to be committed to explaining belief content in terms of desires and acts. Note that in Articulating Resonas Brandom defends the opposite order, explaining desires in terms of beliefs and acts. This greatly compounds the difficulty in the possibility of sapience holding for the mute.
Okrent, on the other hand, takes beliefs and desires together to bootstrap out of a prior realm of acts and goals. Even sphex wasps have goals, but it makes no sense to attribute beliefs and desires to them because when you mess with their goals they just robotically try to go through the same algorithm over and over again (Heidegger noted this with bees). Birds, on the other hand, illustrate a lot of flexibility with respect to achieving their goals when you mess with the normal way they do this. In Rational Animals Okrent argues that the attribution of beliefs and desires only starts to makes sense to explain this kind of thing.
But in thinking about Brandom’s account of the quantifiers it’s always struck me that much of what he’s done is extremely helpful for attempts like Okrent. The way explicit commitment to a quantified sentence is reporting behaviorally manifest implicitly held commitments is a very plausible part of an account of how linguistic expression bootstraps out of previous behavioral commitments. And you can do this for all of the logical operators (as people like Neil Tennant and Greg Restall basically do) if you are appreciative of the natural logic inferentialist tradition. Anyhow the story gives you a recipe for how to attribute quantificational and logical thinking to creatures without the ability to explicitly talk in those ways.
So, even if at the end of the day Brandom is not moved to attribute sapience to anyone short of Hegel, I do think that your work will be extremely helpful for further connecting up his key insights into the implict/explicit distinction and (also with the help of Tenant/Restall et al) his account of logicality into the kind of broadly functionalist project of Okrent’s (as well as considering the latter’s project in terms of some of the neglected wisdom from the 19th century).
be interested in yer take on it, this reminds me of how in psychology we had shifts from Skinner style behaviorism to the cognitive “revolution”, while some of us were off on our own tangent following J.J.Gibson into environmental studies which I think is an easy enough fit with extended-minding/enactivism, Moyalle-Sharrock edited a good volume Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology that might be of interest to folks and led me to work from http://uow.academia.edu/DanielDHutto and company.
Assuming Brandom does go too far in disembodying moral worth, don’t we also have to say that there are gradations based on cognitive ability? So thence at least severely … (can we even use a word here without so-called ableism?) are lower down the scale? I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding this. And of course have published my own thiughts on it in Minds That Matter: Seven Degrees of Moral Standing, which strikes a balance between sentience and sapience. If so, we should be careful not to label (labelism?) any such thinking as wickedly prejudicial with the ableist adjective.
Naive questions from the unchurched: Isn’t Brandom basically doing meta-semantics? Why would he or anyone else think that his views in this area have any implications for morality? Meaning and right/wrong are different things; is there any reason to think that what explains the former also explains the latter? Does he take himself to be committed to any views about other normative domains — etiquette, for example? (e.g. so long as you add to the conversation over dinner, you can throw food, operate power tools at the table, etc.)
A student of mine who is working on non-verbal autistics (who I should have mentioned above) pointed me to this youtube series of Brandom’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-QlUglr0g&list=PLHKVjBSDqMB7tE2JApObXWaAmXfKJfK4X&index=1 . I haven’t watched it yet but my student reports that Brandom explicitly critiques “weak lingualism” in a way that shows that he’s committed to the problematic views I’ve attributed to him.
Again, one of the things that excites me about your work is that it might put us in a position to separate Brandom’s other achievements from this aspect of his thought.
I think that Rorty is committed to the denigration of pain because of his take on the myth of the given, where Sellars is understood to have shown that nothing can be both causal and normative. And, if Simon Blackburn is to be believed (in a sharply critical TLS article which isn’t archived on line), Rorty himself agreed with the above quote about the only moral import of pain is that it stops conversation.
But with you I’m not sure that Rorty was committed either to (what Brandom calls) strong lingualism about sapience or the normative irrelevance of pain in itself. And I agree with you that a good account of embodiment, and the role between embodiment and sapience, probably can solve both of these problems without undermining Rorty or Brandom’s substantive achievements.
