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Brandom on Representation and InferenceAuthor(s): John McDowellReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 157-162Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953785 .Accessed: 07/06/2012 19:25

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LVII, No. 1, March 1997

Brandom on Representation and Inference

JOHN MCDOWELL

University of Pittsburgh

It will take repeated engagements to come to terms with Brandom's huge, cohesive, quirky, and brilliant book. Here I can make only a first pass at one of its architectonic themes.

The book is organized around an opposition between two explanatory strategies-representationalism, which Brandom says "has been dominant since the Enlightenment" (p. xvi), and inferentialism, the "complementary" approach Brandom adopts. This gives Brandom's story the attractions of bucking a trend. More seriously, he motivates his approach, to a large extent, by its competitor's flaws.

The fundamental insight here is that "semantics must answer to pragmat- ics" (p. 83). Semantic terms are not intelligible apart from how they pull their weight in enabling us to make sense of what speakers do, in the way we make sense of rational behaviour in general. And inference is a central ele- ment in the framework of rational requirements in which we place linguistic behaviour when we make sense of it in that way. Now representationalism, as Brandom conceives it, holds that concepts of the representational directed- ness of language towards the extra-linguistic world can confer a self-standing intelligibility on the idea of, e.g., the content of an assertion, in advance of our needing to advert to inferential relations between such contents. Consider, e.g., a theorist who undertakes to capture contents of potential assertions by associating sentences with sets of possible worlds, and then to capture inference-warranting relations between such contents in terms of inclusion relations between sets of possible worlds. By using the concept of assertion as he does, this theorist conforms to the letter of the principle that "semantics must answer to pragmatics". But suppose he does not mind its seeming an afterthought that the world-directed contents he supposedly brings into view as contents of assertions stand in inferential relations to one another. Since inference is central to the framework in which we make rational sense of lin- guistic behaviour, such a theorist violates the spirit of the principle. We

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might put this by saying he undermines his entitlement to use the concept of assertion.

Representationalism at its worst is a cast of mind Wittgenstein considers, on the pretext of the passage from St Augustine that initiates Philosophical Investigations. Here the supposed self-standingly intelligible starting-point is a semantic relation between "names" and elements in extra-linguistic reality. Under Wittgenstein's scrutiny, this emerges as only the illusion of an idea. If we try to think in these terms, we undermine our capacity to make sense of the way we can string words together to yield expressions with which we can make "moves in the language-game", e.g. assertions. Brandom appropriates this thought in the following shape: we cannot work up from the semantics of words to the semantics of sentences, and only then move on to consider the structure of the language-game.

Representationalism, then, purports to bring the representational dimen- sion of conceptual content perspicuously into view before considering infer- ential relations between contents. Now Brandom responds to the insight that representationalism will not do with a position that mirrors its structure, but inverts its explanatory order. He undertakes to bring conceptual content per- spicuously into view precisely by exploiting the way contents are related by inferential proprieties, and only then to consider the representational dimen- sion.

But this is not the only, or even the most obvious, way to accommodate the insight. The representationalist error is to suppose concepts of representa- tional directedness can be intelligible independently of inferential relations. So let us not suppose that. Concepts of representational directedness are intel- ligible, then, only in a context that includes inferential relations. This is not yet to embrace the distinctive thesis of Brandom's inferentialism: that concep- tual content can be brought perspicuously into view, by exploiting the idea of inferential proprieties, before we even consider the representational dimen- sion. To accept that concept A is intelligible only in the context of concept B is not to rule out that concept B is intelligible only in the context of concept A. And if that is how it is with representational directedness and inferential connectedness, neither of Brandom's explanatory orders is correct.

Brandom acknowledges this space between his antagonists, where there is room for a position that avoids representationalism without embracing infer- entialism, but the acknowledgement is buried in an endnote (p. 669, n. 90). It does not deflect him from inferentialism. I think the point is more important than Brandom evidently does. It puts some things in the book in a different light.

