James Swindal

Can a discursive pragmatism guarantee objectivity? : Habermas and brandom on the correctness of norms

Robert Brandom and Jürgen Habermas both agree that all theoretical and practical determinations are normative affairs. But what grants this normative order the power to be objective? While Brandom assumes that ever new appeals to reliable perceptual judgments and inferentialist determinations eventuate objectivity, Habermas thinks that such an objectivistic presumption fails to sustain a thoroughgoing critique of norms. He insists that Brandom’s model of the determination of norms cannot transcend the limits of the given social community the actors share. Habermas thus delimits an additional intersubjective space, internal to the structure of speech, by which discursive actors can distance themselves from the limits of a de facto system of norms and construct norms that have a universal extension. While pointing out that in a more recent work Brandom in fact has made a stronger case for objectivity, I explore a model that is distinct from each of their approaches: Davidson’s. Davidson holds onto a causal story about rationality, while appealing to an objectivity that requires neither inferentialism nor a trans-subjective discursive space. Davidson is more sparing: he requires as the basis of the rational only the existence of another interpreter and an assumption about the basic veridicality of one’s beliefs about the world. This weak naturalist move, I conclude, furnishes an adequate answer to the objectivity problem while relying upon fewer problematic assumptions about what constitutes rationality.

Critical Theory, Negative Theology, and Transcendence

The members of the Frankfurt school, though influenced by Marx, are not as hostile as Marx was towards religion. They do not necessarily advocate religious belief or practice, yet they are interested in analyzing these items as an element of culture from an historical and sociological position. Their own orientations, however, are informed by their Jewish backgrounds, and tend towards an idiosyncratic interpretation of Messianism and the utter historical unrealizability of the utopian ideals toward which it aspires.

A Material Explanation of Agency

The definition of action adopted in this study stipulates that actions are intentional bodily movements, understood as exertions. The last chapter indicated that, due to the intrinsic antinomy of action, action explanation can be accounted for by neither a normative nor an expressive model of explanation, due to their insufficient reference to the material and modal constraints on action. This chapter will explore how an existential analysis can account for at least one material constraint on action: the conditions that physical movement imposes on action. The next chapter will consider the modal constraint.

A History of Action Theory

Several basic questions confront anyone attempting to do a comprehensive study of action. One is exactly what is a human action — as opposed to divine, angelic, animal, plant, or even mechanical or unconscious action. What thus distinguishes it from mere behavior, on the one hand, and simply habit or disposition, on the other? Can we reflexively furnish a comprehensive and complete set of criteria for it?

Agency and Existence

Let us first recapitulate the account developed so far. A human action is analyzable both as an originary causal act of an agent for a desired end via means describable in physical terms, and thus as mediated by a bodily exertion. Actions that are intentional refrainings from movement also involve bodily exertions either not to act so as to maintain a state of affairs or not to interfere with a change of state taking place. As a bodily exertion, an action is subject to multiple descriptions, linked to the causal effects of the action, of which only one is attributable to the agent’s end. The exertion need not be in fact visible to an external observer, but it is in principle observable. Two elicited acts are involved in an action: the desire of a possible but currently non-existent end and the choosing the means to that end based on generalized probabilities (beliefs) about their efficacy. The agent cause, which is the bringing about of the change in the thing linked to the means, can be conditioned but in fact cannot be caused, by the elicited acts. They are necessary but not sufficient for it. They constitute the double existentiality of all action.

Introduction: Action, Thought, Pragmatism

Homer’s Odysseus was a true hero, or so it seems. Tracking his various adventures, one is struck by the craftiness of this mortal able to outwit and control nature at almost every turn. In the Odyssey, our hero struggles with the wide and unstable expanse of the sea in his journey back from Troy to his native Ithaca. The man who is “never at a loss” employs his cleverness to neutralize any foe he encounters, whether Circe, the Cyclops, or Scylla and Charybdis.1 But, curiously, never in all of his sea faring adventures do we hear of Odysseus engaging in what we would consider a rational analysis of his actions: we never hear him weighing in advance his courses of action by a consideration of the morality or even of the advantages and disadvantages of them.2 His singular purpose is to return to Ithaca.3 When he meets the blind seer Tiresias in Hades — a visit demanded by Circe — Odysseus is told that he will indeed return safely to Ithaca and successfully avenge the suitors of his wife. His resignation is clear and terse: “Oh, Tiresias, surely the gods have spun this out as fate.”4 He cannot but obey the indifferent and capricious gods who control his destiny.5

The Explanation of Action

Having stipulated a working definition of an action — actions are existential unities reconstructable as bodily movements caused by an agent in light of an intended end — we can now examine how actions are explained. The definition provides criteria on the basis of which an action can be picked out; the explanation gives the conditions on the basis of which one can say why the action happened.1 Some philosophers speak of the justification of actions, by which actions are understood as moral. But this is beyond the scope of this study. Here we shall be concerned only with the explanation, understood as that by which actions are comprehensible.

Methodology: Reconstructive Dialectics

A proper philosophical analysis provides a complete and consistent systematization of concepts for the description and explanation of things (objects) and their modifications over time. The concepts can be logical, epistemological, metaphysical, ontological, ethical, or even political; the things can be persons, collectivities, physical objects, mental objects, or even transcendent objects.1 My suggestion will be that the resolution of some of the quandaries about action theory can be addressed by a dialectical analysis how action concepts relate to means and ends. A reconstructive dialectics explicates the concepts involved in the actions. Such an approach can resolve some of the epistemic and normative inconsistencies manifest in some of the problems raised in the last chapter about neo-pragmatic action theory.

Neo-Pragmatism and its Critics

A basic idea of pragmatism can be formulated as the view that it is action, rather than consciousness, that is the vehicle of thought.1 Moreover, pragmatists link actions to inventive self-development and creative problem solving. In the modern period, we find this inchoate idea emerging both in Bacon’s conjoining of the ideas of knowledge and power and in Descartes’s somewhat ambivalent suggestion that results are the ultimate test of a theory’s truth. By the late nineteenth century these ideas inspired the development of a series of theories of inquiry and reason that began with Peirce, and continued through James to Dewey and Mead. But pragmatism has never enjoyed a singular canonical characterization. Arthur Lovejoy, in fact, outlines no fewer than 13 varieties of pragmatism.2 Under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, contemporary forms of pragmatism shifted into the neo-pragmatic variants we find in Quine, Sellars, Putnam, Rorty, Apel, Habermas, Brandom, and perhaps Davidson. Goodman, Kuhn, and Toulmin could probably be added to the list.

Comments on Amy Allen's `Systematically distorted subjectivity?'

I, for one, certainly welcome any renewed interest in systematically distorted realities, whether that of communication or subjectivity. It has been puzzling also to me as to why Habermas dropped references to it in his later works, concentrating instead on an analysis of ‘individuation through socialization’ and its role in guiding a model of rational autonomy. It was presumably Luhmann who prompted Habermas to consider such a systemic view of realities, even that of distortion, in the first place. The prima facie problem of any systems analysis, though, is how it is possible that a distortion can be systemic at all, rather than precisely that which cannot be systematized. If, however, distortions can be systematized, it would ipso facto seem that they could be better understood and remedied.