I think it’s maybe equivocal with Heidegger. Early reviews of Being and Time accused him of reducing us to animals and he wrote the boredom lecture (where he talks about bees) in response. Weirdly though, admissibility of world poorness strongly suggests that world is something one can have more or less of, which lends itself to a view of sapience as not discontinuous. But you’re right that much more needs to be said than what you find in Division One of Being and Time (or anything else in Heidegger for that matter).
Going to check out Bernstein now! Thanks for reminding me of it. I found your commments on it on facebook moving and resolved to read it, but then forgot. I’m going to amazon it now!
just reading Esa Saarinen on Rorty and ‘Kindness to Babies & Other Radical Ideas’
“When concluding his analysis of Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given, Rorty makes the point to emphasize that the conclusions reached are ‘compatible with kindness to babies and animals and thus with the common moral consciousness.'”
(PMN p. 192)
Well, what Brandom says is also consistent with a duty to be kind to babies. His view would be (and could only be) that we should be kind to babies because being cruel to them would be bad for conversation. Of course if torturing them is good for conversation, then that’s what we should do.
Rorty explicitly discusses baby pain in more detail PMN. I forget exactly what he says, but I’ll dig it up this week. I only remember that I didn’t agree with it in graduate school, but don’t remember what he actually says.
He’s doing a lot more than meta-semantics in part because he motivates his meta-semantic views with pretty substantive claims about the nature of normativity and in part because he appeals to some false dichotomies that would only not be false if certain nontrivial views about normativity hold. Also, his meta-semantic views directly entail that thinking requires language.
His main meta-semantic view is that content is a function of inferential role, where “inference” is here understood entirely in terms of “theoretical” inferences (as opposed to “practical” ones) involving truth preservation of sentences in a language. On his account this immediately entails that one needs language to have intensional content at all (he calls this “strong lingualism” and endorses it). He even says that to have desires one must have linguistically articulated beliefs, because desires are a function of beliefs and acts.
He often motivates this with a false dichotomy between a thermostat, which reliably registers types of events, and genuine intentionality, which is inferential. Creatures who can’t speak are thermostats.
Another false dichotomy he sometimes appeals to is versions of pragmatism that define beliefs in terms of desires and acts versus his own inversion of this, ignoring accounts that start with acts and goals and bootstrap up both desires and beliefs.
All of these dichotomies are much more plausible if you interpret and endorse Brandom’s (and Rorty’s) Sellars, for whom the myth of the given is just a version of fallaciously deriving an ought from an is. A result of this is that nothing can be both causal and normative. So the very idea of objects in the world exerting normative pressure on us, either epistemic pressure on our beliefs or other kinds of normative pressure concerning other kinds of acts, doesn’t make any sense.
I think this take on the myth of the given narrows the gap in Brandom’s dichotomies, but that’s something I’m working out. I suspect it’s why he’s ultimately unmoved by accounts of content that bootstrap up out of goal directed behavior. The only sense he can make of genuinely normative goals is in terms of desires, and the only sense he can make of desires is in terms of desires to make it the case that some proposition is true, which, at least when described de dicto, can be argued to require possession of language.
I *don’t* think McDowell’s view shares Rorty and Brandom’s views with respect to the myth of the given. For McDowell, Brandom’s version is premise in a reductio. Following Greco, I think McDowell is actually an externalist at the end of the day, but doing so requires giving up bald naturalism. Then at the end of the day the real myth of the given is the mistake of pretending that something that is both causal and normative is merely causal. On this construal, Brandom and the empiricist that Sellars is attacking are two sides of the same coin. Brandom’s unawareness that pain is normative is a mirror image of the sense-data empiricists unawareness that sense data is.
For McDowell we don’t reject sense data because it’s both normative and causal. It’s rather that once we realize that the world is both normative and causal, sense data is superfluous. I also think that Kant’s discussion of teleology in the third critique is motivated by a similar dynamic (Hannah Ginsborg’s work is really interesting when read alongside McDowell).
