Abstract
In his Locke Lectures Brandom proposes to extend what he calls the project of analysis to encompass various relationships between meaning and use. As the traditional project of analysis sought to clarify various logical relations between vocabularies so Brandom’s extended project seeks to clarify various pragmatically mediated semantic relations between vocabularies. The point of the exercise in both cases is to achieve what Brandom thinks of as algebraic understanding. Because the pragmatist critique of the traditional project of analysis was precisely to deny that such understanding is appropriate to the case of natural language, the very idea of an analytic pragmatism is called into question by that critique. My aim is to clarify the prospects for Brandom’s project, or at least something in the vicinity of that project, through a comparison of it with what I will suggest we can think of as Kant’s analytic pragmatism as developed by Peirce.
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Notes
Published, with an afterword, as (Brandom 2008).
See my (Macbeth 2004).
I owe this observation to Kenneth Manders. See his “Euclid or Descartes?” (unpublished).
Henri Poincaré, Preface to his Oeuvre de Laguerre, vol. I, quoted in Manders, “Euclid or Descartes?” (unpublished).
This is why Descartes thinks that there can be no vacuum: “The impossibility of a vacuum, in the philosophical sense of that in which there is no substance whatsoever, is clear from the fact that there is no difference between the extension of a space, or internal place, and the extension of a body. For a body’s being extended in length, breadth and depth in itself warrants the conclusion that it is a substance, since it is a complete contradiction that a particular extension should belong to nothing; and the same conclusion must be drawn with respect to a space that is supposed to be a vacuum, namely that since there is extension in it, there must necessarily be substance in it as well” (AT VIII A 49; CSM I 229−230).
Of course it is not strictly logical in the Scholastic sense of logic, but it is, Descartes thinks, strictly logical in the true sense of logic, in the kind of logic that provides the rules that govern the direction of the mind, “which teaches us to direct our reason with a view to discovering the truths of which we are ignorant” (AT IX B 14; CSM I 186). Both Locke and Leibniz similarly held that by logic alone (as they understood logic) one might extend one’s knowledge.
Thus Kant, unlike Descartes, limits what he calls general logic to what is, as we would say, formally necessary. It is, he thinks, psychologistic to include among purely logical relations those that are necessary but not logically necessary. As I argue below, necessary but not logically necessary relations are to be understood by appeal to the practices and activities of the special sciences, mathematics and the natural sciences. The transcendental aesthetic and transcendental logic serve to set out the necessary conditions of such practices and activities.
See Kant’s remarks in “On a discovery whereby any new critique of pure reason is to be made superfluous by an older one” (AK 8:222).
As characterized by Brandom, pragmatism is “a view inspired by the insights of the later Wittgenstein, which situates concern with the meanings of expressions in the broader context of concern with proprieties governing their use” (Brandom 2008, p. xii). This conception of pragmatism can seem quite disjoint from the conception just outlined, according to which pragmatism begins with the rejection of any Given, indubitable foundation for knowledge. In fact, as we will see, Brandom’s concern with the use of expressions is motivated by the rejection of any Given that would stop the regress of interpretations of explicitly stated rules that Brandom finds in Wittgenstein. All varieties of pragmatism begin with the thought that, as Sellars puts it, the Given is a myth. They are distinguished, we will see, by what they take to follow from that thought.
That Kant’s philosophy is systematic and rigorous is obvious enough. That it is theoretical is indicated, on the one hand, by the familiar contrast Kant draws between the practice of mathematics and that of philosophy, and on the other, by the fact that he thinks that the philosopher must follow the practice of the physicist rather than the mathematician. As is made clear in the B Preface, the philosopher, like the natural scientist, puts forth hypotheses and then tests them. The Critique itself is such a test, and a very successful one Kant thinks. But he nonetheless cautions us in the Method that “in its transcendental efforts . . . reason cannot look ahead so confidently [as in mathematics it can], as if the path on which it has traveled leads quite directly to the goal, and it must not count so boldly on the premises that ground it [as mathematics can] as if it were unnecessary for it frequently to look back and consider whether there might not be errors in the progress of its inferences to be discovered that were overlooked in its principles and that make it necessary either to determine them further or else to alter them entirely” (A735/B763−A736/B764). As we will see in more detail below, natural science, unlike mathematics on Kant’s view, is constitutively self-correcting, and hence philosophy is as well.
The forms of judgment falling under the titles of quantity and quality are preconditions of all science, mathematics as much as physics; only those under the title of relation (and modality, but these do not concern the content of judgment) are peculiar to the practice of the natural, empirical sciences.
This is not to say that Brandom’s account leaves no room for processes of revision and self-correction. Although not in Between Saying and Doing, such processes are explicitly discussed in some of Brandom’s earlier work, for instance, in (Brandom 2000), Chapter One. The point is that such processes are not central for Brandom, whereas they are for Peirce. For Peirce, as for Kant, the key to understanding lies in the dynamic, organic unfolding of knowledge through the inherently self-correcting processes of inquiry; for Brandom it lies in constructions.
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Macbeth, D. Varieties of Analytic Pragmatism. Philosophia 40, 27–39 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9237-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9237-x