Abstract
In Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, Robert B. Brandom puts forward a general method of formally representing relations between meaning and use (between vocabularies and practices-or-abilities) and shows how discursive intentionality can be understood as a pragmatically mediated semantic relation. In this context, the activity that pragmatically mediates the semantic relations characteristic of discursive intentionality is specified as a practice of discursive updating—a practice of rectifying commitments and removing incompatibilities. The aim of the paper is to take a closer look at the practice of discursive updating and to show that the role of inconsistencies and disagreements in discursive practice can only be fully understood if the interactional dimension of updating processes is taken into account—i.e. if one looks at the explicitly social, interactional role of discursive updating in cases of disagreements between different subjects.
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Notes
Although Brandom doesn’t spell out this claim in Between Saying and Doing, he discusses the parallels and differences between cases in which an individual subject has undertaken incompatible commitments and cases in which there is a disagreement between two different subjects in his reply to Sebastian Rödl’s comments on Lecture 6 during the 2007 presentation of the Locke Lectures (which were subsequently published under the title Between Saying and Doing in 2008) in Prague, which is available on video. In this context, Brandom points out: “His [Sebastian Rödl’s] argument turns on the observation that if he says ‘The ball is red’, and I say ‘The ball is green’, there is something wrong. We’re not just okay normatively. Maybe we’re better off than if I say ‘The ball is red’ and ‘The ball is green’, but it doesn’t mean that we are off the hook just because it’s the two of us. […] Now again, if I said both those things I’d be contradicting myself and I’d be in real trouble; and I acknowledge that there is still some problem when he and I disagree. But it’s a different problem. And what defines the different subjects is the difference between the normative pickle that I’m in if I contradict myself and the normative pickle that we’re in if we contradict each other. So all I need to claim it seems to me is that there is a normatively distinctive wrongness that is sufficient to distinguish the subjects. Now, it’s a basic Hegelian claim that self-conscious individual subjects and their communities are simultaneously synthesized by reciprocal recognition. And a consequence of that is that in the end you can’t understand the two sorts of normative wrongness, the kind distinctive of the individual subject, the sense in which I repel incompatible commitments apart from the sense in which we repel incompatible commitments and acknowledge an obligation to sort things out ourselves. Those are two sides of one coin […]”
(see http://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/multimedia/locke-6.mov). This is a quote from a longer passage in which Brandom discusses the case of a disagreement between two different subjects.
As Rebecca Kukla und Mark Lance (2009) point out: “[…] when authors such as Sellars and Brandom discuss practices, the lived, acting body planted in a concrete environment does not remain in view. These authors give pragmatic accounts of meaning and interpretation, but they are vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity, and they care little about how these two domains fit together. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while perception and action serve as the ways in and out of this domain—that is, as language-entry and language-exit conditions. Indeed, he makes the remarkable claim that it is merely a contingent matter that discourse is bounded by perception and action, and that it could in principle exist without them. […] Although Brandom understands language as a system of shifting commitments and entitlements, he has next to nothing to say about what concrete events such as taking on a commitment or granting an entitlement actually are like. He gives us no story about how to materially identify such events, and he often writes as though different speakers’ respective commitments and entitlements may as well be abstract scores that shift around in Platonic space. […] Both schools of pragmatism, ironically, at least implicitly agree that embodied and discursive practices are separate domains making only peripheral contact—which would seem to be a surprisingly unpragmatic conclusion” (Kukla and Lance 2009: 8–9).
Brandom himself draws an analogy between conceptual norms and political norms in Brandom 1979.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the reference to this passage from Making it Explicit and for pointing out its relation to cases of disagreement.
The aim of Giovagnoli’s discussion of discursive updating is to hint at its moral and political implications.
“Put somewhat more carefully, I explore here an intimate sort of connection between (some) deontic modalities and (some) alethic modalities. Only ‘some’ in the first case, because (for instance) moral normativity can also be put in deontic terms, and I am only addressing the conceptual variety of normativity: norms governing the application of concepts” (Brandom 2008: 182).
The presentation of the three models serves the purpose to shed light on Brandom’s ideas on actual interactions of different agents. On the other hand, the idea behind the presentation of the three models is to show that although Brandom does take social interactions into account, he only provides hints. Brandom doesn’t say anything about an interactional version of discursive updating involving more than one subject—apart from his Reply to Sebastian Rödl (see footnote 1). But if one looks at the three models, one might get at least an idea on how an interactional version of discursive updating might look like (in analogy to the social version of the expressive freedom-model, the common law model and the dialogical version of the deontic scorekeeping model). The idea is not to fully integrate the three models into the model of discursive updating, but to hint at the importance of the interactional aspect of practices of language use in Brandom’s other writings—and thereby substantiate the claim that it does make sense to elaborate on an interactional version of discursive updating in a similar way.
Brandom outlines the analogy in the following way: “I am not claiming that there are no significant differences between the way judgments of correctness and incorrectness function for linguistic performances and for actions in general, but I do not think we yet know which differences these are. There are certain respects in which we are surer of what we want to say about the norms that govern language-use than we are about other kinds of norms, so it is reasonable to exploit views about linguistic activity to illuminate the broader issues” (Brandom 1979: 187).
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Pritzlaff, T. Disagreement, Error and Two Senses of Incompatibility—The Relational Function of Discursive Updating. Philosophia 40, 121–138 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9315-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9315-8