Brandom sometimes writes that Kant’s account of Enlightenment freed us from the view that anything normative could have *any* source outside of us. What it is to be autonomous is just to be responsible for the things you endorse. This ties in interesting ways to his inferentialist meta-semantics. For him, it’s not separable from moral internalism.
Weirdly, much of what’s exciting about Brandom’s metasemantics is that it seems to give a clear account of how logical parts of language can be bootstrapped up out of content that is possess-able by the non-linguistic. He actually gives an account of the implicit normative behavior that is then made explicit by logical operators. If you just read this important work you’d predict just the opposite with respect to his views that sapience requires language. And this would be a good reason to adopt these aspects of his system! You wouldn’t then need the version of the myth of the given that entails that pain is normatively inert.
So weirdly, what’s neatest about his meta-semantics seems to me to actually undermine the two morally problematic aspects of his views with respect to sapience (strong lingualism) and sentience (morally irrelevant).
This post strikes me as outright sophistry. It critizes “[Brandom’s] commitment to the idea that causing pain and deprivation, and death for that matter, to mute people is not intrinsically evil.”
But that assumption is false. Brandom is committed to no such things; and your fallacy is simple one of not disguishing between actuality (energeia / kraft) and potentiality (dynamis / vermögen). True, speaking animals (since that reflects of their possession of Reason) takes on a special moral signifance. But any creature with the POTENTIAL to acquire (or re-gain) speech is granted the same rights as actual speakers; they are possible voices of Reason. Brandom is not in favour of the moral insignifiance of killing toddlers or anyone with a particular disease causing them not to able to speak. Their mere status as mere potential sapient speakers grants them all the rights of actually sapient speakers. Potentials (as we are painfully aware) need not ever be actualized, but that’s irrelevant to the dignity granted to potential speakers.
Ants and brain-dead persons, however, do not possess the appropriate potential – and they are thus of lesser moral standing. You may agree or disagree with that Kantian position, but the argument you make in this post seems in need of revision.
It’s hard to be polite when someone calls you a sophist, but I’ll try.
First, as far as I’m aware Brandom never says what you attribute to him. I think I’ve read all of his books, and taught some of them, but maybe I’m misremembering or haven’t read a paper. Please direct me to a source.
Second, your appeal to potential sits very badly with a number of things Brandom *has* said in print (Rorty talks about baby pain in PMN, I’m going to dig that up this week). When Brandom equates parrots with thermostats he never says that the difference is that the parrot is potentially able to speak and the thermostat isn’t.
Third, the overwhelming majority of ethicists take this kind of appeal to potentiality is very thin soup if not sophistic in itself. It’s the same argument that people who wish to criminalize abortion make on behalf of zygotes. I very much doubt that Robert Brandom thinks that every sperm is sacred. And, again, nothing he’s written that I’ve read suggests that he thinks animals have worth because they are potential speakers.
At some point pretty soon it will probably be true to say that your laptop computer is a potential speaker (with the right software and hardware upgrades) but it would be absurd to say that your present laptop has moral worth in light of that.
And, finally, it’s an abhorrent view anyhow. Elderly people who have dementia and no longer speak are still valuable, but they are no longer potential speakers in the sense you mention. The value of children is not due to the fact that they are potential speakers.
There’s pretty good evidence that the widespread child abuse in European schools in the 19th century was very helpful at getting kids to learn all of those classical languages. This produced the generation of scholars that, among other things, gave us modern physics and mathematics. If this were correct (and for the purpose of argument it only needs to be possibly true), then Brandom and Rorty would be committed to saying that it was justified because it helped the conversation. Thus, even if it’s relevant in the case of abortion, and even if Brandom countenances it somewhere, your Roman Catholic bit about the moral relevance of potentiality is a complete non-sequitur here because neither Rorty nor Brandom can account for the wrongness of harm that increases the conversation, as widespread child abuse in the service of learning classical languages did. For Brandom, *anyone* who manages to write a good book out of their suffering has to then to turn around and say that there was nothing wrong with their suffering since it helped the conversation. Such a consequence is both ludicrous and deeply morally troubling.