For instance, Brandom loftily dismisses the idea of semantic relations between words and elements of extra-linguistic reality. (See, e.g., p. 323.) He devotes extraordinary ingenuity to explaining away the appearance that there

158 JOHN MCDOWELL

are such relations. Now this dismissive attitude would be warranted if the idea of a relation of reference could seem to function only within an "Augustinian", or at any rate representationalist, outlook. But consider this explicitly relational claim: "'Snow' and snow are related thus: concatenating the former with, e.g., 'is white' yields a sentence usable to assert a truth just in case the latter is white." This is not "Augustinian", since it affirms its relation by exploiting the concept of asserting, a move in the language-game; and it is not representationalist in any untoward sense, if we do not pretend it would be intelligible independently of inferential relations between contents of potential assertions. Why not group it with, e.g., "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are related thus: the former is further west than the latter"? This does not threaten our grip on the anti-representationalist insight.'

The suspicion arises, indeed, that the "orthodoxy" Brandom takes credit for dislodging is a chorus of straw men. Brandom tends to find representational- ism-in the sense of what the insight undermines-wherever someone does not accept that inference is prior, in the order of understanding, to representa- tional directedness. But that does not justify the finding. Consider our possi- ble-worlds theorist. What made him a representationalist in the bad sense was that his talk of inference was an afterthought, not conceived as providing a context required for talking intelligibly about the content of assertions at all. We can correct that. Now we have a theorist who agrees that conceptual con- tent is unintelligible except in a context in which inferential relations figure. He might say: "That is exactly why associating sentences with sets of possi- ble worlds-some of which do, after all, stand in inclusion relations to one another-is a good way to capture the content of assertions. My account of the content of assertions works only as part of a package, which from the start includes, as it must, the capacity to capture inferential relations." This position is not inferentialist in Brandom's sense, but it cannot be attacked as violating the spirit of the principle that "semantics must answer to pragmat- ics". So long as it is appropriately modest in its pretensions-e.g. not sug- gesting sets of possible worlds are intelligible independently of the notion of assertion-there is no obvious objection to it.2 The dominant strand in

Brandom writes (p. 325): "Various word-world relations play important explanatory roles in theoretical semantic projects, but to think of any one of these as what is referred to as 'the reference relation' is to be bewitched by surface syntactic form." This gets off on the wrong foot, by my lights, in assuming that a genuine relation of reference would have to play an explanatory role in semantics. The result is that the reference relation itself goes missing. Reference is indeed not one of the relations, relating words and elements in extra-linguistic reality as "items in the causal order", to which Brandom's attention is restricted, but it is a relation for all that.

2 Except perhaps on the technical question whether this is the best way to do formal se- mantics. The modesty may seem disappointing, but it is an exact counterpart of Bran- dom's acknowledgement that "inferring cannot be understood apart from asserting" (p. 158).

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semantical reflection has surely been non-inferentialist, in Brandom's sense, in something like the way this position is. That is not to say it has been representationalist in a sense that brings it within the scope of the anti- representationalist insight.

Most seriously, the intermediate position shows that there is no basis, in the unacceptability of representationalism, for supposing Brandom's strong inferentialism must be viable.

In motivating his inferentialism directly, Brandom seems to exploit (pp. 102-4) a Sellarsian slide, one he himself equips us to expose. Sellars makes it plausible that proprieties of material inference are "essential to meaning", in this sense: it is only in a practice governed by such proprieties that conceptual contents are expressible at all. But Sellars proceeds as if he has made it plausible that the contents of the concepts expressible in a language consist in its material-inferential proprieties. The starting-point of this tran- sition leaves it open that a conception of inferential proprieties might alter while the content of the relevant concepts stays the same. But the end-point is a picture in which the whole perceived layout of the space of reasons is not merely expressible-with sufficient resources-in conceptual contents (e.g. contents of assertions), but taken up into the content of concepts, so that what we intuitively conceive as changing our minds about the way of the world must be conceived as remaking our concepts. In terms Brandom him- self introduces (p. 131), this is a slide from weak to strong inferentialism. Given that strong inferentialism is not necessitated by the unacceptability of representationalism, why should we regard it as anything but wildly implau- sible?

The thesis that content consists in material-inferential proprieties dictates Brandom's "perspectivalism", which plays a central role in his climactic Chapter 8. Individuals differ in auxiliary commitments, and hence in the "inferential significance" of any commitment they might undertake with a given form of words. So to understand others one must keep track of how their auxiliary commitments differ from one's own. Shared conceptual con- tent lies behind this interplay of perspectives; it "determines a function from perspective to significance" (p. 635). In this picture, mutual understanding requires a mind-bogglingly complex deployment of information, but Brandom is undeterred. He has to be, because "perspectivalism" figures essentially in his, as he claims, making the representational dimension explicit only after exploiting inference to bring conceptual content into view. The crucial twist in his story is precisely that the inferential articulation of conceptual content has the social dimension registered by "perspectivalism".

