Robert Brandom

Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel's Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms

This paper could equally well have been titled ‘Some Idealist Themes in Hegel’s Pragmatism’. Both idealism and pragmatism are capacious concepts, encompassing many distinguishable theses. I will focus on one pragmatist thesis and one idealist thesis (though we will come within sight of some others). The pragmatist thesis (what I will call ‘the semantic pragmatist thesis’) is that the use of concepts determines their content, that is, that concepts can have no content apart from that conferred on them by their use. The idealist thesis is that the structure and unity of the concept is the same as the structure and unity of the self. The semantic pragmatist thesis is a commonplace of our Wittgensteinean philosophical world. The idealist thesis is, to say the least, not. I don’t believe there is any serious contemporary semantic thinker who is pursuing the thought that concepts might best be understood by modelling them on selves. Indeed, from the point of view of contemporary semantics it is hard to know even what one could mean by such a thought: what relatively unproblematic features of selves are supposed to illuminate what relatively problematic features of concepts? Why should we think that understanding something about, say, personal identity would help us understand issues concerning the identity and individuation of concepts? From a contemporary point of view, the idealist semantic thesis is bound to appear initially as something between unpromising and crazy. My interpretive claim here will be that the idealist thesis is Hegel’s way of making the pragmatist thesis workable, in the context of several other commitments and insights. My philosophical claim here will be that we actually have a lot to learn from this strategy about contemporary semantic issues that we by no means see our way to the bottom of otherwise. In the space of this essay, I cannot properly justify the first claim textually, nor the second argumentatively. I will confine myself of necessity to sketching the outlines and motivations for the complex, sophisticated, and interesting view on the topic I find Hegel putting forward.

The structure of desire and recognition: Self-consciousness and self-constitution

This article reconstructs Hegel’s notion of experience and self-consciousness. It is argued that at the center of Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness is the notion that experience is shaped by identification and sacrifice. Experience is the process of self-constitution and self-transformation of a self-conscious being that risks its own being. The transition from desire to recognition is explicated as a transition from the tripartite structure of want and fulfillment of biological desire to a socially structured recognition that is achieved only in reciprocal recognition, or reflexive recognition. At the center of the Hegelian notion of selfhood is thus the realization that selves are the locus of accountatibility. To be a self, it is concluded, is to be the subject of normative statuses that refer to commitments; it means to be able to take a normative stand on things, to commit oneself and undertake responsibilities.

Uptake and distribution of halothane in infants: in vivo measurements and computer simulations.

We measured uptake of halothane (the fraction of halothane in expired gas divided by the fraction of halothane in inspired gas, FE/FI) with a mass spectrometer over time in 7 infants less than 3 months of age. FE/FI for halothane in these infants increased more rapidly than has been described in adults by others. In addition, we developed a mathematical model for halothane uptake and distribution that incorporates age-dependent anatomic and physiologic parameters (alveolar ventilation, functional residual capacity, cardiac output, brain volume, etc). The model closely predicts FE/FI for halothane measured in the infants. At 5 min observed FEI FI was 0.67, at 15 min observed FE/FI was 0.80, while the predicted FE/FI values were 0.65 and 0.82, respectively. The model predicts that the myocardial and brain halothane concentrations will increase more rapidly in the infant than in the adult. Achievement of high myocardial halothane concentrations early in the anesthetic induction may cause the hypotension and bradycardia commonly seen in infants. Sensitivity of the infant myocardium to halothane would further exacerbate the effect of more rapid myocardial uptake.

Naturalism without representationalism

1. The relevance of science to philosophy What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science, and that philosophy properly defers to science, where the concerns of the two disciplines coincide. Naturalism as spare as this is by no means platitudinous. However, most opposition to naturalism in contemporary philosophy is not opposition to naturalism in this basic sense, but to a more specific view of the relevance of science to philosophy. Similarly on the pro-naturalistic side. What most self-styled naturalists have in mind is the more specific view. As a result, I think, both sides of the contemporary debate pay insufficient attention to a different kind of philosophical naturalism — a different view of the impact of science on philosophy. This different view is certainly not new — it has been with us at least since Hume — but nor is it prominent in many contemporary debates. In this paper I try to do something to remedy this deficit. I begin by making good the claim that the position commonly called naturalism is not a necessary corollary of naturalism in the basic sense outlined above. There are two very different ways of taking science to be relevant to philosophy. And contrary, perhaps, to first appearances, the major implications of these two views for philosophy arise from a common starting point. There is a single kind of core problem, to which the two kinds of naturalism recommend very different sorts of answer.