I’m *not* saying that the view you attribute to Brandom is “outright sophistry.” But, as far as I can tell, it ranks with Brandom’s own views on these matters in terms of absurdity and abhorrent moral consequences.
Brandom attributes to Rorty what I take to be a pretty self-serving basis of thought which is that “Anything else is unworthy of our dignity of as self-determining creatures”
hard to see how this jibes with Rorty’s sort of pragmatist panrelationalism but I may well be wrong.
Hi Jon… I see and appreciate your point that calling people “sophists” makes politeness or even argument somewhat pointless. Yet to my excuse what I did write was not that you were a sophist nor even that the post was sophistry. What I did write that the post *strikes* me as sophistry. And I’ll just expand briefly on that – in all politeness:
It seems to me that you picking on Brandom for no apparent reason; he is no ethicist and you should not expect him to hold or to be committed (most less entitled – to Brandom’s own vocabulary from MIE) to any fine-grained ethical position on handicaps or animals; he is no Peter Singer. Nonetheless, you attribute quite bold and quite terrible ethical positions to him. Based on what? As far I can see, based merely on the fact he that attaches great significance to language and speech. But surely, he is not alone in that attaching that significance. It is as if you wanted (this is how it *strikes* me) to say that the classic Greek definition of man as ‘zoon logon echon’ is wrong because there are recognized specimens of humanity (like your daughter’s friend) who suffers speech impairments. That would seem a childish argument against such definitions. And more-over, it has nothing to do with Brandom in specific. I hope that this explains, more politely, my reasons for speaking for sophistry.
PS: Also, I think you misunderstand the application of the potential / actual, vermögen / kraft, dynamis / energeia distinction (which any good Kantian, including Brandom, would start by citing). In your response you write: “When Brandom equates parrots with thermostats he never says that the difference is that the parrot is potentially able to speak and the thermostat isn’t.” Exactly, Brandom would NEVER write that (consequently I cannot, as you ask of me, direct you to texts where he does), since parrots are NOT even potential speakers. That is the very point of Brandom’s obsession with the parrot example: It would seem that some parrots can speak – given their abilities of pronouncing trained words – but parrots are not even potentially sapient language-users. Note, however, that in this regard parrots are unlike babies and, in fact, even much more unlike people with speech impairments who already do manifest language-requisite capabilities such as inferential reasoning, sapience, hold justified true beliefs etc (unlike babies or parrots).
1. “It seems to me that you picking on Brandom for no apparent reason; he is no ethicist and you should not expect him to hold or to be committed (most less entitled – to Brandom’s own vocabulary from MIE) to any fine-grained ethical position on handicaps or animals; he is no Peter Singer.”
Why does that make a difference? If his position implies, or even necessitates, certain ethical conclusions then the post (which I don’t know enough to judge the merits of) is justified.
2. “It is as if you wanted (this is how it *strikes* me) to say that the classic Greek definition of man as ‘zoon logon echon’ is wrong because there are recognized specimens of humanity (like your daughter’s friend) who suffers speech impairments.”
But this definition does not in itself necessarily imply that zoe who do not have logos are not moral patients.
3. What about Alex, man?
Thanks for your reply. As far as not being a professional ethicist giving one a license to being philosophically committed to rebarbative views, please see BZFGT’s response above.
In the beginning of my post I explictly said that I don’t think the view makes Brandom a bad person and I don’t think it gives us an excuse not to study his philosophy. I think he is one of the three most important living philosophers and that the dialectic goes through him. I think that projects such as those of Joshua I Wretzel, Carl Sachs, and Andrew Sepielli are incredibly important in part because their interventions with respect to contemporary pragmatism generally (and Brandom in particular) help us to figure out what in his views detach from the troubling ethical consequences.