This is prefigured in Brandom's treatment of reports of observation (Chapter 4). So far from providing a first glimpse of the world-directedness of

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(empirical) conceptual content, I think Brandom's treatment of observation reports makes empirical content unintelligible.

Strong inferentialism aims to capture observational authority in terms of a reliability inference. For Sellars, the inference must be endorsed by the reporter, and this leads him to suppose a warrant for the inference-an accu- mulation of cases in which it would have led to a true conclusion-must be at the reporter's disposal. Reasonably, Brandom recoils. Given his commitment to strong inferentialism, the only alternative is to see the inference as endorsed by someone else, someone who keeps deontic score on the reporter. Here we have the interplay of perspectives. But the only rational relation this story supplies, between an observation report and the fact it reports, is precisely not present, according to the story, in the perspective of the putative reporter. So the fact that P is not present in that perspective as the rational constraint it must be on deciding whether to say that P. And that is indistinguishable from saying it is not present in that perspective as the fact it is. Such a perspective is not what it was supposed to be, the perspective of someone who can observe that P. The perceivable facts are not in its view, and they cannot be brought into its view by putting it in a context of deontic scorekeeping.

Strong inferentialism cannot accommodate the rational responsibility of a report to the obtaining (or not) of the fact it reports. We might try to make out that the report and the fact are related as conclusion to premise in an in- ferential nexus, but it would have the form of the "stuttering" inference, "P, so P". From the standpoint of strong inferentialism, this will seem too insubstantial to anchor a picture of the relation between empirical discourse and its subject matter. I have argued that it does not help to invoke the reliability inference; Sellars's placement of the inference is unacceptable, and Brandom's improvement on Sellars eliminates the perceivable facts from what was supposed to be the perspective of a perceiver. The way out is to reject strong inferentialism.

Brandom says "Logic is the organ of semantic self-consciousness" (p. xix). He means that logical forms, paradigmatically the conditional, enable us to make explicit the otherwise only implicit material-inferential proprieties in which the contents of our concepts consist. Now without strong inferential- ism, this reading of Brandom's aphorism lapses. But we can still say logic is the organ of rational self-consciousness; the conditional form lets the light of reason shine on what we take to be the structure of the space of reasons.

3 I elaborate this objection to Brandom's treatment of observation reports in a response to his comments on my Mind and World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), forthcoming in the proceedings of the eighth SOFIA conference, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Atascadero: Ridgeview). I have tried to frame the objection so as to make it clear that I am not misreading Brandom's strong inferentialism as hyperinfer- entialism (see p. 131).

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Rejecting strong inferentialism, we should not picture the requirements of reason as entirely taken up into contents of concepts. Nevertheless, we can recover Brandom's aphorism, though with its significance transformed. Just because it is the organ of rational selfconsciousness, logic is the organ of self-consciousness tiberhaupt; in particular, then, of semantic self- consciousness. But now we can separate the idea from Brandom's thesis that there can be inferring and asserting even in a practice that lacks logic, the organ of semantic self-consciousness. (See, e.g., p. 383.) Indeed, we can exploit the aphorism to deny the thesis. Semantic self-consciousness is required, and hence a command of logical vocabulary is required, if one is to be able to make anything explicit-including explicitly undertaking asser- tional commitments.4'5

4 I am urging that anything recognizable as a language must already contain logical vo- cabulary. Brandom objects that this can only reflect a disreputable "formalism", a wish to see materially good inferences as enthymematic versions of formally good inferences (see, e.g., p. 383). My thought is, rather, that self-consciousness requires the capacity to make the goodness of materially good inferences explicit, and hence command of logical vocabulary; and it is unintelligible that something without (semantic) self-consciousness could explicitly undertake commitments.

5 My take on Making It Explicit has been shaped by reading it with James Conant and John Haugeland. But they should not be blamed for any defects in this paper.

162 JOHN McDOWELL