From a critique of cognitive internalism to a conception of objective spirit: reflections on Descombes' Anthropological Holism

Despite two hundred years of counter-Cartesian agitation, we are still gripped by a picture of cognition as the traversing of a boundary that separates our thought from what it is about. On the one hand, beliefs are all there within the mind. They are what they are, and can be known to be what they are, independently of how things actually are in the world outside that mind. They are in this sense essentially inner states. On the other hand, they are also essentiallycognitivestates. They are about, or at least purport to be about, the world without the mind – a world that is what it is independently of how it is thought to be. As Descartes has taught us to say, they are representations; the divide between thought and thing is that between a kind of representing and what it represents. The puzzle built into this image is to understand how what is wholly within the mind can so much as purport to represent, refer to, or be about what is wholly without it. One can move beyond the details of Descartes’ problematic in many ways without making this question less urgent. For instance, the problem is not obviated by moving beyond the concern with certainty, regarding either the subject’s supposedly incorrigible, privileged access to the contents of thought or the grip those contents have on what they are about. As long as thoughts are still conceived as states that are at once inner and representational, and so as mediating between subject and object by somehow incorporating at least the mind’s aspiration to cognitive access to the world, Cartesianism has not been

Points of View and Practical Reasoning

Problems of practical reasoning often arise as the result of a clash between two different points of view. What do we mean when we say that while from the point of view of prudence there is no reason to rescue ones drowning enemy, from the point of view of morality there is reason to do so? In this essay we examine how the idiom of points of view arises in practical discourse, and offer a clarification of it. We will be particularly concerned with a common argument for assigning a privileged status to the moral point of view, an argument which can be seen to be fallacious once certain features of judgments made from a point of view are clearly discerned. A familiar dissection of practical deliberation distinguishes between prima facie or presumptive reasons for action, and reasons on balance or all things considered. The leading idea of the two-stage explanatory strategy to which these two notions of reason correspond is the following. During the first stage of analysis each of the considerations making

When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Gray: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment

Classical American pragmatism can be viewed as a minor, parochial philosophical movement that was theoretically derivative and practically and politically inconsequential. From this point of view—roughly that of Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger (Mandarins speaking for two quite different philosophical cultures)—it is an American echo, in the last part of the nineteenth century, of the British utilitarianism of the first part. What is echoed is a crass shopkeeper’s sensibility that sees everything through the reductive lenses of comparative profit and loss. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill had sought a secular basis for moral, political, and social theory in the bluff bourgeois bookkeeping habits of the competitive egoist, for whom the form of a reason for action is an answer to the question ‘‘What’s in it for me?’’ William James and John Dewey then show up as adopting this conception of practical reason and extending it to the theoretical sphere of epistemology, semantics, and the philosophy of mind. Rationality in general appears as in-

Adequacy and the Individuation of Ideas In Spinoza's Ethics

IN THIS PAPER* I will argue that Spinozas theory of knowledge is best understood as based on a reduction of intentional relations to causal relations. It follows from two of Spinozas basic theses that some detailed account of intentionality is necessary to his project: that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of extended things, and that universal causal determinism governs the relations of extended things. We shall see that the concept of adequate ideas on which Spinoza bases his theory of knowledge requires intentional notions such as that some mind has an idea of (or representing) some thing. Spinoza must accordingly give an account of such relations which allow them to be translated into assertions of necessary causal relations between extended things. I explicate this reduction of intentionality using two guiding ideas--a novel interpretation of the individuation of extended modes (carried over to the attribute of thought by the psycho-physical parallelism) and an expanded version of the definition of the adequacy of ideas given by Radnor. 1 Providing such a framework enables me to interpret coherently the conatus (Spinozas mysterious individuating principle), the three levels of knowledge, and the relation between this ontological principle of individuation and the epistemological notion of the adequacy of ideas. Elaborating this relation culminates, in the final section, in an explication of Spinozas doctrine of intuitive self-consciousness.

Reasoning and Representing

One useful way of dividing up the broadly cognitive capacities that constitute our mindedness is to distinguish between our sentience and our sapience. Sentience is what we share with nonverbal animals such as cats—the capacity to be aware in the sense of being awake. Sentience, which so far as our understanding yet reaches is an exclusively biological phenomenon, is in tum to be distinguished from the mere reliable differential responsiveness we sentients share with artifacts such as thermostats and landmines. Sapience, on the other hand, concerns understanding or intelligence, rather than irritability or arousal. One is treating something as sapient insofar as one explains its behavior by attributing to it intentional states such as belief and desire as constituting reasons for that behavior. Sapients act as though reasons matter to them. They are rational agents in the sense that their behavior can be made intelligible, at least sometimes, by attributing to them the capacity to make practical inferences concerning how to get what they want, and theoretical inferences concerning what follows from what.

From German Idealism to American Pragmatism – and Back

The classical pragmatist versions of naturalism and empiricism fit together much better than the traditional and logical empiricist versions that preceded and succeeded them. Far from being in tension, they complement and mutually support one another. Both the world and our knowledge of it are construed on a single model: as mutable, contingent products of statistical selectional-adaptational processes that allow order to pop to the surface and float in a sea of random variability. Both nature and experience are to be understood in terms of the processes by which relatively stable constellations of habits arise and sustain themselves through their interactions with an environment that includes a population of competing habits.