If I were doing the lazy thing of saying that because some philosopher said something abhorrent (say, Aristotle on slaves having no soul) we should not read that philosopher, then everything you write would be justified. But I’m not saying that. If it were easy to detach what Brandom says about the inarticulate from the rest of his system, then what you write would have some justification. But in point of fact it is not at all easy. From my contributions to the discussions above, it should be reasonably clear that his account of the source of normativity in Kant, his account of the myth of the given, and his attacks on traditional pragmatism to motivate his own views are all to greater or lesser degrees tied up with his view that the only non-derived obligations stem from whether the conversation is aided.
If you don’t recognize this as a wicked view, then we really are at a case of conversation breaking down (as Rorty and Feyerabend would describe it). Again, by the view: your digital computer (which very much is a potential conversation mate) has the same moral status as your baby does. (2) If widespread child abuse ends up producing better novels and theories (as it almost surely did in 19th century education practices) then we have a moral obligation to abuse our children. (3) Parrots, dolphins, and elephants have no moral status whatsoever, other than the very debatable (almost certainly false) claim that cruelty towards them would hinder conversation. (4) We have no moral obligations towards people who are not potential speakers such as old people with advanced dementia, or severe cases of apraxia, autism, aphasia, and deafness.
One could try to gerrymander the “potential speaker” designation to exclude computers and to include everyone else that we have moral obligations to (including those humans for who are never going to, of biological necessity, speak), and then agree with Brandom’s claim. I don’t for a second think this would be independently plausible. From the few times I’ve taught social contract theory or Kantianism, my impression is that there’s an overwhelming amount of literature in ethics which supports this pessimism. As noted in the original post, the same trick has been tried to make sense, on social contract and Kantian views, of our obligations to children and animals, and it doesn’t work.
But, more importantly, the resulting view would still get wrong the sources of normativity. It’s morally important to not take pain to have only a derived moral significance. Perhaps independent of its falsehood, the pragmatic downstream of such views lead to justification of wickedness. Philosophical epicycles (such as the abuse of the potential/actual distinction in ethics to prop up the view) have a way of dropping away in the trenches. Denigration of the significance of pain is a standard racist trope employed by members of the ethnicity benefiting from the oppression of other ethnicities. The grief of a widow or agony of a lacerated back aren’t the same to those people because they are simpler [Real examples of this were famously uttered by architects of the Vietnam War and the South African mining industry, respectively]. Yes, it’s denigrating to view them as simpler, but it’s also abhorrent to take someone elses simplicity to be morally exculpating.
Finally, let me reiterate that I think the abhorrent views are detachable from much of Brandom’s philosophical achievement, but as I argued above it is not at all a simple matter to detach them. The same kind of thing holds for Heidegger and various tropes in German Romanticism (see the OP), but maybe not so much Aristotle (whose view about slave’s souls does at least to me seem to me to be an easily removable excrescence). And to the extent that they are not detachable, this is an important philosophical lesson too. Again, people like Wretzel, Sachs, and Sepielli’s engagement with pragmatism are very much pushing the dialectic along here.
But, and I’m sorry about this, I don’t think it’s helpful to just say he’s not an ethicist or to waive our hands at a distinction that’s already failed to do the same kind of work in defending other moral theories from similar problems. This being said, I do think you are on to something. One should in this context look at what sensitive Kantians such as Korsgaard have said about similar issues. This *would* be very helpful in the process of detaching Brandom’s substantive achievements from his ableism.
Assuming your reading to be sound, I think it is a very good point that Brandom, despite chastising ‘the inevitably reductive perspective of the naturalist’, has such a weirdly reductive view of what makes someone morally significant.
I preface what I say with that assumption because I’ve never been able to read much Brandom. Somewhat darkly ironically, I find him too wordy. And I wonder if that’s not a clue. This makes me think along Nietzchean lines about philosophers’ systems being unconscious autobiographies. Isn’t it funny that a person whose linguistic capacity is as strikingly hypertrophied as Brandom’s makes linguistic capacity so important?
By the way, this post and the issues raised by it made me think of this wonderful passage from Wittgenstein’s Investigations, which to me combines intellectual penetration with a kind of humaneness in a way I find very attractive:
25. It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: “they do not think, and that is why they do not talk.” But—they simply do not talk.
Yeah, you have to radically gerrymander your definition of naturalism to have it be the case that Brandom and Rorty are not naturalists. Rorty’s late period relativism is just a sop to the positivist’s putting normativity off the island of meaningfulness. We’re going to deconstruct every distinction under the sun except for the one between fact and value, and choice in a “vocabulary” is never ultimately rational for Rorty. As far as I know, Rorty never evinced much awareness of the fact that there might be a problem here, nor the manner in which statements of his relativism recapitulate the scheme-content distinction (McDowell is very good on this). Brandom is a little more self-conscious about it, for example, when he compares moral externalists (those who believe in objective moral reasons or norms) to pre-Enlightenment religious fanatics. In any case, surely the denigration of objective normativity is what is most philosophically significant about naturalism?
I didn’t used to get this, not in for Rorty, who wrote so deeply and movingly about moral injury, and not in Brandom, who in every other respect (beside the return of teleology) is one of the best living interpreters of the significance of post-Kantian philosophy. I assumed that the disciplinary pressures to be naturalist in the late positivist period where Rorty came up, and which still informed Brandom’s philosophical infancy, must just have just been overwhelming.
But I’ve recently had some time to reflect on the disciplinary response of Alvin Plantinga, Jerry Fodor, and Thomas Nagel when they criticized evolutionary theory. If these philosophers wrote about anything else lots of B listers and C listers like me would have spent loads of time interpreting them with the utmost charity,* including reformulating the arguments in the best possible way. And the critics would follow the principle of charity and respond to the reformulated versions. This would not at all be difficult with Plantinga at least (I haven’t read Nagel’s book yet), since his type of self-reflexive argument against scientific accounts of intentional creatures such as us has a rich history. Recognizable varieties of it have been made by Schelling, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, C.S. Lewis, and John McDowell. I don’t know if anyone’s noted this except me at various times on blogs. The response instead (included by one prominent Nietzschean!) has largely been to treat Plantinga like a force of darkness that must be defeated. It’s embarrassing. As if reading Plantinga uncharitably were the equivalent of defending Galileo from Cardinal Bellarmine. . .
I did find some of the prose in Making it Explicit to be hard-going. I don’t think it’s that I’ve just been acclimatized, but I do find his prose from Articulating Reasons onwards to be much more easy-going. He’s capable of genuine humor too.
I love the Wittgenstein quote for exactly the reasons you give.
[*It’s probably not clear from the above post that I actually do spend a fair amount of time on Brandom. Since Carl Sachs’ comment above, I’ve started reading Bernstein’s book on torture now and beginning to get a good appreciation for the aspects of Brandom’s work (in particular, his reading of Hegel on the constitutive nature of recognition for creatures like us) that are extremely helpful for ethics. More broadly, I think both that his philosophy of logic is basically right and that his meaning use diagrams should be understood as the best thing to happen to critical theory since the Frankfurt School.]
“his meaning use diagrams should be understood as the best thing to happen to critical theory since the Frankfurt School.”
That’s one heck of a claim! I’d love to hear your elucidation of that when you have time!
A more general point: most Sellarsians think of the Myth of the Given as an argument for semantic holism. I think that’s a mistake, maybe not an important one, but a mistake nevertheless.
To see that the Given is a myth, we first have to appreciate semantic holism. Whatever the arguments are for semantic holism — either strong inferentialism with Brandom or weak inferentialism with Hegel and McDowell — that has to be in place first. Only then do we get an argument for the claim that the Given is a Myth. Put more succinctly, the critique of the Given is an argument from moderate semantic holism to epistemic anti-foundationalism.
(I’m open to correction on this, but that’s how I see the overall shape of the argument.)
This means that neither intuited logical principles nor the ‘testimony’ of the senses can be immune to revision, once they’ve entered into the space of giving and asking for reasons.
Jon said above that the rejection of the Given means that nothing can be both causal and normative. This is how Rorty puts it in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and I’m not sure it’s the best way of seeing what Sellars was doing — although Rorty is the key mediation from Sellars to both Brandom and McDowell.
Sellars, for his part, certainly did have a theory of non-conceptual, non-intentional sense-impressions as causally constraining our conceptual, intentional responses to objects. Sellars, like Brandom, denies that intentionality is a relation between mind and world. Rather, they think of intentionality as ‘internal’ to the discursive community as a whole. McDowell’s rejoinder is that we don’t need non-conceptual sense-impressions in our theory of experience if intentionality is a relation between mind and world. The passive actualization of conceptual capacities (intentionality) in sensory consciousness in response to facts is, on McDowell’s, all the constraint that we need.
McDowell is certainly friendlier to animals than Brandom is. I’ve published a bit on that, where I tried to pry open room for a “logical space of motives” as distinct from “the space of reasons” and “the realm of causes”. I got the idea from Mark Wrathall’s work on Merleau-Ponty, and it’s gotten some uptake in the subsequent literature.
I would need to think about how similar that is Okrent’s work on goal-oriented behavior. I’ve been treating them as equivalent but that might be a mistake on my part.
One very big issue I’m been wrestling with is whether teleology a la Okrent or the space of motives a la Wrathall is itself a kind of intentionality. I’ve actually defended both the positive and negative claims in print, so at this point I have no idea what I should think. In my most recent work I’ve tried distinguishing between “sentient intentionality” and “sapient intentionality”. But I have no idea if that will work.
Wow this stuff sounds great.
Yeah, Brandom often present the myth of the give as an argument for semantic holism. Once we appreciate that nothing can be both causal and normative we see give up most appeals to representation and replace that with inference. And then he argues that inference cannot be practical, which then justifies all of the awful things he says about parrots (and by implication non-talking humans).
With Greco, I do think that at the end of the day McDowell actually is an externalist. Then, at best, the Rorty/Brandom version of the myth of the given works as part of a reductio for McDowell in Mind and World. I think this is consistent with your reading of the three thinkers.
One of the things that’s really nice about your take on Sellars is that it motivates what’s important in Brandom without necessitating what’s problematic. Semantic holism and epistemic non-foundationalism does support some form of inferentialism. But, this dialectic doesn’t support the Cartesian disconnect between talkers and everyone else.
I’m perusing your phil papers page (https://philpapers.org/profile/36193) and see the articles you’re talking about. Will be very hyped to read them and bug you about them. I hope that I get a chance to teach your work in the next few years (maybe next Spring if I’m lucky). I think these are really important issues and that you’re taking the right path.
I wrote review articles of Between Saying and Doing and Reason in Philosophy for Philosophical Books and The Journal of Value Inquiry (respectively). In the first I used Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals as an example of Brandom’s Meaning-Use-Diagrams. I think it shows how he provides a very good model of at least what the traditional critical theory triumvirate were up to. In the second I went after him about the parrot stuff. I just reread it, and it is (as is unfortunately my wont) is a little over the top. It’s very hard to keep your cool when a philosopher you love is so strongly committed to views that strike you as legitimating moral injury. And Brandom’s dismissal of sentience and non-linguistic sapience is much more central to what he’s doing than anti-semitism is to Frege, or even Heidegger.
Anyhow, I’ll e-mail you copies of both reviews in a few minutes.
I can’t speak to Brandom.
However, Rorty never cared about truth, beauty and goodness. For him, they are the worst place to start; but you know that.
Further, he never says that “conversation” is the only intrinsic good.
He does not even buy into the notion of intrinsic good. He does say that calling something true is to call that series of grunts and pencil scratches “a metaphorical pat on the back” for providing descriptions of things that have helped us get what we want in accordance with our values and desires.
Thinking ahead, what I will say is that those who are physically unable to speak or express themselves in language would not directly contribute to discussions of our values and desires for Rorty. But, those with a capacity for empathy can imagine what it would be like to be unable to express themselves to others through language and would provide spaces and opportunities to construct an idealized society around that reality.
But in another way, those unable to express themselves in language contribute to being, in the Heideggerian sense.
Rorty would not morally discredit a human being on the basis of any ableism.
Please direct me if I am incorrect.